Chef

Where do food pros dine when they're not working in their own kitchens? In our new bi-weekly dining feature (running every other Friday), Big Fat Friday dines out with some of the area's finest restaurateurs, chefs, waiters and other food experts. Get to know them, and their favorite restaurants better. Anne-Marie Lasher doesn't eat out much. She's usually in the kitchen at Fork, the hip Old City American bistro she owns with partners Ellen Yin and Roberto Sella. But when she does go out, it tends to be in her Fairmount neighborhood.

At 11:10 a.m. the phone call came. Georges Perrier and his assistant were lost among the cow pastures in Salem County. "Can somebody who knows the area talk them through and get them here?" asked Michael Aliberti, a flustered culinary instructor. His 26 high school students had been preparing for weeks to welcome their equivalent of a rock star: Perrier, the world-renowned French chef and owner of Philadelphia's Le Bec-Fin, would be coming to Salem County Vocational Technical School for lunch.

Simply Irresistible, a heavily diluted version of Like Water for Chocolate, stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as a chef with such mystical powers that people who eat her meals float off on clouds of romantic rapture. One of the other ways in which the film declares itself a fantasy is that Gellar, as the saucy Amanda Shelton, wears a $500 Todd Oldham gold lame camisole and four-inch spike heels to work in a Manhattan restaurant kitchen. The film opens as Amanda cruises the Union Square green market, shopping for the restaurant, and receives condolences from vendors who've heard that the third-generation joint where Amanda's late mother once cooked is about to close.

Bill Sherman of Perkasie is the new executive chef at the Golden Slipper Uptown Home in Northeast Philadelphia, preparing 4,900 kosher meals weekly for 240 residents. The nursing home is run by the Federation of Jewish Agencies of Greater Philadelphia. Sherman, 42, took to the kitchen 10 years ago after working for many years in the construction field. He graduated with honors from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in 1992 and later worked in several restaurants, including a stint as a sous chef at the Lambertville Station restaurant and at the Ferndale restaurant in Ferndale, Bucks County.

ERNEST Strother was not really a born renegade, but he couldn't stand injustice when he encountered it. That acute sense of right and wrong that guided him all his life might have had its origin in the segregated South of his childhood. It was when he was in 10th grade at Abbeville High School, in Abbeville, S.C., in the early '30s that Ernest became aware that the "separate but equal" doctrine followed by many Southern school districts was a farce. The whites-only and blacks-only schools were separate, all right, but rarely equal.

L.F. Hoffman is a man for all seasons. Make that a man for all seasonings. The author of The Bachelor's Cat - A Love Story (Harper Collins, $12.95) is a dedicated foodie whose first published novel features a classic of its kind, a mouthwatering seduction dinner. The Bachelor's Cat is the story of a Philadelphia man who accepts an abandoned kitten into his life and in the process learns the meaning of true love while finding true love. Hoffman, 53, whose first name is Lynn, was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and received a B. A. in anthropology from Hobart College in New York and a Ph.D.

The sound of shuffling paper crackles over the phone as Alison Barshak answers questions about her food. I am put on hold again, while the celebrity chef and owner of Venus and the Cowboy goes in search of a recipe. It has been four months since her long-awaited, much-gossiped-about restaurant opened near the base of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and more than two absent years since she left Striped Bass, where her shooting star was launched. Venus and the Cowboy, its name borrowed from the title of a friend's book, was to be her triumphant return.

One thing any smart chef in this city knows is that Philadelphians adore crabcakes. Executive chef Vincent Alberici serves one of the best renditions in town. His saut?ed jumbo lump crabcakes with Thai sweet black rice and smoked red pepper sauce star on the menu at The Marker, the signature restaurant of the Adam's Mark Hotel on City Avenue. Alberici's innovative food is among the city's best-kept secrets. He created a contemporary American menu with echoes of Italy using ingredients from his own backyard garden as well as local specialty farms.

Stanley Sambora, whose French cuisine was the marvel of a private Center City club where he ruled for decades as head chef, died Friday night of a heart attack. He was 83 and lived in Northeast Philadelphia. For 32 years, until his retirement in 1975, Sambora not only created feasts for the lawyers and bankers and politicians who ate lunch at the Downtown Club, but he personified the establishment. They called him "Mr. Downtown Club. " In his tall chef's hat and his starched white apron, Sambora reigned supreme in the kitchen and in the dining room, where his greatest enjoyment was to watch others enjoy his specialities.

For many years the owners of San Marco restaurant have been delighting their customers by bringing back recipes from visits to the resort town of Positano, Italy, and incorporating them into the menu. Granted, what pleases a customer is bound to please the owners, too. But in the case of San Marco, at 27 City Ave. in Bala Cynwyd, an interplay between customers and owners also began to develop. Customers looked forward to the new recipes. They began asking questions about the new dishes.