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Gourmet Chef
by B. J. Carter
Coastal Journal Staff
One of the midcoast’s most passionate and esteemed chefs took time he
could have been using to prep for dinner at the Solo Bistro Bistro’s
dinner service to talk to us about growing up in his mom’s kitchen,
absorbing ethnic food, and the creative process behind his menus.
Did you grow up around food?
My dad was in the military, we bounced around quite a bit. My mom did most of the cooking, that was my first inspiration. I’d watch her in the kitchen, she’d kick me out, I’d run around the other way and come back in. I was fascinated by how she was able to create dishes out of what seemed to me like nothing. And watching my grandmother cook down in Louisiana was another major source of inspiration for me.
Did you have a big family?
It’s funny, both my mom and dad were from families with ten kids, but it was just me and my sister. My mom cooked every night until I was in high school, then she told me if I wanted something to eat I could go get it myself [laughs].
Did all the moving around have an effect on the kinds of foods you’re willing to try?
Absolutely. When you’re living on military bases, you’re surrounded by ethnic cultures. When we lived in San Francisco, there was a woman from the Philippines a few houses down who would catch crabs, crack them, peel them, and cook them. Then she’d make spring rolls with them and bring them over to the house on these big platters. We use to eat them like candy, those things were so good. Being around that helps you develop a lot of respect for other cultures. When I make an ethnic dish, I want it to be authentic, otherwise I’ll do an interpretation of it and then tell people that it’s my interpretation of an authentic dish. I wouldn’t want to mislead anybody.
Did you go to school to become a chef?
Yes, I went to Newberry College in Brookline, I was in the second graduating class. It was a two year program. After that, I worked in Boston until my wife decided she wanted to move back home to Maine.
Ah, so that’s how you came to Maine. A mystery revealed!
[Laughs] Yeah, I met her down in Massachusettes through a friend of hers, she wanted to move back home, so I came on up with her. We’ve been her since ‘87.
Is she a foodie, too?
Not so much with her own cooking, but when she goes out to eat, she knows what she likes. And she tells me when I mess up at home [laughs].
Is she your toughest critic?
No, I think I am. I beat myself up if I make a mistake or put something out that I’m not completely happy with. I’m tough on myself because I’m tough on other people that I work with and train, and I really care about what I’m doing. If I see myself slipping, yeah, I get upset.
Going back to your education, have you ever trained under a particular chef?
I’ve always been in very supervisory positions, I’ve rarely had jobs where I was just a cook or a line cook. I basically I had to teach myself through experimentation. One person in Maine who I can say should be teaching and writing books is Sam Hayward (of Fore Street restaurant in Portland). He’s a walking encyclopedia when it comes to food, I’ve picked up a lot of technique from him in terms of cooking and understanding food. It’s nice to see somebody else reinforcing what I believe in myself.
How important is front-of-the-house experience when it comes to being a chef running a kitchen?
It’s extremely important. For one, it helps with your timing on the food. At a place like this, you can actually see the tables you’ll be cooking for, so you know if someone’s been waiting too long for their food. It also establishes a level of respect for what other people have to go through, which is extremely important in the food business. You’re at the mercy of customers with as many moods and attitudes as you can think of. You have to try to understand as much about what they’re going through as you’d hope they would understand about what you’re going through. So I think cross-training is important.
When you’re running the kitchen, do you feel like you have to supervise everybody pretty closely, or do you prefer to step back?
It depends on the personality. If I trust your abilities and then you show me that I can’t trust you, I’ll let you know. We all fumble every now and then, if I feel like I need to tighten the reigns a little, I’ll look over your shoulder. But you have to remember, we all stumble before we can walk. Everybody makes mistakes, you just hope you can catch them before they leave the kitchen on a plate.
Some chefs don’t like that side of their job, they’d rather just cook the food than have to deal with people. Do you view the management side of your job as a burden? If you could do it all yourself, would you?
Would I clone myself? Yeah, that would be ideal [laughs]. Sometimes it’s difficult dealing with all the personalities, but here, it’s a match made in heaven as far as I’m concerned. Carrie’s top notch; she learns well, she puts a hundred percent into what she’s doing, and she beats herself up as much as I do. But I’ve been in situations where the personalities involved don’t really care, and that’s when it gets tough.
You said that traveling within the military exposed you to other cultures. Since being in Maine, how have you managed to keep an open mind and absorb ideas from other cultural sources?
It is tough because it’s Maine [laughs]. But when I go out to eat, I don’t eat, say, classical French cuisine because I know what that tastes like. I want to eat something from a different culture, be it Argentine or middle eastern. I like tasting the different spices and flavor combinations, not just the reductions. I mean, I love reductions and cream sauces, I use them, but they don’t inspire me as much as seeing how other cultures appreciate food. And I do have some books that I refer to, most of them are from South America, I have a Jewish cookbook I look at from time to time. Ethnic food is just more honest to me. You have to remember that this is the food those people eat to survive. These are recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation, not like more modern fusions. All that fusion stuff’s fine, it’s good to look at, but I tend to want to draw my interpretations from regional concepts. I don’t have cable, so I don’t get ideas from the Food Network. I do watch Gordon Ramsey on Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, the guy’s a riot. I’d love to be able to chit-chat with him. He says a lot stuff I want to say to people [laughs].
I think that’s why his shows are so popular. If only we could all be that honest. . . .
Other than that, I try to inspire myself. It takes me forever to write a menu because I try to just let the ideas come to me before I write them down. I don’t use recipes unless I’m doing something scientific like baking. If you understand the principals behind what you’re doing, you generally don’t need recipes. For example, if you want to make cookies and you understand what the flour does, the egg, the baking soda, the salt, those kinds of things, then you can switch out those ingredients and substitute something else you’d like to try. That’s how you create recipes. I don’t test any of my recipes beforehand, I just put them out. If I need to refine them at that point, I’ll refine them.
Really?
I’ve never had the luxury of working at a place where they’d just let you cook and re-cook a bunch of food to find out what it tastes like. That costs money. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it works out. The presentation is the part I don’t have worked out in my head yet, it takes a couple of plates before I lock it down. But I know flavors and aromas well enough in my artistic eye to combine them, and I rarely miss. That might sound cocky, but if I wasn’t certain about what I was doing, I wouldn’t be here.
You certainly haven’t missed any of the nights that I’ve been here.
Thanks.
When you’re putting ethnic food on a plate, how important is it to you to take the patron to the food’s source of origin, to give them a slice of life? Or does the presentation of the flavors take priority?
It’s both. The biggest compliment I can get is someone from Italy telling me that my risotto is the best he’s ever had.
Has anyone ever told you that?
Yes. Or people say things like my chicken and dumplings remind them of their moms. That’s why I cook. I want to take people on a ride, and if I can bring them to a place of happiness, then that’s it, I’ve done it.
Let’s talk about your dream job. If you had your own place, where would it be, and what kind of experience would I have?
Well, it would be in a slightly warmer location [laughs]! It would be in a more metropolitan location, maybe the outskirts of downtown. There’d be a lot of ethnic foods, different flavor combinations, and just me doing what I do. But this is actually as close as I’ve come to working a dream job. Will and Pia are great, we get along really well.
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