Inside Bobby Flay’s Stylish NYC Home

Hey AD, I'm Bobby Flay.

Welcome to my New York City apartment.

[gentle upbeat music]

For the first 10 years that I lived here,

you would open the door and you'd be into the kitchen.

Now I have this cool vestibule that we just built.

My designer, Olivia Jane, drew this on a piece of paper

one day after we were looking at some Parisian apartments.

It really is like a little jewel box.

You have like the distressed mirrors.

You have the stained glass that you can kinda see through

but not quite.

[laid-back music]

So I've lived here for about a decade.

I just renovated the apartment just recently,

so it's got a kinda new look, but one of the things I love

is the bones of this building.

This building's over a hundred years old,

and it's first incarnation, many of the buildings

in this neighborhood, including this one,

were like tea, coffee, and spice warehouses,

and I just love the sort of open air kinda loftlike feeling.

Somebody who cooks in kitchens,

we always feel like we're cooking in a submarine.

It's nice to come home to some breath.

It was really important for me to have lots

of sort of landing area.

That's one of the things that I think

that people underestimate when they're building kitchens.

You need places to put things and work on.

So first of all, I have a BlueStar stove here,

which is basically as close to a professional stove

that you can have.

It has a lot of firepower.

I like to cook for lots of people.

I love this material here, the backsplash.

You want a material that you can wash easily,

but also you want something that looks cool.

My first oven was actually an Easy Bake Oven.

I saw a commercial and I was like, wait a second,

you can bake a cake from a light bulb?

I have to see this for myself.

So I asked my parents for an Easy Bake Oven,

and clearly, I wanted to be a chef.

I just didn't know it probably at that point.

I was watching a lot of Julia Child

and The Galloping Gourmet.

This is just literally a handful of cookbooks that I have.

I have cookbooks everywhere.

I'm just gonna give you a quick tip.

Your spices don't last forever,

so if it's been a couple of years,

you might wanna replace 'em

'cause they probably don't taste the way they should.

Of course, I have a bunch of different knives.

I changed my knives from time to time.

I love this knife.

I just love the design of it.

I love the feel of this olive wood on here.

I always have a really great cutting board.

This is one, I use it all the time.

It's very, very thick and dense.

and so when I'm cutting, it feels like,

it feels like it has a lot of heft to it.

So I have two cats.

They are Maine Coons, so they are big cats.

I love when people say to me,

I can't believe your cat is on your kitchen counter.

You try to keep a cat off a kitchen counter.

When you figure that out, let me know.

Then we have all my molcajetes here.

Molcajetes obviously are important to me

because I used them to cook in, to make sauces,

to make sauces.

This one I actually just got,

I was in Mexico City about a month ago.

I was walking down the street, went to this little boutique,

and she's just so gorgeous.

I mean, look how pretty it is.

So, here are my pots and pans.

In terms of like my restaurant influence to my home,

and I have things like this, you know,

where it's like these little individual cast iron pans.

One of the dishes I do all the time is where I take shrimp

and garlic and chilies and olive oil,

and maybe like some fresh thyme, oregano,

and I just put it in here,

and I put in a very, very high heat oven, like 500 degrees.

I pull it out, I put this on top of a plate with a napkin,

and it feels like a restaurant.

To cook for my friends and my family,

it's the thing that I love to do more than anything.

It's the way I show my adoration towards them.

You know, if I have Thanksgiving here

or a dinner party here, I mean you'll have like,

you'll have 10 people sitting here.

You'll have 10 people sitting at the dining room table.

There'll be people sitting on the sofa.

Always kinda has a casual feel to it.

[laid-back music]

I bought this table when I moved into this apartment

over 10 years ago.

I just love it.

I love kind of the smooth edges of it,

but it's not like perfectly cut.

So I kinda like that rustic feel to it.

I just think it's just so beautiful.

I mean, you can see all the grain from the wood.

So this chandelier I bought

when I moved into this apartment,

it's a very famous lighting designer called OCHRE.

Each one of these individual glass drops

kinda reflects the light coming from the bulbs

in this really cool way.

I had these chairs made 10 years ago,

and then just recently, I changed the upholstery.

I love the design of these chairs.

I think they're gorgeous.

I almost never cook and plate each dish

for people like you would get in a restaurant.

I always serve family style.

One of the world's great dishes is paella.

It's a beautiful dish.

You can cook it in one big pan.

You can basically feed the world with paella.

That's the idea.

[laid-back music]

From the kitchen to the dining room

and then we move into the living room.

To me, this has been the biggest change

in the renovation of this apartment,

and this is where Olivia really did some of her best work.

All we did was we changed the direction of the dining table.

The idea was to make this room much more inclusive.

Now, everybody gravitates here.

I love vintage furniture,

especially things from like the '60s, '70s.

What we have here is a collection of that.

You'll see the said sofa.

It has this very recognizable style.

It's like individual pieces put together,

almost like a snake.

You can actually reshape this in lots of different ways.

And then we found these amazing chairs.

They all kinda worked together,

but they all came from very different places.

This light is from the Netherlands.

After Olivia showed me what she wanted the living room

to feel like, I said to her,

I'm gonna find a light that I think can tie

this whole thing together.

The inspiration behind the bookshelf,

to me, it's about the materials, right?

So you have this really gorgeous wood,

but then you have the juxtaposition of this steel.

I even love the rivets here.

I think a bar cart is important.

There's something, I don't know,

James Bond about it.

I like to pour myself a little, a little sip

and call it a night.

[laid-back music]

This was meant to be a bedroom when I first moved in,

but I really didn't need one extra bedroom.

So I decided to turn it into kind of like a hangout area.

You know, something that's like a little more cozy

than my living room.

Just so you understand, this is not part

of the designer's inspiration.

This is from cats getting their claws

into this wall covering.

If you have cats, don't put anything on your wall

that they can get their claws into 'cause they will.

I have lots of bourbon.

I like to drink bourbon, I like tequila,

mezcal, things like that.

I've been lucky enough to win a couple of Emmys.

I never know what to do with them, so I just kind of,

I just push 'em against the wall.

And then there's some Breeders' Cup trophies there

from horse racing, which my family's been involved in

for generations.

One of them is for a horse that I raced

in the Breeders' Cup, and her name was Pizza Bianca,

and she won a really important race, so she gets a trophy.

I do refrigerate my reds, you know,

at like 55 degrees, something like that.

I love Brunello di Montalcino.

If I'm making like some kind of ragu of like beef

or short ribs or something like that,

like a bottle of this.

[gentle upbeat music]

This is the room.

Olivia says it's like taking a shower

in an oil painting, and let me show you what I mean.

[gentle upbeat music]

I just love this bathroom. This is busy.

There's a lot going on in terms of the pattern

of this marble.

I find it to be spectacular.

The copper on the outside of the tub, you can see

it actually has kind of like this bluish green tint to it,

works beautifully.

[laid-back music]

And this is my bedroom.

It's built for comfort.

It's a nice sizable room.

I love having this sort of midnight blue sofa

at the end of my bed where I can get up

and watch the news in the morning, gets my day going.

Olivia Jane designed this headboard, which frames the bed

and sets the tone for the room in a really nice way.

The wood panels were an original design from 10 years ago,

and she decided she wanted to leave that there

and then create this new headboard.

One of the things about a New York City apartment

is carpeting and rugs.

That's like, it's very key.

You know, if you have neighbors downstairs,

they don't hear you walking

and also like feels good on your feet, I mean.

Lighting to me is really, really important,

and I love finding vintage lights like this.

When you think about the lighting here,

the lighting in the living room,

the lighting in the dining room,

the lighting in the kitchen,

it sets the tone for the design of the house.

This credenza is from Italy.

Each one of these is sort of a different metal

kind of like laid on top of each other, and I just love it.

This is actually a Ralph Lauren dresser.

I think I've had this for 25 years.

This is the kind of furniture that I like to buy.

It never goes outta style.

This thing is classic.

It's gorgeous, obviously functional.

[gentle upbeat music]

This is the closet.

This is a real luxury to have a closet like this.

Over here, I have a bunch of suits that I wear like on,

on my shows, like in Triple Threat for instance,

when I'm hosting something.

Then I have sports coats here as well.

Three different colors of shirts.

Down here, I have some chef coats.

This is almost like an artifact at this point.

This is my last Iron Chef jacket

that I haven't worn in a while.

But you never know, could be coming back.

I have a lot of glasses, sunglasses,

and reading glasses,

'cause I love this brand, Moscot.

It's a very New York City, old school eyewear company.

Lots of baseball caps, lots of ties,

and then lots of shoes.

Everything from tons of Nike Air.

I wear these a lot on Beat Bobby Flay.

So, basically, I have them in every single color.

Converse, again, this is like that piece

of Ralph Lauren furniture.

Always cool, always.

This was a gift from Carson Kressley.

Let's call it my ugly Christmas sweater.

[laid-back music]

Thanks for being here, AD.

I got a dinner party to cook for, so I gotta go.

See you soon.

[laid-back music]