In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn

Alex Curley is chief operating officer of Palacios Murphy, a Houston-based restaurant company that got its start with Armandos, a 43-year-old restaurant that occupies the unique niche of serving Tex-Mex food in a fine-dining setting. Apart from opening a couple of restaurants in the village of Round Top, Texas, midway between Houston and Austin, Armandos' owners basically stuck to the business of running that local culinary institution.But in the aftermath of the pandemic, they started to explore new possibilities. Now they operate Hotel Lulu in Round Top as well as Italian concept Lulu's, casual Tex-Mex restaurant Mandito's, and Popi Burger which serving burgers and sandwiches.Heading up operations is Alex Curley, who joined the group after a career of working in multiconcept groups including Southern Proper Hospitality and Richard Sandoval Restaurants.Curley recently discussed the evolution of Palacios Murphy, which now centers a lot of its activity around Round Top, and how to run successful businesses 365 days a year in a town that really only comes to life during festivals.

Gayle Pirie is the chef and partner, with John Clark, of Foreign Cinema, a dining institution in San Francisco's Mission District that has been nourishing its guests with Mediterranean-inspired California cuisine, as well as with movies projected on the restaurant's wall, for the past 25 years.She grew up in San Francisco and funded her ambitions as an oil painting artist by cooking. From 1985 to 1993 she worked with her mentor, Judy Rogers, at Zuni Café, and then went on to launch a restaurant consulting practice. That was followed by work with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., as her personal assistant. She joined Clark at Foreign Cinema in 2001.Pirie takes her role as a “restaurateur” seriously. The word is French for “someone who restores,” and she does that by fostering the success of her employees, local producers, and her community as well her guests.She is also a pioneer in sustainability practices, including her recent adoption of oil from Spotlight Foods, headquartered not far away in Alameda, Calif., that is derived from algae.Pirie recently discussed this new oil as well as her approach to running her restaurant and her plans for the future.

Julia Zhu is the managing partner for the United States of Grandma's Home, a chain with more than 200 locations in 60 cities in China, and with its first U.S. location opening soon in New York City's Flatiron neighborhood.Zhu is the daughter of one of the founder's of the chain and she's heading up the opening.She was born in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province in China and a city whose cuisine hasn't been seen much in the United States. Zhu moved to the U.S. at the age of 15 and said she's looking forward to showcasing the food that she grew up eating and that is hard to find here.Neither Hangzhou nor its cuisine are well known in the United States, but it is an ancient and beloved city, known for its scenic West Lake and general beauty. In fact, there's a Chinese saying: “The sky has heaven, the earth has Suzhou and Hangzhou,” Suzhou being another ancient city known for its gardens the next province up in Jiangsu.Marco Polo reportedly said that Hangzhou was the finest city in the world.Zhu discussed the cuisine of her hometown and her plans for the New York City restaurant.

Ameneh Marhaba is doing her part to spread the love of West African food in Detroit.Born in the West African country of Liberia, she grew up in that country, where her mother is form, as well as Lebanon, her father's home country, before she, her dad, and siblings moved to Detroit when she was around 15.Having always loved the food she grew up on, she wanted to share it with others in her new home. She thought of launching a food truck but soon learned that she was priced out of such a venture, so instead she started going to bars, offering to cook and sell items like jollof rice, fried plantains, and spiced meat skewers.It turns out that the bars were receptive to the idea.“Most of them were really nice about it,” she said.So in 2016 she started doing pop-ups at those bars under the name Little Liberia. Over time, her efforts grew into catering gigs and one-off seated dinners.Now, with the help of Hatch Detroit by TechTown, which awarded her $100,000 in a competition with some 350 other small business, Marhaba is getting ready to open Little Liberia as a brick-and-mortar restaurant.She recently discussed her journey and her plans for the restaurant.

Johnny Spero has been cooking for pretty much his whole life, and he has been running his own restaurants since he opened Reverie in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown in 2018. The intimate fine-dining restaurant took its lumps over the course of the pandemic, but it was done in by a fire in August of 2022, from which nothing but memories was salvaged.Spero already had established himself as a big-name chef: When he was executive chef of José Andrés's Minibar in D.C., Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema had given the restaurant a four-star review and the local eater.com declared him “Chef of the Year.” He also competed in the Netflix show, The Final Table.Before the fire, Reverie had been granted a Michelin star.He also had another restaurant, the more casual Bar Spero inspired by the time he spent in Spain's Basque country, including a stage at the much lauded Mugaritz. But as he tried to pick up the pieces from the fire, and planned to reopen Reverie, Spero took the time to travel the world, doing collaborative pop-ups and continuing to learn how operators from around the world ran their own restaurants, sourced their food, and worked to make their own corners of globe a better place.Reverie is about to reopen — its debut is slated for late February — and Spero recently discussed what he has learned since the fire, and what his plans are for the future.Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@informa.com

Lane Li is the chef and owner of Noodle Lane, which opened earlier this year in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Park Slope. Li was born in China but her family immigrated to New York City, where they already had relatives, when she was a child. She worked in finance for many years before her love for food led her to set up a stand at the weekly open-air food festival Smorgasburg. Her dan dan noodles in particular were a big success, and she decided to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant near her home.It will be a surprise to no one in the industry that opening Noodle Lane was a lot harder than Li expected, but she persevered and is now serving dumplings (including soup dumplings because they're her son's favorite), noodles, stir-fried dishes, stews and more for lunch and dinner, with brunch coming soon.Li recently shared her experience of opening her first restaurant, the challenges she faced, and advice for other new restaurateurs.

Carl Sobocinski has been spending the past 25 years or so creating popular restaurants in Greenville, S.C., and in the process revitalizing the center of that city and enabling his employees to develop great careers.In fact, he has helped a number of his team members to stop working for him and work for themselves instead. Sobocinski has been spinning off his restaurants to employees in a number of deals involving both sweat equity and financial investment, creating a new set of entrepreneurs for this city that's about midway between Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta.One of those entrepreneurs is Michael Minelli, a New Jersey native who fell in love with Greenville, started working for Sobocinski and is now the owner of Passerelle.Sobocinski is also a northerner, born in Boston and raised in New Hampshire. He moved to South Carolina to study architecture at Clemson University, worked in restaurants and bars while studying and, as many people do, fell in love with the hospitality industry.Sobocinski and Minelli recently discussed their respective careers and their plans for the future.

Paramjeet Bombra is the head chef of Gulaabo, a new restaurant in New York City focusing on the cuisine of Punjab in northwestern India and eastern Pakistan.Bombra is a native of Punjab and had cooked all over India before arriving in New York and working at modern Indian gastropub Baar Baar, whose owners opened Gulaabo as a vehicle for the chef to highlight the cuisine of his native state.Since opening the restaurant this summer, Bombra has been thrilling guests with items such as Amritsari Kulcha — a long and dramatically presented flatbread — goat curry made using his grandmother's recipe, and a traditional dessert of cottage cheese balls that he tops with saffron ice cream.Among other aspects of Punjabi culture that Gulaabo celebrates is its hunting tradition, which is reflected in the menu's fried quail kebab and its rabbit curry.Bombra discussed his strategy for developing the menu and his plans for the future.

Sarah Stegner has been the chef and co-owner of Prairie Grass Cafe in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Ill., since she opened it in 2004. From there she has overseen a community of team members, local suppliers, and customers that she says are essential to the success of the restaurant as well as of those around her.She's a founding member of a number of area organizations that foster sustainable food production, including Green City Market, of which she's also past president, and The Abundance Setting, which supports working women and mothers in foodservice. More recently, she was a co-founder of Chicago Chefs Cook, which has raised more than $1 million since its founding in 2022 through culinary events, some of which has been donated to José Andrés's World Central Kitchen.She's also an advisor to chef Sebastian White of The Evolved Network, which supports farming and culinary education for underprivileged kids in the area.Stegner was already an industry veteran when she opened her own restaurant, having been chef of The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Chicago, for 21 years.Stegner recently discussed the importance of community in her work, and how she continues to nurture those around her, including the growing number of people who are sensorily sensitive.

Billy Dec is a longtime restaurateur and entrepreneur, mostly in Chicago, where his Rockit Ranch Productions operated a number of concepts, but now he is expanding to new markets and focusing, as much as Dec ever focuses, on Sunda New Asian, a festive restaurant that celebrates his Filipino heritage.He also has a nightclub called The Underground, an advertising agency called COACT, and the human resources firm HR Pro.Dec is actually a lawyer by training, something he says certainly doesn't hurt when it comes to running restaurants, and he has long been involved in raising the profile of Asian Americans. He was on President Obama's White House Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, as well as the White House Bullying Prevention Task Force.He also is an on-camera personality, having been a frequent guest on morning shows and appearing in a variety of films and television programs, and he just released a documentary, Food Roots, that debuted in September at the Nashville Film Festival.Dec recently discussed that film, his heritage, his adjustments during the pandemic, his new Sunda location in Tampa, and his plans for the future.

Richard Sandoval has spent the past couple of decades running restaurants and educating the world about Mexican cuisine, and more recently about other Latin American cuisines as well.He was born in Mexico and comes from a family of restaurateurs. Upon his arrival in the United States he found the food that was billed as Mexican didn't resemble what he grew up on at all, and he resolved to change that.He studied at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and like many such graduates in the early 1990s he started cooking French food. His first restaurant, Savann in New York City, was indeed French, as was his second one, Savann Est, also in New York.But in 1997 he opened Maya, and that became the seed of his global empire, Richard Sandoval Hospitality, that now operates or licenses some 60 restaurants around the world. In fact, his company says it introduced Latin cuisine to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Serbia.Sandoval, now a cookbook author and TV personality as well as a restaurateur, has launched a mentorship program to help cultivate young talent, and he recently discussed that while reflecting on his decades in hospitality.

Sam Fore recently opened her first restaurant, but she has been on the professional food scene for years.Of Sri Lankan heritage but born and raised in Lexington, Ky., Fore got her start doing pop-ups at festivals in 2016. The food was a mashup of the spice palette of Sri Lanka with the foods of the South. Her ribs drew the locals, then her fried chicken started to attract crowds, and her tomato pie became something of a viral sensation. Soon she was working as a guest chef at high-end restaurants across the country. She demonstrated her techniques at prestigious food events such as the Culinary Institute of America's Worlds of Flavor conference, and was even a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for best chef in the Southeast — possibly the first time that honor was given to a chef without a restaurant.But now she does have a restaurant. Tuk Tuk Snack Shop opened in Lexington last week, and shortly before opening she discussed her journey and what she has learned along the way.

Michael Schlow started working in restaurants at age 14 and never looked back. Yes, he went to college and culinary school, and sometimes worked in non-foodservice jobs for extra money, but the native of Brooklyn, N.Y., has been in kitchens of many different types for decades.He gained fame and awards with his fine-dining restaurant Radius in Boston, which closed in 2013, and since has been working on a variety of other projects across the country, especially in New England and the Washington, D.C., area.That empire has shrunk since the pandemic started, as many have, and Schlow and his team currently operate nine restaurants, including five Alta Strada locations, serving fairly traditional Italian food in a casual setting, along with Michael Schlow's at the Time Out Market in Boston, Sauce Burgers at Hub Hall in Boston, and Nama Sushi Bar and Nama Ko in D.C.Schlow, like many multi-concept operators is working with more hotels these days, leveraging his operational experience with their infrastructure.Schlow is the author of the cookbook “It's About Time, Great Recipes for Everyday Life,” and has won multiple awards including being named Best Chef in the Northeast by the James Beard Foundation in 2000.The chef and restaurateur recently discussed his current and future projects as well as how his priorities have shifted in recent years.

Maya-Camille Broussard is the chef and owner of Justice of the Pies, a bakery concept specializing in sweet and savory pies that she started operating out of satellite kitchens in Chicago in 2014. It's an LC3, or a low-profit limited liability company, which has a primary mission of providing social benefits, but unlike non-profit organizations, is allowed to distribute profits.Broussard's mission is to positively affect the lives of people in the underserved communities where she operates through education in creativity, including baking, as well as nutrition. She also operates the non-profit Broussard Justice Foundation focused on food- and health-related issues.She opened her first brick-and-mortar bakery, on Chicago's South Side in her mother's former dentist's office, in June.Broussard also is the star of the Netflix series Bake Squad, and her cookbook, Justice of the Pies, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.The baker, who is in New York City as a visiting fellow at the James Beard Foundation, recently discussed her mission and the importance of showing young people how to achieve their own dreams.

Philippe Massoud, the chef and owner of Ilili restaurant, with one location in New York City celebrating its 15th year and a newer one in Washington, D.C., that opened in 2021.He comes from a family of restaurateurs in Lebanon, who sent him to the United States to stay with relatives. Then the political situation deteriorated at home and he found himself an unwitting immigrant, enrolled in high school in the suburban New York county of Westchester, where he played football, and found the local Middle Eastern food to be lacking.Eventually he used his family's recipes and techniques to open Ilili to critical acclaim.Massoud has maintained his connections with Lebanon, visiting his mother once or twice a year (his father was executed during the unrest), and carrying at Ilili what he says is the largest selection of Lebanese wines in the United States.Massoud recently discussed his restaurants and what makes his native country's food distinct from other cuisines in the Middle East.

Sam Bakhshandehpour is the president and CEO of the José Andrés Group, formerly ThinkFoodGroup, based in Washington, D.C.He joined the company in early 2020 from The Silverstone Companies, a hospitality group that opened Andrés' first restaurant outside of D.C., Bazaar by José Andrés.Prior to that he was president and CEO of another hotel company, SBE Entertainment, and before that he worked in investment banking, heading up J.P. Mogran Securities' casino investment practice, among other things.His move to his current job comes at a time when more restaurant companies are partnering with hotels, often to benefit from those hotels' management infrastructure, among other assets. However, Bakhshandehpour said Andrés' group already has those abilities, but there are other reasons for hotels and restaurants to work together, which is why that is a key strategy of his company, including the upcoming opening of the latest Bazaar, at The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad, in early August.Bakhshandehpour recently discussed those benefits as well as Andrés' media company, which he also oversees.

Shawn McClain has been running restaurants for decades, having got his start in Chicago, where he lived for 20 years, first studying at Kendall College and then building a name for himself as a talented and innovative chef.He ran the kitchen of Trio in Evanston, Ill., before Grant Achatz took that over and began his own rise to fame. Then McClain opened Spring to critical acclaim in 2001, followed by Green Zebra, which was one of the country's first fine dining vegetarian restaurants.Now he spends his time between Detroit, the hometown of his wife Holly, and Las Vegas. The couple has been back in Motor City for the past 12 years and currently operates Highlands, a fine-dining restaurant at the top of General Motors' global headquarters, where he has reworked the typical approach to running restaurants with spectacular views by actually offering great food and service there.Holly McClain is heading up Olin, a sort of American brasserie in downtown Detroit that the couple built and opened during lockdown.McClain's Libertine Social, now in its seventh year of operations, is at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas and is having its best year on record. He opened Balla Italian Soul last year and is working on opening his first Las Vegas concept that's not on the Strip, a wine bar and retail shop called Wineaux.The couple recently shared their approaches to running their restaurants and discussed the business climates in the two cities where they operate.

Rob Rubba is the chef of Oyster Oyster in Washington, D.C., which, despite the name, is a mostly vegan restaurant. One of the ‘oyster's in the name stands for oyster mushrooms, and the other is for the actual sea creatures, which apart from being delicious are regenerative animals that help shore up the coastlines and riverbanks where they grow while also helping to purify the water. The single oyster dish on the menu, from a local producer, of course, is the only item that is not vegan.Sustainability and connection to the environment and his community are hallmarks of Rubba's approach to running his business, which uses all sorts of local and seasonal ingredients while managing food waste and also looking after the welfare of his employees.His food is no joke either. He was named a Best New Chef by Food & Wine Magazine last year, and this year he won the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Chef in the country. Rubba recently discussed his restaurant, his cooking, and his priorities.

David Burke has been wowing his customers and fellow chefs for decades. He was already executive chef of the legendary River Café in Brooklyn, N.Y. at the age of 26, and while he was there got a three-star review in The New York Times. He went on to head up the kitchens of the Smith & Wollensky restaurant group, including Park Avenue Café, Maloney & Porcelli, Cité, the Post House, and others, and became an expert at steak in the process. He went on to open critically acclaimed Davidburke & Donatella among other restaurants in New York City.These days he spends most of his time running restaurants in his home state of New Jersey, but he still has one restaurant in New York City, David Burke Tavern, and he's planning on opening another one, a modern brasserie called 277 Park Avenue, later this year. He also recently started running the Port City Club in Cornelius, N.C.Burke is credited with having invented many dishes, including the swordfish chop and cake pops. He has treated guests to candles made of beef tallow that they could pour over their beef, and served food on blocks of pink Himalayan salt before anyone else was doing that. He also created an aging room for beef lined with the salt.In April 2022 he purchased 89-year-old Dixie Lee Bakery and incorporated its products into his business. He also recently established the David Burke Scholarship at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, N.J., for which his annual donation of $10,000 pays the tuition for two students every year: one for a culinary arts major, and one for someone studying hospitality management. Burke recently discussed his approach to running restaurants, his perspective on where the industry is going, and food that he's excited about.

Ria Montes has been chef de cuisine of Estuary at the Conrad Washington, D.C., hotel for a little over a year now, and in celebration of Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, this Filipina American celebrated with her guests by laying out a traditional kamayan feast. Literally meaning “by hand,” this smörgåsbord is a customary celebration among family and friends.Montes was raised in a Filipino family in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, N.Y., and developed a love of cooking when preparing meals with that family.She attended the French Culinary Institute in New York City and began cooking in restaurants there, including Smith & Wollensky and Andaz. She later moved to D.C. to work as sous chef under Brad Deboy at Blue Duck Tavern, and then moved on to work for Opie Brooks at A Rake's Progress. That restaurant closed during lockdown and Montes worked at Albi, also. In D.C., and then rejoined Brooks at a new restaurant No Goodbyes, before joining the Conrad team.In this interview she discusses working with her senior sous chef Sean Tew, collaborating with other women chefs as well as sommeliers and farmers, and what she loves most about working in restaurants.

Bin Lu has been the executive chef of The Restaurant at Blue Rock in Washington, Va., about a two-hour drive from Washington, D.C., in the bucolic Virginia countryside, since it opened in October of 2021. A year-and-a-half in he continues to delight guests with a constantly evolving prix-fixe menu.Lu was born in Shanghai, China, but immigrated to the United States when he was 2 or 3 years old. He was drawn to cooking in college, where he didn't particularly care for the food that was available on campus and figured he could do better on his own. However, he didn't know anything about cooking, and this was long before any recipe or technique could be looked up online. But he did research and got the hang of it and realized that he was spending a lot more time learning to cook than paying attention to school. So upon graduation he started working at restaurants, including CityZen in D.C., under executive chef Eric Ziebold, and at Pineapple and Pearls, also in D.C., where he worked his way up the ranks and ended up as executive chef.He recently shared his approach to cooking and his experimentation in bringing out different flavors in his dishes.

Chef and restaurateur Michael Mina has long made education of his staff a priority.Born in Cairo, Egypt, and raised in Ellensburg, Wash., Mina studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., while staging under Charlie Palmer at Aureole in New York City. He then partnered with chef George Morrone to open Aqua restaurant in San Francisco in 1991, where he personally trained the kitchen staff.He became executive chef Aqua in 1993 and the accolades started rolling in, including being named Rising Star Chef of the Year in 1997 and Best Chef in California in 2002 by the James Beard Foundation.Then in 2003, with a decade of experience running restaurants, he founded the Mina Group, which primarily partners with different hotel groups to open restaurants on their properties, a strategy that allows Mina to focus on running the restaurants while the hotels focus on infrastructure, accounting and other issues. He now operates 38 restaurants under that model.During that period he has focused on teaching as well as learning from his staff. He took the time with the onset of the pandemic to formalize that, and now the group has Mina-versity, a collection of online learning tools, including a database of some 40,000 recipes, that is frequently updated.Mina recently discussed Mina-versity and his approach to running restaurants.

Chris Morgan has spent most of his career in fine-dining restaurants, including in San Francisco at Zuni Café under the late Judy Rodgers and under Charles Phan at the Slanted Door.But as grateful as he is for the training that he got at high-end restaurants, he feels more at home preparing food that most people would like to eat every day, and he eventually returned home to the Washington, D.C., area to do that.He currently operates Lebanese kebab shop Yasmine at Union Market in D.C., as well as Pizza Serata, which opened at late January in partnership with Ben Farahani. They are planning on opening a Persian restaurant, Joon, which will also operate as a ghost kitchen for Yasmine and Pizza Serata.“Serata” is Italian for “evening” as well as “party,” sort of like the French word soirée, and it exemplifies the restaurant, which offers traditional pies as well as more creative ones, like the pizza inspired by the sandwich of roast pork, broccoli raab, and sharp provolone that is a favorite in Philadelphia, and the one with mortadella over pistachio pesto.It's all on a focaccia-like sourdough crust made with wheat from Wade's Mill in Raphine, Va.On top of that, Morgan, who has experienced the abusiveness of some chefs that until recently was very much the norm in professional kitchens, has developed his own gentle but demanding management style that allows him to retain his employees, foster their talent, and make better food.

Nick Livanos is the head of the Livanos Restaurant Group, a multi-generational family business that operates Oceana and Molyvos restaurants in New York City, as well as Moderne Barn and City Limits, in the suburbs of Armonk and White Plains, N.Y., respectively.The restaurant group was started in 1960 by his father John Livanos, who had immigrated from Greece three years earlier and started washing dishes in his uncle's restaurant.Nick Livanos grew up working in the family restaurants and got a degree in management from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., and later attended The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.Both Oceana, a seafood restaurant, and Molyvos, which serves high-end Greek cuisine accompanied by an all-Greek wine list, are in Midtown Manhattan, which was hit hard early in the pandemic when offices were closed. Those restaurants are up and running again, although Molyvos recently relocated to a smaller location, which Livanos said suits the new restaurant climate in Midtown.He recently discussed his restaurants and the changing dining scene.

Aaron Taylor is the corporate chef of Atlas Restaurant Group, a Baltimore-based company with 27 restaurants, mostly in its hometown but also in Washington, D.C., and Houston. It's also about to enter Philadelphia with its fourth location of Loch Bar, which Taylor calls a “seafood parlor” with a focus on whiskey and oysters.It's an 11-year-old company that brothers Alex and Eric Smith started with Ouzo Bay Greek Kouzina. Now the group also has Japanese restaurants, a French steakhouse, an Italian trattoria, a speakeasy, a cigar lounge, an array of seafood concepts, and more to come. All of them have some kind of entertainment, such as live music, which Taylor said is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Atlas restaurants.The group also has a farm outside of Baltimore that provides some of the produce for its restaurants.Taylor has been with the group for four years, after spending 2.5 years at restaurants in Chicago, and prior to that he was corporate chef of steakhouse chain STK for nearly eight years.Apart from overseeing 19 chefs, Taylor also spends his time with the local public schools, encouraging young people to pursue careers in hospitality.Taylor discussed the dynamics of the Baltimore market, his involvement in the community, and his plans for the group's future.

Yia Vang is the chef and owner of Union Hmong Kitchen, a restaurant in the Graze Food Hall in Minneapolis’s North Loop, and he’s about to open Vinai in the center of the city. Vang was born in Thailand as a Hmong refugee and grew up in the Twin Cities, which has the largest Hmong population outside of Southeast Asia. The Hmong are traditionally mountain-dwelling people in mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Laos, and many of them supported the United States during the Vietnam War, which meant that as the U.S. withdrew, it left many Hmong in the lurch, so they migrated to the United States in the 1970s. At Union Hmong Kitchen, Yang tells that story through the food. He said his people adapted to their new communities, and so did the food, incorporating local ingredients as well as foodways. That means Minneapolis Hmong food is different from the Hmong food of Sacramento, Calif., or Boca Raton, Fla. “But at the end … what connects is is our history, our story. And it’s a story of pain, suffering that really connects us together,” he said. Vang is also a TV personality, having appeared on morning shows and cooking competitions, and he also was the host of the Food Network’s “Stoked” as well as “Feral” on the Outdoors Channel, in which he captures and cooks invasive species. Vang recently discussed his experiences, his approach to incorporating broader Minnesota cooking traditions into his own food, what he calls “Hmong sofrito,” and much more.

Tonii Hicks grew up in north Philadelphia with her two sisters and parents who had a water ice stand — Philadelphia’s version of Italian ice — that also sold pretzels, fish platters, chicken sandwiches and other straightforward food. She hadn’t planned on going into food as a career until she ended up at the Swenson Arts & Tech High School, which has vocational training including separate programs in baking and pastry as well as culinary. She specialized in baking and pastry, but also made friends with the culinary arts teacher who encouraged her to join the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, or C-CAP. Through that she got a scholarship to Drexel University where she studied food science. Now with 10 years of cooking experience under her belt, having started at age 14, Hicks is working on plotting her own course in the restaurant world. After doing some pop-ups last year, and also being a fellow at the James Beard Foundation, which has a new program that fosters young chefs such as Hicks, she is about to spend a month with Philadelphia-based chef and restaurateur José Garces at his restaurant Volvér. She’s also working to raise funds for a commissary kitchen in Philadelphia out of which she can do more catering and private chef work, as well as educate people in her community about cooking and eating more healthfully. She also educates young people about food and cooking through the Free Library of Philadelphia. In early December she shared her vision for the future, including teaching people how to “glow from the inside out.”

Adijatu Jalloh runs her own catering company in New York City, is the head grill chef at Cut by Wolfgang Puck and is one of the chefs of Resident which hosts pop-up events showcasing aspiring chefs in the city. And she’s only 22 years old. Jalloh has been cooking ever since she was a little girl in the West African country of Guinea, where she prepared her father’s meals with her stepmother and the other women in the family. She joined her mother in New York City in 2008, at the age of 8, and in middle school she got connected with the Careers through Culinary Arts Program, better known as C-CAP, which nurtures, mentors, and grants scholarships to culinary students who might not otherwise be able to launch their careers. She said cooking kept her out of trouble. “It made me love going to school and look forward to something,” she said. On top of that, she needed good grades to be involved in the culinary programs, and that was motivation enough for her to focus on her studies as well. She started cooking in restaurants at age 15, at Popeyes, and soon moved on to full-service restaurants — first The Copper Still, then Pilot, a seafood restaurant on a boat docked in Brooklyn headed by chef Kerry Heffernan, and then, while still in high school she started cooking at Nobu 57. In the meantime, she was selling her own Buffalo wings, cooked out of her house, to classmates. “That didn’t work out very well. I was losing money because I didn’t know about food cost,” she said. She moved on to work at Cut by Wolfgang Puck, where she is now head grill chef, while still also running her catering company and working with Resident. Jalloh recently shared her career path and her strategies for creating the food of her childhood in a modern Western context.

Jahqyad Austin is the executive pastry chef and owner of Jahqyad’s Twist, a mail-order cookie bakery based in New York City. Although in his early 20s, Austin has been cooking for years, starting by selling cupcakes in grade school and then studying culinary arts at the Food & Finance High School in New York. He also bot involved with the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, or C-CAP, which provides scholarships to culinary schools as well as ongoing mentorship (probably the bests known C-CAP alum is former Top Chef competitor Amar Santana). Austin graduated from The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in 2020 and since then cooked at Café Boulud, Eleven Madison Park, and other fine-dining restaurants in New York. Recently he was one of the early participants of the James Beard Foundation’s new month-long “Beard House Fellows” program through which he developed a meal kit with catering company Great Performances. He and other fellows also cooked a dinner at the Beard House last autumn. Austin, who is also a visual artist, recently discussed his experiences and traced his course to becoming an up-and-coming pastry chef.

Meghan Lee has been in the restaurant business since she was a teenager, working up and down the East Coast from Philadelphia to Nantucket until she opened her own restaurant, Heirloom, a seasonal fine-dining restaurant in a Victorian house bult in 1899, in the beach resort town of Lewes, Del., in 2015. In July of 2021 she and her executive chef of five years, Matthew Kern, parted ways. “It was just kind of the right timing for both of us,” she said, “[but] it was a somewhat abrupt departure.” Rather than replace him, she sat down with her seven cooks and made it a communal kitchen. “We’ve been crushing it ever since,” Lee said. The restaurant already was doing well, and had achieved critical acclaim — Kern was a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation Restaurant & Chef Award for Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic in 2019 and 2020 — and Lee said Heirloom continues to flourish, and five of those seven cooks are still running the kitchen with the oversight of Lee, who also manages the restaurant’s beverage program. Lee recently discussed her approach to running the restaurant and her strategies for building such an enthusiastic back-of-the-house team.

Chef Gavin Kaysen is the founder of Soigné Hospitality Group in Minneapolis, which operates Spoon & Stable, Demi, Mara, and Socca Café restaurants in that city as well as three Bellecour Bakery locations. He also runs two catering companies. Spoon Thief Catering, named for the award-winning chef’s penchant for collecting silverware, is available for anyone to hire. KZ Provisioning caters to athletes, specifically the professional hockey players of the Minnesota Wild and the men and women basketball players of the Timberwolves and the Lynx. Kaysen is also a TV chef, having competed on The Next Iron Chef, Iron Chef, and Chopped All Stars. He has been a judge on Top Chef and was culinary producer of the reboot of Iron Chef on Netflix. He has won two James Beard Foundation awards, for Rising Star Chef in 2008 when he was executive chef of Café Boulud in New York City, and Best Chef: Midwest in 2018 after he relocated to his hometown. He also represented the United States in the biennial Bocuse d’Or competition in Lyon, France, in 2007, and continues to mentor American competitors for that event. The chef recently self-published a cookbook, At Home by Gavin Kaysen, which is currently being reprinted because the first edition sold out. Kaysen discussed his experiences with all of that and shared his plans for the winter.

Gozu is a modern American restaurant in San Francisco with the unique approach of including some type of premium Japanese wagyu beef in every single dish. That could include the meat itself, the fat that is made into a form of garum — the ancient Roman version of fish sauce — and everything in between. Most customers order the restaurant’s tasting menu and one of four pairings: Wine, sake, whiskey, or tea. The person in charge of those pairings, and all other alcohol served at the restaurant and its adjoining whiskey room, is beverage director Jordan Abraham. Abraham, who was beverage director of Atelier Crenn, also in San Francisco, between 2018 and 2020, joined Gozu in March of 2021, when it reopened. Gozu actually closed before the pandemic started due to a fire on New Year’s Eve of 2019, and when it reopened Jordan set to work with his pairings, the most popular of which is whiskey. Abraham recently discussed his approach to selecting the whiskeys for each course, as well as the complexities of properly brewing a great cup of tea.

You might have seen Selena Tan in the hit 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, in which she played Alix, one of the friends of the male romantic lead’s mother, but she recently visited New York City to promote the opening of Daisy’s Dream NYC, an offshoot of Daisy’s Dream Kitchen, which her mother Daisy opened 12 years ago at the age of 60 in a hawker stall in Singapore. Daisy’s Dream features Peranakan cuisine, which is the food of the Straits Chinese — named for the Straits of Malacca that separates the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra — who moved to the region mostly in the 19th century. Most of those immigrants were male, and they married local Malays, creating a hybrid culture reflecting the traditions of southeastern China and the foodways of the land where they settled with its heady fermented pastes, fresh spices and herbs, and bountiful seafood. Tan was raised on that food, as was her younger brother Roy, who is the chef at the New York City restaurant, which is at the new Urban Hawker Food Court in Midtown Manhattan. That space was conceived of by the late Anthony Bourdain and Singaporean food reporter and entertainer K. F. Seetoh, who recruited the restaurants that have now opened there. Although Tan is best known in the United States for her role in Crazy Rich Asians, she has been acting, directing, and producing for decades, including performing in the cabaret trio Dim Sum Dollies. She is an ambassador for Pink Dot, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Singapore. Tan recently discussed her mother’s restaurant and Singaporean food culture, as well as her upcoming role in Shotgun Wedding, a film starring Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel slated to be released in January 2023.

Hollis Silverman played an instrumental role in expanding José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup. As its chief operating officer she oversaw the group’s food & beverage, service and human resources teams as it tripled in size from a small collection of restaurants to a national empire. Now she’s running her own company, Eastern Point Collective, which at the moment is a small collection of foodservice venues, all in a row in Washington, D.C.’s, Capitol Hill. The Duck & the Peach is a New American seasonal restaurant, Collina serves Italian food, and The Wells is a cocktail bar. Hollis opened the first of those restaurants, The Duck & the Peach, in 2021, so naturally she designed it to fit the realities of the pandemic era. So there are efficiencies, such as a single kitchen for all three concepts, and also an increased awareness of how to treat employees, which means Eastern Point Collective adds a 22% service charge to all checks instead of anticipating tips, allowing more equitable pay between front- and back-of-house, but also freeing servers from the indignities they often endure due to their dependence on customers’ goodwill for their income. She also offers medical insurance for hourly team members after 90 days of employment and insists on having a work environment free of the harassment and substance abuse that remain endemic in the industry. Silverman recently discussed her restaurants and her approach to doing business.

Jason Asher is the founding partner of hospitality and cocktail entertainment company Barter & Shake, which operates Century Grand, a building with three cocktail lounges in Phoenix, each of which Asher calls “immersive concepts” with elaborate fictional back-stories that are told in their 50-60-page cocktail menus. The Grey Hen RX is decked out as an apothecary, and is also the building's transportation hub, from which guests can take a train to another cocktail bar, Platform 18, or they can take a boat to the third bar, Undertow, which Asher opened in 2016 at a different location and then brought it to Century Grand in 2019. The cocktails are elaborate, to say the least. Asher and his team develop them using two encyclopedic food books as source material: The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg and Taste Buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food, Wine and Flavor by François Chartier. To make it all more complex, Asher changes the themes of each cocktail bar each year, selecting three destinations on which to base them, traveling to them, adding to the venues' interwoven story lines and developing 40 cocktails each for Undertow and Platform 18 and 30 for The Grey Hen RX. Asher recently shared his perspective on flavor combinations and shared his process for cocktail development.

Rob Connoley is the chef and owner of Bulrush, a restaurant in St. Louis that seeks to put the traditional cooking and foodways of the Ozark region — northern Arkansas, southern Missouri and parts of Kansas and Oklahoma — into a fine-dining restaurant context. That has meant a lot of research into family journals and letters from the 19th century, as well as extensive work with the Osage community and local Black communities, a lot of experimentation in Bulrush’s kitchen, and a great deal of foraging. But Connoley has other missions as well. Bulrush is a zero-waste restaurant, and so the chef and his team have developed or borrowed processes for things like fermenting stems and turning them into sauces or condiments. He also has made it part of his business model to pay all of his staff a living wage, and to provide them with health insurance and other perks. There are social justice aspects to Connoley’s approach to running his business, including amplifying the voices of native, Black and other communities who are often left out of our national culinary conversation as well as other conversations. Connoley recently discussed his perspective and approach with Restaurant Hospitality.

Ji Hye Kim arrived in New Jersey from South Korea at the age of 13 and found her way to Ann Arbor, Mich., the way many people do, as a student. She made a home for herself there, but although there were already good Korean restaurants in the college town, she missed her mother’s cooking. So she started to cook her own food and eventually opened a restaurant, which has won local accolades as well as a semifinalist nod from the James Beard Foundation, and Kim herself was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s “Best New Chefs” in 2021. Though inspired by her mother’s cooking, Kim soon came to understand that the food she was raised on was mostly limited to Gyeonggi province, which is Seoul and surrounding areas. So she began to study the food of other Korean regions, getting her relatives in South Korea to send cookbooks, some dating back to the 14th Century, exploring Korean food from a medicinal perspective, a farmer’s perspective, from the perspective of the aristocracy and more. That and the produce of Michigan are her main inspirations at her restaurant, which, although it’s Korean, has adapted to local service styles. For example banchan, an array of cold or room-temperature side dishes that accompany a traditional Korean meal, must be ordered separately, because Kim despaired to see them wasted when her guests didn’t eat them. Kim recently discussed her approach to running the restaurant as well as her plans for Chuseok, the mid-autumn harvest festival that is on Sept. 10 this year.

Ricky Moore is the chef and owner of Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, N.C., which specializes in a rotating line of mostly local and seasonal fish and shellfish, plus his own interpretations of specialties from eastern North Carolina. The food is all re-envisioned through the prism of his own culinary experience, which includes growing up as an Army brat in Germany, traveling the world as an army cook when he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the service himself, attending The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and working in some of the world’s greatest restaurants. He also competed on Iron Chef America in 2007. Moore is himself a North Carolina native, from the coastal town of New Bern, and the food at Saltbox reflects that as well with dishes such as hush-honeys — a cross between Southern hushpuppies and Italian zeppoli — and crab & grits, which he sees as his answer to South Carolina’s shrimp & grits. Saltbox was originally the size of a line cook’s workstation — 205 square feet total — but he opened a new, larger location in 2017 and eventually closed the original space early in the pandemic. This year he won the James Beard Foundation Restaurant & Chef Award for Best Chef in the Southeast. He recently discussed his approach to cooking, his reasoning behind operating Saltbox the way he does and his plans for the future.

“It’s very easy to find something that’s both delicious and that you’re going to feal really good eating,” said Seamus Mullen, who is currently the culinary director of the Rosewood Sand Hill resort in Menlo Park, Calif. Responsible for overseeing that property’s culinary outlets, developing recipes, training and so on, Mullen also has a broader mission to help people live better lives by embracing the joy of eating well. The chef first rose to prominence in 2006 as chef of Boqueria, a Spanish tapas-focused restaurant in New York City. He went on to open his own restaurants, Tertulia in 2011, followed by El Colmado in 2013, both also in New York, while also working the celebrity chef circuit, appearing on the Food Network’s “Next Iron Chef,” “Chopped” and “Beat Bobby Flay” as well as the morning new shows etc. Simultaneously, he was battling rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease he was diagnosed with in 2007, and which he has fought using the weapons of diet, exercise and lifestyle changes. For years Mullen has, in his own words, been beating the drum of eating delicious food that makes you feel good, trying to free people from their “antagonistic relationship” with what they eat. That doesn’t just mean limiting eating things that we all know are bad for us, but taking the time to sit down and really enjoy our meals, and also devoting time to taking care of ourselves. Mullen recently shared advice for how chefs and other people working in foodservice, can adjust some of their habits and live better lives.

Andy Lansing has worked at Levy Restaurants for the past 34 years, and has been CEO since 2004. He came about that role via the unusual route of being hired as the company’s general counsel. Being a naturally curious person, he poked his head around different aspects of the business and learned so much about the company’s operations that he became chief operating officer in 1995 after spending four years as its executive vice president. Levy is now a far-reaching company, as well as a division of the Compass Group, that operates more than 200 venues, including restaurants, but also many stadiums and other event spaces, and it also provides the foodservice at music festivals and similar celebrations. The company is also doing some celebrating of its own with the 20th anniversary of Jake Melnick’s Corner Tap, an everybody-knows-your-name type of tavern in Chicago. Lansing discussed that milestone, as well as the keys to its success, including understanding, as he puts it, that ‘It’s more exciting to eat in a bar than drink in a restaurant.” He also shares tips on how to hire and retain employees and why running restaurants makes Levy so successful at running the foodservice in stadiums.

In early April, Robert Ash joined the Encore Boston Harbor Hotel as executive director of culinary operations. That means he oversees the Wynn Resort property’s banquets, catering and in-room dining as well as its 11 restaurants (including a Shake Shack and possibly the only 21-and-over Dunkin, which is located on the casino floor) and 4 bars and lounges. Ash got his start cooking “out of necessity,” as he said, making dinner for himself and his brother because his parents weren’t around much. He started washing dishes at an Italian trattoria in Buffalo, N.Y., and by the time he was 16 he was a sous chef there. Noticing that a lot of chefs were lacking in pastry skills, he got a second job at a local country club to learn pastry and in the late 1990s got a job in Las Vegas at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in the pastry kitchen of legendary chef Jean-Louis Palladin. He rose to the rank of pastry chef and took those skills to Chicago, and before long switched back to savory, cooking for N9ne restaurant, a steakhouse concept that he helped to expand to Las Vegas and Dallas. Back in Chicago he started working for the Japanese-Peruvian-Brazilian concept Sushi Samba, eventually becoming assistant corporate chef as it expanded. His next stop was back to Las Vegas, working for Wynn for the first time, and then moved to Milwaukee for his first job as head of all culinary operations at a hotel at the InterContinental there. He went on to oversee 21 Omni hotels as a regional executive chef, then spent four years at Fairmont hotels in Canada before landing in Boston at the Encore. He recently discussed what he has learned over the years, especially about training and supporting cooks, spotting talented and managing the labor and supply chain woes that are plaguing everyone these days.

If you don’t think of Oklahoma City as a prime culinary destination, Andrew Black would suggest that you think again. The chef and owner of Grey Sweater — a tasting menu-only restaurant where Black’s staff interviews guests as they take their reservations to plan out their meals — and the more casual Black Walnut, says he’s not the only restaurateur in the city to flex his culinary muscles for a group of well-heeled and well-traveled customers who, like Black, have come to call this city their home. Originally from Jamaica, Black got his start as a porter at The Boscobel Resort in that country, which eventually arranged for him to study abroad — to the United States where he got a degree in hotel management at Ohio State University. He then worked his way across the Caribbean and Europe and eventually ended up at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. He moved to Oklahoma City to work on the opening of The Skirvin Hotel in 2007 and has been there ever since. Black recently discussed his restaurants and why he believes in a great gastronomic future for his adopted home.

At the turn of the century, Rocco DiSpirito and Troy Guard were both executive chefs in New York City. DiSpirito was turning heads at the adventuresome Union Pacific, and Guard was cooking his interpretation of Roy Yamaguchi’s Asian-fusion cuisine at Roy’s restaurant at the World Financial Center. Their careers took different paths. DiSpirito went on to be a cookbook author and TV personality, among other ventures, and Guard built an empire of restaurants based in Denver that currently includes Guard and Grace, a steakhouse with locations in Denver and Houston, TAG Burger Bar, Big Wave Taco, a fast-casual concept called Bubu, a gastropub called FNG, a breakfast place called HashTAG and a five-unit Mexican concept, Los Chingones. Thanks in part to the machinations of entrepreneur James Park, currently the CEO of Korean wing concept WingWok in Denver and operating partner of the venture-capital Savory Fund, but also involved with projects with Guard and DiSpirito, the two chefs are collaborating on a couple of charity dinners in the Mile High City next week. On June 14 they will do a dinner at the RiNo location of Los Chingones, with proceeds going to We Don’t Waste, which works to reduce hunger and as well as food waste in Denver. And then on June 15 they’ll be at Guard & Grace to raise money for victims of the Marshall Fire that devastated Boulder County at the beginning of the year. The two chefs recently discussed their plans for the dinner, as well as DiSpirito’s upcoming book.

Amelie Kang is the co-founder of Málà Project, a 3-unit restaurant concept in New York City specializing in Sichuan dry pots, which are similar to what we think of as Mongolian barbecue here in the United States: The customer’s choice of raw ingredients quickly stir-fried together. The main difference is the Sichuan flavor profile called málà. Má is the Mandarin Chinese term for the numbing sensation that comes from Sichuan peppercorns, and là is the burning heat from chiles. The combination is vibrant taste explosion loved far beyond the borders of Sichuan, a large province in southwestern China. Indeed, Kang is from Tangshan, near Beijing in the northeast of the country, but Sichuan dry pot was the food that she most missed from home when she came to the United States to attend the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. With the help of investment from her parents among others, she opened her first MáLà Project in New York’s East Village in 2015. The restaurant quickly got attention from locals, and gradually got critical acclaim: Kang was named an Eater’s Young Gun in 2018 and a member of its “New Guard of New York” in 2020. That same year she and business partners Meng Ai, Yishu He and Evan Toretto Li were named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for food & drink. Málà Project now has three locations, with two more on the way. She recently shared her thoughts behind developing the restaurant, the inevitable adjustments she made during the pandemic, precautions taken as anti-Asian hostility surged, and her plans for the future.

Okan Kizilbayir has been the chef de cuisine of Salt at the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island in Florida for almost a year now, but he has been cooking with seafood for decades. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, from a family of cooks, he grew up on great fish and shellfish from the Mediterranean as well as the Black Sea. Not long after culinary school in Turkey he ended up getting hired at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C., and then went on to work at Blue at the Ritz-Carlton, where he came under the mentorship of Eric Ripert. After nine years on Grand Cayman, Kizilbayir ended up moving to the New York City area to work at Ripert’s flagship restaurant, Le Bernardin. Now he is using his knowledge and connections from there in his current job, as well as befriending new suppliers in the South. He recently discussed his approach to sourcing and preparing seafood, from caviar to sea bass, including cooking fish with beeswax. He also discussed Salt’s special Hook, Line & Supper meal, which includes a fishing expedition as well as dinner for $2,000 per couple.

Amarit Dulyapaibul is the managing partner of three concepts in Chicago that are part of the Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises empire: Three-unit Ramen-san, two-unit Sushi-san and the 11-week-old Omakase Room. Dulyapaibul grew up in restaurants, the child of immigrants from Thailand who ran a number of Thai dining establishments in downtown Chicago, including Star of Siam. “I grew up in the dining rooms [and] the kitchens,” he said. He went on to study architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans, pursuing the dream of many first-generation Americans and their parents to move up the economic ladder. But he missed the pace and energy of restaurants, and ended up falling in with LEYE. He said working for such a well-known and well-liked company helped soften the blow that he was continuing to work in restaurants. “I think there’s always that idea of [immigrant] parents wanting you to do better than they did, or not have to work as hard as they did … but if you’re in Chicago you know and respect the team that I’ve decided to play for,” he said. He recently discussed his path to restaurant management, the origins of Ramen-san and its spinoff concepts, and the joy of running the Omakase Room, a 10-seat tasting-menu-only restaurant with checks starting at $250 that is nonetheless a fun place to spend the evening. Additionally, he shared strategies for making takeout sushi delicious.

Kevin Tien, like many first-generation Americans, especially those with Asian backgrounds, was supposed to do something extremely professional, which is why he got a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in business intelligence and business analytics. But that took a while, and while he was doing it he was also working his way up the ranks of Tsunami, a Japanese restaurant with locations in the Louisiana communities of Lafayette, where he started his studies at the University of Louisiana before being displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and Baton Rouge where he finished. Upon graduation he got offers to do financial analysis as well as to start working at the Houston location of Uchi, Tyson Cole’s modern Japanese concept. He chose the latter. His career took him to Washington, D.C., and he eventually opened his own restaurant, Himitsu, where he was named to Food & Wine Magazine’s coveted list of the 10 “Best New Chefs” in 2018. In 2020, well into the pandemic, Tien opened Moon Rabbit at the InterContinental Washington D.C. hotel in the location formerly occupied by Kwame Onwuachi’s Kith/Kin. Tien recently discussed his journey, his cooking style and how Moon Rabbit reflects his Vietnamese heritage, his upbringing in Cajun country and his training in modern Japanese fine dining.

Jim Meehan might not love being a cocktail legend, but that’s what he is. The founder of Please Don’t Tell, better known as PDT, in New York City, and author of its cocktail book helped introduce Americans to a new sophistication in mixed drinks, with house-made syrups and tinctures and complex combinations graciously presented. Now he’s doing it with more factors in play at Takibi, a Japanese-influenced restaurant in Portland, Ore., owned by a Japanese lifestyle company, Snow Peak. Portland is almost certainly the American city most sensitive about cultural appropriation, and so Meehan must tread lightly as he develops drinks that reflect Japanese culture. But he has leeway, because Japanese cocktail culture was derived from American cocktail culture, although with added focus on great local and seasonal products, which is the hallmark of food in Japan. As luck would have it, it’s also an important aspect of Portland’s food & beverage scene. Meehan recently discussed how he is bringing all of that together at Takibi, as well as how the so-called “modern speakeasy” exemplified by PDT was never really that at all.

Caroline Bell co-founded Café Grumpy in 2005 in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Greenpoint, partly because she was an office worker who was having trouble finding a decent cup of coffee nearby. “I’m like, how hard can it be to make a good cup of coffee?” she said. One cup of coffee, or a decent pot of coffee, might not be that hard, but Bell soon found herself immersed in a world of roasting techniques and green coffee examination, managing supply chain issues and keeping employees happy. And she ended up being a pioneer, offering some of the first single-origin coffees in New York, continuously serving some of the best coffee in the city, and developing a robust retail business that has helped see the company through the pandemic. There are now 10 Café Grumpy locations with their signature frowning coffee bean logo, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as one location in Coral Gables, Fla, and another in the Whole Foods Market in Weehawken, N.J. Bell recently discussed her journey over coffee in the recently reopened Café Grumpy location in the Market Line, the underground section of the Essex Market food hall on New York City’s Lower East Side.

New York City native Justin Cucci has spent the past couple of decades in Denver, where he operates four restaurants — Root Down, Linger, Vital Root and El Five — and also has licensed a Root Down to the operators of Denver International Airport. He’s about to reopen his fifth restaurant, Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, an entertainment venue that shut down at the start of the pandemic. Cucci and his team have dubbed Ophelia’s a “gastro-brothel,” which of course it’s not really (many things in Denver are legal, but prostitution is not) because it’s in a historic building that once was a brothel and later a sex shop. Cucci likes to honor the heritage of the buildings where he opens restaurants — Root Down was a gas station and Linger was a mortuary — so at Ophelia’s he is creating a “sex-positive” vibe with early, almost G-rated pornography posters from decades ago. It’s all very tasteful, though, said Cucci, who himself has two daughters and doesn’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable. He’s currently booking musicians to perform at the venue while rejiggering the menu to fit the current times, with simpler dishes that are easier to execute. Cucci discussed that process with Restaurant Hospitality, as well as his approach to reworking the menus at his other restaurants. A musician himself — he plays the guitar and harmonica — Cucci has curated the music that’s played at all of his restaurants, and he discussed that process, too.

The new Poppy & Seed in Anaheim, Calif., is up and running and new concepts are underway