AUSTIN, Texas — Chef Tom Valenti is clear about one thing: "There is no such thing as a diabetes diet."
But there is such a thing as balance for people with diabetes, something Valenti found out 14 years ago when he was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. For Valenti, the diagnosis was especially pointed. As a chef, he is surrounded constantly by the starches, sweets and excesses that can spell disaster for someone whose body has trouble processing sugar in the blood.
His restaurants — Ouest and West Branch in New York City — are full-tilt temples to New American cooking, with no compromises made for the diabetic chef. The pursuit of flavor drove Valenti to co-write a new cookbook with Andrew Friedman, "You Don't Have to Be Diabetic to Love This Cookbook" (Workman Publishing, $19.95). It preserves the comforts, adventures and tastes of real food in dishes that people with diabetes can live with.
Don't bother looking for nonfat cream cheese or artificial sweeteners in this book. Instead, try lobster bisque with ribbons of tarragon or spaghetti-squash spaghetti or mint chocolate pot de creme. There's a section devoted to sandwiches, wraps and quesadillas, including a steakhouse wrap with filet mignon.
The ingredients and techniques are hardly exotic. What's different is that each recipe — along with the usual statistics — lists the food exchanges and carbohydrate-choice numbers that many people with diabetes use to regulate what they eat.
In Austin on a searing summer lunch hour, Valenti is visiting Annies Cafe & Bar, the airy farm-to-table bistro that recently reopened on Congress Avenue. The goal is for the chef to navigate the menu, to find a balance between health and flavor in a place where the bounty ranges from a simple arugula salad with grana Padano cheese to a peanut butter volcano brownie.
He's trying some Spanish rice, robust and aromatic, speckled with nuts and tomato. It's part of a sampler dish also laden with sauteed cherry tomatoes, some Chinese-spiced broccoli and mustard greens with bacon. Questioned about his choice of rice and its blood sugar-spiking carbohydrates, Valenti is more concerned about the salt in the tomatoes, saying heart disease also lurks in his family's medical history.
Diabetes can be a malady magnifier of sorts, making other health problems harder to treat, harder to diagnose, even. Watching sugar and carbs is just one leg of the predict-consume-and-measure trifecta of vigilance people with diabetes are forced to follow.
"I was diagnosed 14 years ago," the 50-year-old chef said. "Fifteen years ago, 17 years ago, I was having a ball. I was going out at least three nights a week with Mario and Bobby (fellow chefs Mario Batali and Bobby Flay), and we would meet after work, and we would eat and we would drink — and eat. When I was diagnosed, I didn't just stop. It took me a while. But as I got older, I wanted to start feeling better. You've got some choices to make."
In Houston the day before, Valenti had eaten brisket, ribs and turkey at Goode Company Barbeque, then had two bites of pecan pie. Blissed as he was, he started to tank afterward. "I could feel my balance waver," he said.
Valenti says being surrounded by food, the kinds of fresh foods delivered to his restaurants or that line the shelves of organic markets, can be an advantage. "But we're all bombarded by bad choices on the road."
"Every day you make your deal with the devil," he said. "I know that if I'm going to Jean Georges tonight for dinner, I can't not have something that the pastry chef makes there. So I'm going to provide myself the route to get there, starting in the morning."
Valenti also talks about how important it is to make time to cook — how it's easier for him to control his blood sugar with his own cooking — "because most of the time you don't know what you're getting when you're out."
Even at Annies, the Oriental broccoli salad is cloyingly sweet and overly salted. "If you were sitting in a Chinese restaurant, and you had a big bowl of General Tso's chicken, that wouldn't even occur to you," he said. "But here, it really stands out. It has too much of everything."
A salad arrives with roasted red and gold beets and true baby carrots, plus greens and goat cheese, topped with a perfectly cooked piece of salmon. Valenti agrees that even in the presence of pizzas, pasta salads and pastries in the cases at Annies, it's easy to make good choices here because even the simple greens and humble grilled chicken taste great. Valenti's sacrifice to dodge hidden sugars and cut calories is to put the sauces and dressings on the side and to gingerly brush the food across them.
But he knows the limitations of righteous behavior at the table and in the kitchen. "The thing about the book is we realized that you've got to let things go once in a while," he said. "You've got to let them have pizza or they'll lose their minds."
That recipe's on page 50 of the cookbook.
Mike Sutter writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: msutter(at)statesman.com.