I'm the Boss, and I Say No Lentils

New York Times: "AK PELACCIO can't stand sweet potatoes. 'I find them a little too rich, a little too cloying, a little too overwhelming,' Mr. Pelaccio said. 'I don't like to eat them.' It isn't unusual for somebody to hold a deep dislike for a particular food, but Mr. Pelaccio is the chef of 5 Ninth, an inventive restaurant that plays fast and free with its ingredients. Veal breast is braised, topped with botarga, and served with green tomatoes, shishito pepper and ground ivy. But no innocent sweet potatoes?'I just have no desire to cook with them, ever,' Mr. Pelaccio said. 'And sweet potato fries are the most disgusting things.'Almost everybody has his or her sweet potato, a food that is harmless to the rest of the world but that is, to this individual, too revolting to stomach. Your basic eater can spend a lifetime dodging that ingredient, bypassing those dishes that will make him at best unhappy, at worst queasy. But a chef can turn his personal dislike into restaurant policy. 'Whenever I tell somebody I hate lentils, they're shocked,' said Bobby Flay, whose menu at Bar Americain, incidentally, is peppered with sweet potato, including some in the clam chowder. 'There are a lot of lentil fans out there.'An early draft of Bar Americain's menu had a beet and goat cheese salad with lentils, but Mr. Flay rejected it before the restaurant opened. 'When I go on vacation, they run specials on lentils,' he said. Celery is a building block of French cooking, but it has no place at Chanterelle. 'I don't use it in my stocks,' said the chef, David Waltuck, whose loathing has become lore. 'I don't use it in my mirepoix. It has no flavor. It's one-dimensional. It's an exercise in chewing. It's pointless.' There are arguments for banning an ingredient based on concerns about quality or morality. Some choose not to use out-of-season strawberries because they're flavorless, or Chilean sea bass (also known as Patagonian toothfish) because of overfishing. The argument for banning carrots bigger than your thumb, however, is a little more arbitrary. 'I will serve baby carrots,' said Alexandra Guarnaschelli, the chef of Butter. 'But once it gets over two inches long I break into a cold sweat.'"