Made in Connecticut: Celebrity chef Scott Conant
Scott Conant’s career as a Food Network star, restaurateur and cookbook author had an unlikely start.
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He’s been a fixture on the Food Network for 15 years. Now celebrity chef Scott Conant has launched a new line of pasta sauces based on recipes from his childhood in Waterbury.
For Conant, coming to Connecticut is coming home.
One of his former high school teachers, Maureen Buell, still remembers him as a student with big ambitions.
“I am so proud of what he has become. I watch him on TV all the time,” Buell said.
Conant’s career as a Food Network star, restaurateur and cookbook author had an unlikely start. In vocational high school in Waterbury, he wanted to enroll in the plumbing program.
“I couldn’t get in. So as a second choice, I chose culinary arts,” he said.
“I feel like it was kind of divine intervention to a certain extent that put me on this path.”
That turn in the road also took him back to a place on Martone Street in Waterbury.
“I have these memories of my grandparents on Martone Street taking these tomatoes and peeling them, eating them, putting them in, you know, pureeing them, putting them in a jar,” Conant said.
The home where his grandfather grew fresh ingredients and sauce was on the stove became the inspiration for his new line of pasta sauces, complete with a blue label as a nod to the Connecticut state flag.
“If you were to come to my house and I would cook for you, this is exactly the same ingredients in the same product,” he said.
And just like on Martone Street, family and friends gathered in town for a taste and a chance to say hello. Conant’s mother, daughters and wife were among those on hand.
Buell said the moment reflected his connection to home.
“A lot of people just go away and don’t come back. And Scott comes back,” she said. “He always had a special place for home. Having that moment of memory with food, in that connection at the table.”
