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In chunky glasses and a comfy cardigan decorated with a carrot brooch, Questlove looked like your favorite uncle as he worked the crowd at his food salon.
The 45-year-old musician and D.J., whose birth name is Ahmir Thompson, hosts one every few months. On a recent night, it was in his Lower Manhattan apartment building and he had invited enough famous actors, writers and musicians to make a TMZ reporter weep. (Was that the musical director for “Hamilton”? Is FKA Twigs in the bathroom? Has Gayle King shown up yet?)
“It’s very ‘Playboy After Dark,’” said Al Roker, the television personality who was leaning against a wall enjoying a cocktail.
Mr. Thompson kept edging toward the little kitchen, where the chef’s equivalent of a jam session was in full swing. Marcus Samuelsson handed him a slice of pickled lotus root topped with Arctic char tartare.
Angela Dimayuga, the executive chef at Mission Chinese Food in Manhattan, spooned salmon roe and rare beef into what she called “baller lettuce cups.”
Bill Telepan sweated through his T-shirt, fending off Wylie Dufresne, who snatched a few cubes of potato Mr. Telepan was frying in olive oil to go with slices of dry-aged rib-eye.
By virtue of his appetite, his fame and the kind of mind that can keep track of an 80,000-record vinyl collection, Mr. Thompson the last few years has crept into the white-hot center of a food world that is itself moving toward the center of pop culture.
He doesn’t cook much himself, although he grew up with a grandmother devoted to Sunday supper. Rather, he aspires to become to food what Gertrude Stein was to art, a culinary catalyst whose parties mix the creative and the powerful against the backdrop of cooking. In these discussions and a book to be released next month, Mr. Thompson continues to mine a favorite topic: the mechanics of creativity.
The job is not all indulgence. His favorite dish at the salon was a South African malva pudding with blood orange sherbet put together by Jessica Koslow of Sqirl in Los Angeles. But “it was the first time I had sugar in, like, five weeks,” Mr. Thompson said.
He had been on a cleanse, which involved a lot of cabbage soup, in an effort to get his frame under 330 pounds. “Based on my physical look,” he said, “you can tell that food and me have been friends for a long time.”
The chefs at the salon said that musicians tend to have terrific appetites, and that the bridge Mr. Thompson is building between food and music makes sense. “There is no difference between the music you listen to and the food you eat,” Mr. Samuelsson said. “The emotions are the same. They are both a narrative.”
Mr. Thompson has been a presenter at James Beard awards ceremonies and has been a “Top Chef” judge. He’s the guy Chris Rock calls to find out where to eat. His culinary exploits are sent out to his 3.6 million Twitter followers and the 25,000 people who have discovered his Questlovesfood Instagram account. When he spreads his wings over food-related charity events, he can help raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Anthony Bourdain calls him “a fully made member of the chef mafia,” but Mr. Thompson thinks that’s overblown. He doesn’t want to be another celebrity trying to extend his brand into food. “I’m very leery of my entry into the fraternity or sorority of these people,” Mr. Thompson said.
In 2013, he opened a little food stand in Chelsea Market with the restaurateur Stephen Starr, who like Mr. Thompson is from Philadelphia. Mr. Thompson is a drummer, so they served fried chicken drumsticks. It was the food version of a rap battle between him and the chef David Chang. The bigger point, though, was to prove he was serious.
“I don’t want to be perceived as someone who just bought my way into this world or used my currency as a means to get in,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “Like, I had to throw them proof.”
After seven months, the stand was losing money and closed. “After the restaurant went down, it was sort of like, ‘What should our next move be?’” he said. So the food salons started.
The idea came from something he used to do with the Roots, the neo-soul hip-hop band he founded in 1987 with Tariq Trotter, the musician known as Black Thought. They made their record company add a food budget to pay Philadelphia chefs to prepare meals for social gatherings of musicians.
“We would eat and the musicians would set up and we’d start writing music,” Mr. Thompson said. That’s how the band’s breakthrough album, “Things Fall Apart,” was born in 1999.
His food obsession became more serious in 2009, when the Roots became the house band for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” (Mr. Thompson and the band have stayed on with Mr. Fallon since he took over “The Tonight Show” in 2014.)
“I was counting the pros and the cons of having the ‘Late Night’ job, and one of the big pros was just the amount of chefs who were at our disposal,” Mr. Thompson said. “It was like, ‘Oh man, I am eating a sandwich Martha Stewart just brought in.’”
The job has also made it harder to fight his weight. For his birthday in January, cakes poured in from all over. Tastykake even made a delivery. “They are my kryptonite,” he said. “The scariest thing about being here at 30 Rock is that if I mention something, a lifetime supply of it will show up.”
The seminal moment in his food education came after he watched the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and then traveled to the basement of an office tower in Tokyo to eat at the hands of the film’s sushi master, Jiro Ono.
“Once I saw his commitment, I realized that I needed to work harder myself,” he said. The visit led to a book, “Something to Food About: Exploring Creativity With Innovative Chefs,” which Clarkson Potter will publish in April. Written with Ben Greenman, co-writer of the Questlove memoir “Mo’ Meta Blues,” it’s based on lengthy interviews with 10 chefs.
“Is this drive for perfection necessary for creative people,” Mr. Thompson asks in the new book’s introduction, “or is it just something that happens to creative people whether it’s necessary or not?”
One may legitimately ask if the world needs another book examining the creative mind of the chef, but in the hands of Mr. Thompson, it’s a fresh ride.
He discusses race and poverty with Donald Link in New Orleans and the compromises that come with cooking in America’s culture of instant gratification with Dominique Crenn in San Francisco. He visits Nathan Myhrvold, an author of “Modernist Cuisine,” in Seattle, and asks Michael Solomonov, Philadelphia’s impresario of Israeli food, what it was like to work at his dad’s Subway restaurant in Israel.
The poet Elizabeth Alexander, who seemed surprised and delighted to be at the food salon last month, said she was looking forward to reading the book. She perhaps understood more than others at the party the deep link between cooking and other creative pursuits.
Her recent memoir, “In The Light of the World,” uses food memories and recipes to explore her grief over the sudden loss of her husband, a chef and painter.
Chefs, she said in between bites of a baller lettuce cup, are just like any other artists: “They are obsessive weirdos in the same way.”
