Actress Debi Mazar and chef husband Gabriele Corcos have experienced a full range of emotions while being quarantined, from COVID-19 to the joy of food.
If you thought the word quarantine would become part of our lexicon in 2020, run, don’t walk to buy a lottery ticket. Prescience aside, we’re able to suggest with metaphysical certitude that nobody among us actually did, but here we are. And with quarantine becoming our way of life in recent memory, familiar names and faces have shared virtual access to their new normal, some amusingly, some philanthropically, some productively, and some even precariously. In the case of actress Debi Mazar and her chef husband Gabriele Corcos, their COVID-19 experience has checked all of those boxes.
Debi Mazar and Gabriele Corcos, the hyphenated couple has done it all; James Beard Award winners-best selling authors-successful television hosts-acclaimed actress-renowned chef-philanthropists-parents. Better yet, they’re beyond cool, so real, and comfortable sharing, which they did with us.
While being diagnosed with COVID-19 is no laughing matter, the way Debi discovered that she’d lost her sense of smell first and then taste sure adds levity to what was obviously a potentially perilous realization.
“The first time I realized that I couldn’t smell anything is, I farted in bed and told my husband that ‘I didn’t fart!'”, Mazar chuckled. “And then the next day I went downstairs and I couldn’t taste my coffee, I then ate a clove of garlic, I ate ginger and jalapeno pepper and tasted NOTHING!”, she recalled, adding “The heat from the jalapeno pepper didn’t resonate, so it was a horrible experience.”
Having her own personal chef-in-residence was of little use at that point too as the actress “couldn’t eat any of his food because it didn’t taste like anything. I was like oh, alright, I don’t wanna eat this, it doesn’t taste good.”
In the end, Debi Mazar kicked COVID-19’s butt, pun intended, but only after it had done a number of its own on her. And with the gradual return to good health came renewed senses, “finally when my taste and smell came back, the first thing you made for me that’s one of my favorite things was Pasta all’Amatriciana,” she reminisced to Gabriele, “which is like lots of garlic and pork in it and I finally tasted something and I felt like it was nirvana!”