How cooking saved Bobby Flay's life,

This is Gato, Bobby Flay's white-hot new restaurant in Manhattan. That's good. Don't be surprised to see the man himself behind the stove. If you're lucky enough to score a reservation here, chances are Bobby Flay will cook your dinner. Just grab one of those pans and get one of the striped bass and make sure you have the broth and everything, okay? I said to my business partner, this is a passion project. We're going to do this because we want to do it. We're not going to make any money in this restaurant, but it's what we want to do. Are you making money? A tiny, tiny bit. And right now, money does seem to be taking a back seat to Flay's obsession with wowing his customers. The night we were there, he put together this massive seafood dish as a kind of warm-up for his Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes. Then he served it to his bar patrons for free. You could call it an obsession, but to me, it's my job. It's my work. It's the thing I love to do. Way more than television, no offense. Do you think that some people didn't see you or don't see you as a legitimate chef because you're on TV? It's really easy for people to discount you because you're on television. I'm not really sure why that takes your skills away, but I understand it, and I stopped fighting that fight a long time ago. Does it bug you? It used to bug me a lot. It doesn't bug me anymore. We're going to make some baked clams and Italian sauce. We're doing an Italian meal today. It's the same thing. For most of the past 20 years, Flay has been a nearly constant TV presence on a number of networks, this one among them. Feliz Navidad. This is good. He also, it seems, has confidence to burn and is known as a kind of kitchen gladiator. On his latest Food Network show, the aptly titled Beat Bobby Flay, people are lining up to take him down. Now, Bobby Flay. It's go time. But before he was a household name, you might say Bobby Flay's toughest enemy was himself. Born in Manhattan in 1964, Robert William Flay showed an early interest in cooking and not much else except killing time with his pals on this New York City street corner. That's what kids did then in New York. We hung out, we ate pizza, we got into some fights, we played some video games. We got chased by the cops because our boom boxes were too loud. He flunked out of a series of New York Catholic schools, some more than once. Were you bored? Were you angry? You know what I mean? Were you like the angry young man who just didn't have time for school? Not really. No? I had nothing to be angry about, really. Maybe I was bored. I mean, I guess I was because I wasn't interested at all. He did manage to show up here on a regular basis, Mimi's Pizza on New York's Upper East Side, where he got a job as a delivery boy at age 12. You've told people that you graduated from UCLA. Yeah, UCLA. You know where UCLA is, right? University corner of Lexington Avenue. It's right here. Truth is, he quit high school, and his father made him get a job doing grunt kitchen work at another restaurant. But instead of scaring him back to school, that little restaurant job changed his life forever. I remember waking up in the morning, laying in my bed, staring at the ceiling and saying to myself, I can't wait to go to work today. It hit me. What was it? I was working with my hands, I was creating things, and I could actually do it. I didn't have to open a book. I was learning in a practical manner. Excited and inspired, Bobby Flay went on to cooking school, graduating from New York's French Culinary Institute in 1984. Seven years later, he had a New York City place of his own, Mesa Grill. He was all of 25 years old. So let me ask you this. Did cooking save you? Oh, totally. Cooking definitely saved my life. Saved your life? Yeah, I think so. I think I would have, I could have easily gone down a bad road for sure. Like what? What was I going to do? I mean, how was I going to make a living? What were my skills? So honestly, Bobby, you think you would have turned to a life of crime? I'm not going to say that, but a lot of my friends did. I took a different path. And it worked out. Mesa was a huge success, and Bobby Flay now has 24 restaurants to his name. Life outside the kitchen's pretty good, too. For the past 10 years, he's been married to actress Stephanie March, and he has a daughter, Sophie, from a previous marriage, who's now a college freshman. I got the greatest thing ever. I got Sophie, who's happily surpassed me in the educational world. But there are times when it seemed he may have stretched himself too thin. In 2008, a New York Times reviewer wondered if he'd taken his eye off Mesa Grill and took away one of the restaurant's two stars. Do you remember it clearly? Do I remember it? Oh, yeah. I was in a taxi when I found out that he was taking a star from me. Somebody called and told you? Mm-hmm. And it was a long day. I got really drunk that night. But Mesa Grill survived and flourished right up until the rent got too high and Flay was forced to close it down last year. The same thing happened with another place, Bolo, which left him with a hole in his soul that only a new restaurant could fill, and that was Gato. There's no extra garnish or anything, just to let people taste it. Okay. Don't forget, the award we want to win, friendliest restaurant in New York. We have our wonderful roasted sprouts with pomegranate molasses. Right after Gato opened, a New York Times restaurant critic came calling again. This time, the review was glowing. So what'd that feel like in your gut to read that? It was an amazing just, I could finally exhale. Muscle pasta, that's the underdog dish of the whole restaurant right there. Anyone who's tasted his food knows he's not afraid to spice it up, but Bobby Flay also knows how to savor the sweet. Pick up the risotto. It's the holiday time. It's a time when people are counting their blessings. Do you do that sort of thing? You know, I feel blessed and lucky every single day. You know, my father always said to me, think of the word content. If you can feel like you're content most of the time, everything is good. Are you content? I'm 100% content, plus a little more.