A MAGAZINE FOR AND ABOUT LOUISVILLE
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people and places | profiles | PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN DRY
 The true measure of a chef, it is said, is the quality of his stock. Stock, after all, is the essential distillation of meat, poultry, fish or vegetable flavor, a work of culinary art that requires skill and experience to achieve perfection through simplicity. Indeed, stock is so basic to fine dining that we might compare our city's restaurant scene to a "stock market," an investment in good eats that pays dividends in flavor. And just as the world financial markets have their puts and calls, bulls and bears, short-selling options and steady long-term performers, we think it's possible to identify some of the top chefs as blue chips - solid, established issues that have stood the test of time - and a few more as hot prospects, newer to the scene but rising fast, showing promise of significant returns. Like any good market analyst, we don't declare the following group of top chefs to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Consider it our tipsheet on six impressive, long-term performers, to go along with other blue chips we've covered before, like Kathy Cary of Lilly's (Fall 2004), Agostino Gabriele of Vincenzo's (Fall 2003) and Peng Looi of Asiatique (Summer 2003), just to name a few. The same principle applies to the hot prospects we present for your consideration: They're not the city's only fast-rising cooking stars, but they're six mighty good ones.
As a child in Iran, Anoosh Shariat was a picky eater. Fortunately, he grew up in a household and a city that could accommodate his tastes. "Back then, everything was done from scratch. In the summer my mom would buy a bunch of tomatoes. She would cut them, and put salt on them, and then put them on the rooftop. They were flat rooftops, and we didn't have much pollution or dust, so you could do that. The sunlight would dry the tomatoes, and three or four weeks later she would make a wonderful sun-dried tomato paste. Dried fruit is part of our tradition over there, so making tomato paste or drying limes was one of the ways we stored food for the winter."Iranian tradition wasn't the only thing that influenced his youthful tastes. In those days, before revolution toppled the Shah, the capital city Teheran was also home to a thriving community of French businessmen and engineers who brought with them a taste for continental cuisine. Though the picky youth was an eager observer of his mother's kitchen, it wasn't until 1972, when Shariat moved to Germany to study engineering, that he took a professional interest in cooking. It was virtually a matter of survival. As a 14-year-old student, he wanted to eat, he said, "and the best way to eat was to work in a restaurant." He first worked in a university commissary in Gottingen, and then moved to Cologne, where he worked in a 40-seat French restaurant. That experience got him excited about food: "That's where I learned classic French food, escargot, octopus soups. We made a blackboard menu every day, and when it was gone, it was gone. I washed dishes, made salads, and picked up any pointers I could." By 1977, Shariat had moved to Texas with plans to continue his studies in engineering. Then the Shah tumbled. Like many Iranians residing in the U.S., Shariat found his life in turmoil when Iranian student visas were cancelled. He requested and received asylum in the U.S. In the next few years, he recalls, "It was tough getting a job as an Iranian. People were being fired. There was so much hostility because of the hostages. Some of my friends dyed their hair, so it wouldn't be so obvious that they were Iranian. It was a rough situation." But the restaurant business has always offered sanctuary for folks with talent and a willingness to work. "Most of the time," said Shariat, "we get the cream of the crop, but in the restaurant business we're maybe not so discriminating in our hiring as in other businesses." Texas was in the midst of a culinary boom fueled by a thriving oil economy and growing interest in fine dining. Shariat found himself working with chefs who were sticklers for flavor and presentation, tableside carving, elaborate service platters and high levels of service. By the time he was 25 he realized that, rather than going back to school, he wanted to remain a chef. "I set myself some goals. I decided that by 32 I wanted to be an executive chef and that by 35 I wanted to achieve my own restaurant." To meet those goals, he said, "I became a kind of culinary mercenary, if you will. I had very versatile experience, and I liked a challenge, so I developed a reputation for fixing restaurants up when they were in trouble, saving them and reorganizing them. I rebuilt this little French bistro, and then through a friend I was introduced to Remington's here in Louisville. It was having some trouble, so I came here, met Charles Osborn, the owner, and fell in love with Louisville." Geography was a factor, too. Shariat's wife, Sharon, was expecting their first child, and Louisville was closer to her family in North Carolina than Texas. "The rest," he said, "is history." That was 1987, and under Shariat's stewardship, Remington's (on Hurstbourne Lane in the spot now occupied by Olive Garden) became an influential part of the Louisville dining scene of the era. Remington's eventually closed, but that opened the door for Shariat to open his own restaurant, the much-cherished Shariat's, on November 16, 1993, beating his goal by two years - he was 33. A decade later, ready for a change, he closed Shariat's and sought other opportunities. In the end, he was lured downtown to take over the two restaurants located in Slugger Field: the fine dining Wellinghurst's Steakhouse (which he promptly re-named Park Place on Main) and the more casual Browning's. A year later, he has transformed both into critically acclaimed restaurants. "It was the perfect opportunity," he said. "The unique thing was the opportunity to work in two areas of food that I love, to combine fine-dining with casual and fun food. It always made me a little sad that I would only see my guests on birthdays or special occasions, and this gives me the opportunity to see people more often. We have two separate kitchens back to back, so we cross-train as much as we can, but each side has its own chefs and techniques. In Park Place we try to get into the essence of flavors, so we want the highest quality. But for me, creating the best pizza or Hot Brown is just as satisfying as anything else. It's simple food on the Browning's side, but there's nothing better than using fresh ingredients and keeping it consistent." Longtime Shariat fans will be gratified to learn that Anoosh, himself a vegetarian, continues to offer a wide range of meatless menu options in addition to his offerings for omnivores. "In Park Place we customize three-, five- or seven-course vegetarian menus. We do a lot of custom dishes because there are so many varieties of vegetarian - vegans, lacto, fruitarians, people who don't want anything cooked, raw foods. I try to respect all their wishes. I love the challenge of customizing a dish, because it's so fun. And it forces you to improvise. Improvising in the kitchen is a must. You improvise with a sauce, or an ingredient, but you never improvise with quality. Need is the mother of invention."
Start talking to Dean Corbett about the management philosophy that has turned his side-by-side restaurants, Equus and Jack's Lounge, into two of Louisville's most popular dining spots, and he'll start telling stories about his father, Jack. "He was a corporate aluminum salesman who became a restaurateur after my mother died," Corbett said.
Besides a firm grasp of fiscal management and budgets, the elder Corbett also instilled in his son an approach to personnel management that's helped Dean Corbett recruit and retain an extraordinarily loyal group of employees. As proud as he is of the quality of cuisine and service at his indisputably elite restaurants, Corbett seems to take just as much pleasure in the longevity of his crew. In a business where turnover is endemic, Corbett can point to the fact that at least 18 of his 33 employees have been with him for more than a decade. How does he hold on to his crew? "I just leave 'em alone," he said with a laugh. "I try to set people up for success, give them all the tools they need, encourage them, and be there with them in the trenches. Everybody does their thing and has pride in their work." In addition to that laissez-faire approach, Corbett goes out of his way to sustain a family atmosphere. This August, for instance, when Equus celebrates its 20th anniversary, he'll close the restaurant for a week and take two dozen of his key employees (everyone who has been with him for five years or more) on vacation for a week of recreation in coastal South Carolina. Over the years, he's taken his staff to Nassau and Gulf Shores, Alabama. Even if group junkets weren't a custom, Corbett would likely be able to attract talent. "The philosophy is, if you surround yourself with excellent people, you'll keep learning new things as well. At any given time there are three former executive chefs from great restaurants who are working our line, and that's because we leave them alone and give them room to express themselves. Since we've been open, we've had four executive chefs here, and I've learned things from each of them. Dave Cuntz, our current chef, is enormously talented. When it comes to presentation, I've never worked with anybody better. I learn things from him every day. But it works both ways. He learns things from me about management, and math, and the business end of things." Perhaps the key to Corbett's success - and it could be a lesson to any chef and restaurant owner - is a balance of whimsical artistry and hardheaded business. "I want this to be fun," he said. "For young chefs, especially, who are just getting into the profession, or just getting out of school, working here is kind of like a playpen. In our kitchen they have the freshest scallops, sushi-grade tuna, fiddleheads, fresh morels, hundred-year-old balsamics, cheeses that you can't find just anywhere, artisan specialty foods, dry-aged beef and that kind of thing. "And it's a very open environment. Anybody who comes in here who wants to try something, if they want to run a special, we'll talk it over and if it works out cost-wise, and if David and I approve it, we'll let them try it. But they also get a dose of reality. We'll analyze the food costs, and they'll learn that you can't create a dish that has $16 in food costs and sell it for $22. "To be successful in this business, you have to have two things: really good taste buds and a knack for math. I'm fortunate that I can taste a dish and immediately tell what it needs to kick up the flavor. But I can also look at a dish and calculate immediately whether it makes business sense."
"There's nothing better for me than cooking in the region where I grew up," says Joe Castro, executive chef of the Brown Hotel. "When you come home and cook at home, you're inspired beyond just making a move to a new job. I grew up eating country ham and fresh tomatoes, and coming home just raises the bar for me. I love that I'm home and cooking. It feels good. It's what I love."Joe Castro came home some 13 years ago to take over the culinary reins at the Brown Hotel - and its flagship restaurant, the English Grill - after spending the early part of his career working as far afield as Taiwan and Washington, D.C. In fact, just before returning to Louisville he was offered the sous chef position at the White House; but he decided he wanted to return to his roots. Those roots are in southern Indiana, where Castro and his brother John grew up on a Scottsburg farm, spending their summers developing an intimate relationship with produce. "My mom hated cookin'," said Joe. "But she was a master gardener who loved to grow all kinds of crazy stuff, so as soon as we were old enough we worked in the garden every day. We came down to Bunton Seed every year and picked out the latest and greatest. I think that gives me a special appreciation for the food that grows in this region. It's a thrill to get product locally, when it's at its peak, when the sap is dripping out of the squash blossoms. Any chef is going to want to focus on that. "I love farming as much as I love cooking in a lot of ways, and I look forward to being an old chef, curing hams and bacon and bringin' in my produce to chefs." It'll be a while before Castro qualifies as an old chef, though. He's 43, and still an ambitious, energetic advocate for the power of Kentucky cuisine. "I'd like to do what I can to see the flavors of this region show through and develop a national reputation that goes beyond country ham, Bourbon and sorghum," he said. "We're every bit as powerful in terms of farming, fresh vegetables and meats as anyplace in the country. And with the things our suppliers are showing up with these days, I think we could compete with everything you read about California. This is a great farming area, and I don't think people really understand that nationally." If Castro has his way, they will - not only through the products of his own kitchen, but through the work of chefs he's mentored over the years like Jerome Pope at the Coach Lamp, Nathan Carlson at Avalon, Kevin Rice at Mitchell's Fish Market and Maureen Hartman at Café Fraiche. "I love having young chefs and students around," said Castro, who got his own training in the field, working in kitchens after finishing a business degree at Transylvania University in Lexington. "It keeps you on your toes. The key to being successful in this business is they have to have the desire to give whatever it takes. You can look into almost anybody's eyes and tell whether they're there to learn or if they're there because the student loans are mounting up on them. I look for the desire. I've always been driven by a desire to do this; it's never been anything else. I like people like that around me." Then he unleashes a gardening metaphor: "I want to plant each person in fertile soil and help 'em along and see how they grow. That's what I do. I'm not a taskmaster beatin' it into people. I want people who have that desire built in. If it is, then we have healthy roots and a healthy planet at the end of the day. I want somebody who really, really wants to do it. The hours are long; you work when everybody else is playing. Unless you've got those kinds of things ready in your head and know that, you aren't going to be happy doing it. But if somebody knows what they want, then off we go."
Long before fusion cuisine had turned American cooking on its head, John Castro, the executive chef of Winston's at Sullivan University, and his brother Joe, who holds the same post at the Brown Hotel, were in the thick of it. Or perhaps more accurately, they were both in the thick of an unlikely postmodern juxtaposition of kitchen traditions that gave them a unique culinary perspective."When you hear the word fusion," says Chef John Castro, "that's how I grew up." Their Filipino father, Ignacio Castro, and their mother, Mary, from Meade County, Kentucky, settled in Scottsburg, Indiana, where Ignacio practiced medicine. John Castro says their mother was an unwilling cook. "She used to say, ‘When I die, if I go to Hell, they'll make me cook,'" he recalled with a chuckle. She was, however, a passionate gardener who "raised some crazy, amazing stuff." Their father, on the other hand, loved to cook and entertain. He reveled in putting on Filipino-style pig roasts for 300 to 400 people, or hosting dinner parties for the small enclave of Filipino physicians who had found their way to the region. Menus in the Castro household ranged from exotic Japanese eggplant, bitter melon and yard-long beans grown in the family garden to regional favorites like country ham, grits and redeye gravy. "It was like worlds colliding," Castro said. By age six, Castro was expressing himself in the kitchen, creating dishes like a home-grown Hot Brown by mixing cream of mushroom soup and sliced turkey. By junior high school, he was focused on cooking as a career. And as soon as he was old enough, he had his first kitchen job, as a lead cook at the Ramada Inn in Scottsburg. "They asked me, ‘What can you do?' and by then I knew all the basics. I was lucky that the staff and owners were great people, and once they realized what I could do, they gave me free rein. Before long, word got around and we had people driving in from Columbus or Louisville. It just validated everything for me." From those beginnings, Castro pursued formal training, first at the Northwood Institute at West Baden Springs, Indiana, and then at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, New York. Then he spent time working his way up through the culinary ranks, serving as executive chef at Amato's in Lexington, then following the path of a corporate chef, putting in stints in places as distant as Taiwan. "The cooking there is brilliant," he said. "And the great thing about the hotel restaurants in Taiwan is that they're really rooted in the street food of the people. On the streets, of course, it's squat-and-eat, and in the hotels you have a sophisticated environment, but the food was so exciting. In those days, I felt like I'd been plugged into 220 volts; I didn't require any sleep. Everything new just excited me." Then it was back to Louisville, where Castro served as the last executive chef at Hasenour's before becoming executive chef at Winston's at Sullivan University, where every 11 to 13 weeks he greets an entirely new kitchen staff as the new semester's class comes in. "People think moving from the kitchen to the classroom-kitchen might be like slowing down from 1,000 miles an hour to a slow pace," said Castro. Wrong! Rather, he now must run a kitchen that maintains a high standard of culinary excellence to please a demanding clientele, while at the same time keeping pace with pedagogical rhythms that ensure that every student will get practical experience in the various kitchen stations.
Michael Cunha grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, surrounded by the rich aromas of his mother's French cooking as well as the seafood and Mediterranean-style comfort food created by his father's Portuguese family.Jim Gerhardt grew up in Cincinnati, spending his Saturdays gawking at fresh produce, fresh sausage, smoked sturgeon and other delicacies at that city's Findlay Market, and then sitting down to weekend meals of braised tongue, limburger cheese or kidney pie at his grandmother's home. Both were fans of the television chefs of the era: Julia Child and Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet. And both Cunha and Gerhardt realized early that they wanted to be chefs. If their paths diverged in the details, it wasn't by much. For Gerhardt, who grew up in an era when the chef's profession wasn't well established in the Midwest, just finding out about schools was an obstacle. "When I told my high school guidance counselor I wanted to get a formal degree in food, he really didn't know anything about it," he said. Fortunately a bit of research opened doors, and he found his way to the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, New York. For Cunha, the way was more direct: Johnson & Wales, another respected culinary school, was located nearby. Both chefs combined formal training with practical experience. "The Gourmet Room in the Terrace Hilton was one of Cincinnati's three great restaurants, along with the Maisonette and Pigalle's, back then," recalled Gerhardt. "I went down there one day and waited three or four hours until the chef would see me. I just wouldn't go away." After an interview, Gerhardt landed a spot in the Hilton's sandwich shop. He then earned a promotion to the Gourmet Room, a classical French restaurant, and within six months worked his way through all the stations in the kitchen before heading off to school. On his father's advice, Gerhardt sought an interview at l'Auberge de Maison, a classical French restaurant in Marion, Massachusetts. He was hired on the spot and spent the next five years putting in a punishing schedule of 80 to 90 hours a week at work and school. Gerhardt's next career moves involved stints in Florida and the Virgin Islands, back to Cincinnati at the Maisonette, and at The Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas. After graduating from Johnson & Wales, Cunha traveled to California for what he calls "the most fun two weeks of my life." But he didn't fit into the California scene and returned home. One day he called a J&W classmate, John Plymale (now executive chef at Porcini), who had landed in Louisville. "I told him I was thinking about coming this way, and he said ‘Come on down.'" Within a few weeks, Cunha was cooking on the line at Dietrich's. A few months later, in 1989, the Seelbach offered him a sous chef position. In 1992, Hilton Corporation, which operates the Seelbach, sent him to Austin, Texas, to run another kitchen in the chain. A couple of years later, it was back to the Seelbach, where he was involved in the expansion of the hotel ballroom. In August 1995, Medallion Hotels recruited Gerhardt to take over as executive chef and food and beverage director at the Seelbach. "They flew me in to look it over," he said. "I just fell in love with the hotel. It had the historic Oakroom. They had just completed a convention center, the Medallion ballroom and a smaller ballroom, so it was a hotel that had three ballrooms with about 32,000 square feet of meeting place. It had everything I wanted: fine dining, a la carte, an in-house pastry shop and a convention center that could finance pretty much anything that you wanted to do. So all the components were in place. I was really looking for a fine dining room that I could kind of put my signature on, and that was the Oakroom. Medallion was a small company, they were growing, and they wanted someone they could just toss the keys to and let them run with it, so it was an extraordinary opportunity and things just clicked." Things clicked between Gerhardt and Cunha, too. Cunha likens forming a restaurant partnership to a slow, careful courtship. "It's a relationship that grows over time. When we met, we'd never heard of each other. But over years of working together you form a bond of trust. Knowing that you can trust someone is huge, and knowing that you can get along is huge. Our personalities are different, but really in a good way. Jim is more the host, and I'm more focused on what's coming out of the kitchen. I know what we're putting out, but I don't always see the face of the customer." Gerhardt echoes Cunha's sentiments. "You have to have a partner who has a good work ethic, is talented and is trustworthy; and to find all three is rare. And you also have to find someone you can get along with, who has a shared vision in terms of the quality of the food and management style, and with Mike that happened. I guess it was kind of a surprise for me. When I came to the Seelbach, I didn't know him from Adam's housecat, but over time we came to know each other." And over time, the pair turned the Oakroom into one of the nation's elite restaurants, putting into place the systems and standards that would earn multiple AAA Five Diamond Awards. Cunha had always dreamed of opening his own restaurant. For Gerhardt, the idea was a youthful goal that had been deferred: "I always wanted to have a restaurant, but as odd as it sounds, I got sidetracked by the food side of things. Once I got started learning about different foods, I just kept going, and I really had no idea how diverse the range was. Moving around the country, and experiencing what different chefs were doing was a great experience, but after we earned that third Five Diamond Award, I think I realized that the next step was to open a place, and we started putting out some feelers." Eventually, those feelers would lead the two chefs to their new restaurant, Limestone, which opened in September 2003 and earned immediate critical and popular acclaim. "People keep telling you it's not a good time," said Cunha. "They'll tell you the economy's not good, that unemployment's high. If you keep listening to people, you'll never do it. Is it ever a good time to open a business? Probably not, but you have to decide that it's a good time for you. And if you do it, do it right." For Cunha and Gerhardt, doing it right seems second nature. In November 2004, the two were invited to cook at the James Beard House in New York City, a taste of national recognition that portends more great things to come.
If Tim Smith ever decides to pursue a new career, he might have a future in motivational speaking, with his own inspiring career as the topic. Still on the youthful side at 30, Smith has risen from busser to executive chef at Napa River Grill, one of the most prestigious kitchens in Louisville ... with no formal culinary education. What's the secret to Smith's success? He credits the old-fashioned work ethic that he brought to bear at Mama Grisanti's Italian Restaurant, which once occupied the St. Matthews-area building that now houses Napa River Grill.
The story of the Grisanti family's restaurants - and the many top chefs, restaurant hosts and owners they've produced - has been told often, even right here in Food & Dining. Smith's story is one of them. But the story begins even before Smith, who grew up in nearby Jeffersontown, started as a busser at Mama Grisanti's in 1990. In fact, he admits to an early interest in cooking. "When I was a kid my mom bought me an Easy-Bake Oven, and I used to make little cakes," he said. "I wanted to take one to school for Show-and-Tell, but I was afraid the other boys would laugh at me." After he graduated from duPont Manual High School in 1992, Smith became a utility player at Mama's, splitting time between the front and the back of the house. "It started because they needed help in the kitchen during lunch," he recalled. "I'd work in the kitchen during the day and in the front bussing tables at night." By the time Grisanti's gave way to Napa River Grill in 1999 - a transformation that shifted its focus from family Italian-American to the upscale food and wine of California's Napa Valley wine country - Smith had worked his way up to sous chef. During the transition, the business was closed for six months and most of the staff was laid off. But Smith, ever the jack-of-all-trades, found a way to stay on the job. "During the changeover I helped hang drywall and paint," he said. "We gutted the whole building. I think there was $750,000 in renovations. I also spent time learning a lot of new styles and techniques: Italian, Asian, South American. Coming from a traditional Italian restaurant was a big change." After 15 years, literally half of his life, spent working in the same building, Smith said he feels like he's attended a great culinary school: "I have worked with some great chefs. I learned a lot from them all. Cooking is something you learn by doing. You don't know how to peel potatoes until you've had to cut 50 potatoes." Smith was named executive chef at Napa River Grill in 2003. The restaurant has an upscale, intimate feel that bespeaks quality. "We are off the beaten path," Smith said. "If we were on Bardstown Road or Frankfort Avenue, we'd get twice the business. I like it the way it is. If you come here, this is where you wanted to eat. You don't come here because some place down the street is full. This is a destination location." Smith implements his cooking philosophy by trying to get customers to experience familiar dishes in new ways. "The thing about being a chef is judging people's limits and getting them to go just outside of their box," Smith said. "I'm not limited to any style." One of the restaurant's most popular dishes, for example, is Smith's fennel- and coriander-crusted sea bass. Served over lobster dumplings, it looks almost like a soup with fish on top. "Sea bass is not your normal fish dish, but people in this city love it, " Smith said. "Our dish is just something different that has proven to be really popular." Smith said he changes eight to ten menu items every season. Most of the decisions on what to add or take off the bill of fare are based on the availability of seasonal vegetables and the cost to the restaurant … and its diners. "We don't want to gouge customers," Smith said. "We don't want them to visit one day and have an entrée at a certain price, and then get charged a lot more for something else the next time they visit. We try to be consistent. A lot of things besides recipes go into this." Smith is not the kind of executive chef who sits in his office all day. He estimates that he works 65 to 70 hours a week, much of that time spent cooking on the line. He usually gets to the restaurant around 8 a.m. to help with daily prep work. "I'm right there," he said. "I don't just carry around a clipboard. I think it helps morale for the other cooks to see me working."
Become a cook, or join the Navy? That's the simple decision that faced teen-aged Charlie Owen a decade ago. In some ways the chef's life resembles the military. Although different levels of danger are involved, both jobs require discipline and teamwork - and they provide the opportunity for travel and adventure.Owen, still youthful in appearance at 27, recalls that he spent the year after graduating from Ballard High School pretty much goofing off. Owen's father soon tired of his son's aimlessness and asked a simple question: "What would you like to do?" When the young man failed to come up with a satisfactory answer, his father suggested the Navy recruiting office. "That's when I told him that I liked to cook," Owen recalled with a chuckle. "When I was a child I liked to cook eggs. Then I became the master of fried bologna. In high school, I was always the guy asking, ‘Hey, man, are you hungry?'" Fair enough, his dad said, informing young Charlie that he would soon be attending cooking school. "Until that moment, I didn't know such a thing existed." It did indeed, and Sullivan University's National Center for Hospitality Studies gave Owen a warm welcome. He graduated in 1998, and he credits the school with giving him the focus that helped him rise through the kitchen ranks quickly. Owen entered Sullivan at a time of transition for the school. Its restaurant, Winston's, had just opened, and everything seemed topsy-turvy. But good ideas and plenty of hard work abounded. It was one of his best cooking experiences, Owen said, adding, "You'd think it would be just the opposite, but the other places I've worked were a lot more structured than Winston's was in the beginning. My instructor, David Moller, was unpredictable and really inspiring. It was a really creative time." After he graduated, Owen felt a sense of wanderlust. Checking out the world beyond Louisville, he landed at Ajax Tavern in Boulder, Colorado, working for Chef Tobias Lowry. "Lowry told me that if I wanted to ever have his job I'd have to outwork my competition," Owen said. "The other line cooks came to work an hour early, so I came to work an hour and a half early. I had an hour commute each way. That's the way it was." Owen eventually worked his way up to sous chef at Ajax. But rather than staying on to drive the train, he veered onto a side track, working as a private chef for one of the families that opened the AutoZone automobile-supply chain. He recalls the experience as surreal, saying, "I cooked a banquet for 12 people every day. There were bodyguards and servants, Picassos on the wall, the whole deal." That stint was short, as Owen's sense of wanderlust was still strong. He moved on to Hawaii, enjoyed the beaches, met a girl he'd eventually bring home to Louisville, and worked his heart out at Mama's Fish House. "I can't think of a more amazing restaurant," Owen said. "You could hear whales from the dining room. They had some of the best fish dishes I've ever seen. I worked as a line cook, and we must have had 1,000 customers a day." A couple of years ago, Owen started feeling the call of home, and last year he came back with a splash as chef and part owner of the short-lived restaurant Steam, Fire and Ice. He described the closing of the restaurant after less than a year as one of the few low points in his career. But he was able to bring some of the staff from Steam with him when he joined Leander's on Oak this year. Owen said the restaurant in Old Louisville is a good situation for him. It offers a stable atmosphere where he is free to work out his fascination with seafood. Leander's has moved a lot of sea bass, but Owen said the breakout star dish is the restaurant's Falls City Beer-battered cod. "I don't know what it is about this city and Falls City beer," He said. "I know there is a bar in Germantown where they sell a lot of it. Seafood is our niche. We do classic and eclectic preparations. The Falls City dish was supposed to be kind of a novelty thing, but sometimes it amounts to 10 percent of our sales." It's just one more surprise in the cooking life for Owen, who says he still feels as if he's only at the beginning of a grand adventure. "I grew up in the country, where you caught a fish, cleaned it and cooked it," he said. "I never thought this could be a real job."
Stephen Young, Executive Chef at Artemisia, boasts quite a resume: When he ran the kitchen at Fourways Inn in Bermuda, the Scottish-born chef was featured twice on Discovery Channel's Great Chefs of the World. He has prepared meals for dignitaries such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former President George H. Bush and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. So we suspect Young is kidding when he claims that cooking is only his second passion. One call from his beloved Glasgow Rangers, Young swears, and he would rip off his apron for good. "I'm a huge soccer fan. I grew up following the Rangers. I always dreamed about playing for them, but the manager of the team never gave me a call. I'm still waiting."
The long, winding road that brought Young from Glasgow to Louisville began with his first cooking jobs at the Royal Automobile Club, the Central Hotel and the Grosvenor Hotel in Great Britain. In 1984 he moved on to Jersey in the Channel Islands, where he worked at the Grand Hotel and then at the Hotel de la Plage. His next stop was Bermuda, where he joined the staff of the Fourways Inn in 1986 and became its executive chef in 1995, elevating it to four-diamond status. But he says working in such a high-pressure atmosphere eventually took its toll. "Talk about fresh seafood … To get the special for the day, I'd ask the fisherman what he caught today and he'd just check to see what he had on the line. … After 13 years in Bermuda, I needed a little bit of a change." From Bermuda to Louisville? That's a change, all right. Young isn't sure what attracted him to the River City, but he says it has offered him the respite he needed. "It is a little laid back. I enjoy myself here, and there are a lot of good chefs around. I can see myself staying for a while." Young said he has had to make some adjustments to placate the local palate. "I didn't realize that they loved calamari so much in Louisville," he said. "It is a big hit. I'm not used to cooking it so much. I'm also using more chipotles and hot peppers than I used to. I always try to use as many local ingredients as possible. Otherwise, the food is still the same as I cooked in Bermuda." His biggest hit at Artemisia has been a rack of lamb with espresso coffee sauce, a popular dish that he featured for a year and a half before retiring it for a while. "That went down fantastic," he said. "I might have to put it back on because I get so many requests for it." In the interest of keeping things fun, Young often creates offbeat "theme nights" at Artemisia. Each month, for example, the restaurant shows a movie on its patio, and Young comes up with a three-course meal to fit. For the movie Chocolat, for instance, he fashioned a chocolate pasta with scallops. "I usually look for some dish in the movie to prepare or do something from the country the movie is from, be it Italian or French. Mostly Martha is a German film, so I made some German dishes that night." Remembering his own Scottish roots, Young recently presented a tribute to the poet Robert Burns with a menu including haggis, the traditional Scottish meat pudding made of lamb organ meat and oatmeal, customarily cooked in the lamb's stomach. He hopes to make the Burns Night dinner an annual tradition to mark the poet's January birthday. Every Tuesday, Artemisia offers a six-course Chef's Table dinner - $55 with wine, $40 without - often featuring such creative repasts as oyster tempura with a Vietnamese dipping sauce, Tasmanian ocean trout with lobster ravioli, and red leek salad. "Since I do it every week I try to come up with a fresh pasta or ravioli dish," he said in his distinctive Scottish burr. "I try to keep it interesting for diners and myself."
David Salvo and Chris Gibson might strike you as an odd couple in the tradition of great comedy teams like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy: Even with his partner's chef hat making up some of the difference, the husky Gibson towers over the compact, rail-thin Salvo. Despite their different sizes, though, when it comes to Fusion restaurant the two are like twins.After less than a year in business, the co-owners and chefs of Fusion (1605 Story Avenue) are delighted, but not surprised, that their restaurant is riding a popularity wave. "I've been carrying this concept in my head for about five years," said Gibson, 29. "Nothing about the restaurant side surprises me," Salvo, 28, added. "The food sells itself." The chefs attribute Fusion's concept to Los Angeles celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, who helped popularize the cooking style that combines techniques from disparate cultures into a blended cuisine. "He might take from Asian, Moroccan and African cuisine to form a singular dish," Gibson said. He offers Fusion's Anasazi salmon is an example. The salmon is dusted in spices from Central America and South America, served over American Indian roasted corn cakes, and given a French accent with sautéed spinach and mushrooms. The Fusion style may appeal to Gibson because he got his culinary education on the road, having been all but born with a knife in his hand. Gibson's mother managed country clubs all over the country, and when most kids his age were out playing soccer, Gibson was slicing vegetables. "My mom managed the Mayfair in Alabama and the Paducah Country Club, among others," Gibson said. "Each place I would end up working in the kitchen. By the time I was 15, I was an old hand at cooking." Gibson soon graduated to running kitchens himself. He was sous chef at 160 South in Birmingham, one of only two four-star restaurants in Alabama at the time he worked there, and then chef at Pacific Pearl in Lexington, Kentucky. He met Salvo when he came to Louisville's Bluegrass Brewing Company in 2003. "He was my sous chef and we hit it off," Gibson said. "I felt like he was someone I could go into business with." Salvo has worked his way up to chef from the bottom rung of the kitchen ladder. He started out washing dishes for Chef John Gray at Café on Romany in Lexington. Eventually he became Gray's sous chef at Portofino in Lexington before joining Gibson at the BBC. "I learned so much from John Gray," Salvo said. "I credit his tutoring for a lot of what we've achieved. I felt prepared for this." Since Fusion opened last November, Gibson said, it has built a regular dinner clientele; the restaurant added lunch hours in January. After operating very briefly on Baxter Avenue, Fusion quickly moved to its current home, which had housed the Greek Paradise Café and several short-lived predecessors and was long the home of Min's Cafeteria, affectionately nicknamed "Dirty Min's." Gibson said the location has housed a restaurant continuously for 70 years. In an unusual division of responsibility, Salvo and Gibson share the duty of running the front and back of the house at Fusion. Besides cooking, Salvo handles the waitstaff and the bar. "It just adds an extra layer of responsibility to what I was already doing," he said. "The big difference is that I'm not just responsible for keeping track of people's hours. As the owner, I'm responsible for making sure that these people have a job to come to. That's a bit different." On the other hand, Gibson said running the kitchen has been an easy transition for him. "We have day and night managers and about a dozen other employees," he said. "The hard thing is not having as many employees as I'm used to having. I've worked at places with way bigger staffs." Salvo and Gibson said they have had some surprises in discovering what appeals to their customers' tastes. For instance, every time Gibson tries to take the coconut fried lobster tail off the menu, a chorus of complaints prompts him to put it back on. A relatively simple dish, it's a split lobster tail coated with sweet coconut sauce and served over a rice-noodle salad. "We were thinking it might make a spring-summer dish," he said, "but it really took off." Fusion is still evolving. Gibson said the co-owners plan to add a patio for summer. And even if the coconut lobster stays, there will be some menu changes. The only thing that's sure to stay, he said, is the practice of displaying the works of local artists. Fusion Restaurant should reflect its name, Gibson said. "The style is high energy and atmospheric. 'Kinetic' is the way to describe it."
"My plan was always to come back to Louisville," he said. "My wife and I didn't want to raise kids in New Orleans. At 31, I want to be where I plan to stay for the rest of my life." Wallace, who grew up in the Crescent Hill area of Louisville, got his start in the restaurant business making salads at Café Metro and Uptown Café. He worked his way up the kitchen ranks at the two adjacent cafés, and then left for New Orleans in 1997 to take a job as chef at the Mystic Café. Within a year, he bought a 10 percent stake in the café. Eventually Wallace expanded his holdings until he was the sole owner. "I met this doctor through the restaurant who was looking for an investment opportunity," Wallace explained. "This doctor bought out the original owners. We were partners. Over the next five years, I bought him out. Basically, I didn't make a dime for five years. When you have no education and no money, a bank is not going to give you a loan, so that's the way I had to do it." The early stages at the Mystic Café were not easy going. "Cooking is the easiest part of running a restaurant," he said. "The hardest part is getting a good staff. If you find someone good, pay them or you'll lose them. It's about being organized." Sometimes his youth worked against him, too, because the waiters and cooks he hired were usually his contemporaries. "When I owned the Mystic Café, it was trial and error," he said. "There were a novel's worth of lessons. I learned that you have to be nice to your staff, but you can't let it slide into friendship. Because when you become friends, then maybe they don't think it is a big deal if they come in 20 minutes late." Wallace continued, "A lot of people don't realize that this is my life; this is how I plan to feed my kids. It is where they work for a few hours to make $100. If I close, they go down the street to get a job at the next restaurant." Two years ago, Wallace and his wife Stephanie, an artist by avocation who works as a nurse at Baptist East, decided it was time to come home. "I missed Louisville from the moment I left it," Wallace said. "It's got great music and great food. I missed my sister and her kids. It was just time." Wallace knew he wanted to return to Louisville and he knew he wanted to open a new restaurant, but it took him a while to decide where. A friend in real estate tried to steer him toward lower Frankfort Avenue. Wallace resisted. He looked at restaurant-saturated Bardstown Road and East Market Street, but nothing seemed right. Finally, he took a closer look at 1800 Frankfort Avenue, now the address that Café Lou Lou calls home. "He finally convinced me that this part of Frankfort Avenue was coming alive," Wallace said. "I've been very happy here. It was a club called the Black Cat. We did all of the construction ourselves in five weeks. I was worried about the on-street parking at first, but luckily people seem happy to park and walk." Café Lou Lou specializes in Mediterranean food, which Wallace calls a misunderstood concept in Louisville: It is not just gyros and Greek salads. Wallace is most proud of his gourmet pizzas and wide array of pastas. The Mediterranean pizza, for example, features mozzarella cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, Kalamata olives, roasted eggplant, roasted garlic, feta cheese, capers, and marinara sauce. Another popular dish, pasta carbonara, features chicken, fresh mushrooms, green onions and bacon in a Parmesan cream sauce over linguine. "We sold a ton of pizza in New Orleans," Wallace said. "But I think this city really loves pasta. Everything is made from scratch. There is really nothing like this in town. There are not a lot of middle-of-the-road restaurants where you can spend $8 for a meal and still have leftovers." The next evolution for Café Lou Lou is toward a more health-conscious menu. Since starting a diet himself, Wallace said, he has become more aware of the limited choices offered to vegetarian diners and those watching their weight. "It is hard to eat healthy nowadays," he said. "You can only eat so many salads. I've been working on some creative options I'm going to unveil soon." In addition to working at his restaurant, Wallace said, he spends a lot of time getting reacquainted with family and friends. He said many of them find it strange that he spends a lot of time cooking when he's not at the restaurant. But cooking is like breathing to him. "If you have it in your heart to be a chef, you'll be a chef no matter what," Wallace said. "Just like my wife expresses herself with her art, this is how I express myself." | ||||||||||||||||||||
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