Interview by Dominic Ciambrone
Photos by Bryan Villacres
Before we get into everything about your life, let’s talk about how we connected in the first place because it’s pretty closely related to your overall story. You came to me with the idea of customizing your Balenciaga Crocs. What’s the name of this boot?
I do not even know.
Everyone just calls it the Kanye boot because of how many times he’s worn it.
When I saw Kanye wearing them, I said, “OK, this isn’t really an everyday car.” They were tight, but if I wear these things every day, people will come up to me and say, “When are we going fly-fishing?” “ I thought they were the perfect boots for work. They’re rubber, they’re heavy, they’re tall, they’re safe for every element in the kitchen. But they are not that practical [otherwise]. When I brought them to you, I thought, “Can we just chop them up a bit and turn them into lowriders?” It accomplished everything I wanted, both from a practical and a fashion point of view. It was the ultimate cooking shoe.
I feel like chefs have been underserved in the shoe department for many years. I love that you wanted to take something cool and make it even cooler so you can wear it in the kitchen.
And get out of the kitchen. A lot of fashion is inspired by industrial workwear, like the trends with vintage military gear and the like. I thought the idea of a chef uniform might also be part of this workwear inspiration that inspires fashion. We work on our feet 10, 12, 16 hours a day, so it starts with the shoe. What we did with the boots was figure out how we could make something that I could wear to work and after work but also inspire other companies to look at this design and I hate to say it, but let it be and do something that is more easily accessible.
In the kitchen, apart from knives, shoes are one of the first things chefs try to use to represent themselves. I think that’s pretty narrow, you walk into a kitchen and you see the same shoe trends in the kitchen that you see outside of the kitchen.
This seems like a good place to ask how you got into working in the kitchen in the first place.
I started my career at the Holiday Inn at the Francis Scott Key Mall in Frederick, Maryland at the age of 15. I started as an assistant and my brother was the sous chef. We worked in the same hotel and he was in the kitchen while I was cleaning tables. I kinda sucked. The people you want to hang out with are sitting in the kitchen, even at the Holiday Inn. My brother put me in the kitchen on a Sunday – told me to do it on a Saturday – and gave himself and the other sous chef time off and didn’t tell the chef. I showed up in a chef’s uniform and the guy looked at me and said, “What the fuck is that Halloween?” That was the start of my hazing phase. He gave me shit for a year and a half and did everything to dissuade me from going into this industry. Fast forward to today. I took that as a challenge: I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it at a higher level than you even say it’s possible, because I love doing it.
I find it motivating when someone says no. It triggers something in us.
The defiance. It’s similar to getting a tattoo. A lot of it is very much against what I’m supposed to do, I’ll do what I want to do. I got a tattoo and started cooking the same year.
What was your first job in the kitchen?
First I had to push everything back and forth at the Sunday buffet, then I was allowed to start preparing the food. The first thing I had to make was one of those huge platters of poached salmon with all the veggie decorations, like a carrot turned into a palm trunk with an upside down green pepper. Carve a radish into a mouse. I was building these scenes out of food and I was like, ‘Damn, this is kind of tight. I make art out of food.” Visually I was there, then I started exploring flavors.
They would tell me that I make the pasta special. I say, “You let me create something, then you put it on the menu and sell it at this restaurant?” They say, “Yeah, what do you have?” So I grabbed some pepperoni and diced them, threw in some cream, added some tomatoes and tried making pepperoni pizza pasta and stuff like that. I couldn’t believe that I was allowed to just walk into that kitchen, take a few ingredients and put them together the way I like, and then you’re going to go and sell it to other people. I wanted this to be my career.
Photo by Bryan Villacres
You mentioned that you make art. Does the cooking profession have an artistic side?
My discipline is that I’m a chef, that’s my job, but I mix emotions with my career. I’ve always wanted to be creative and do something artistic. I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t sing, I can’t do all that stuff. But when you mix all the elements of what I do together, there’s a certain art to it. From designing a restaurant together with interior designers who I think are artists, we work closely together to transform a space. There is art in curating the whole experience – the music, the furniture, the food, the drinks.
Then when you break it down into individual dishes, I approach everything I cook with an artistic rather than a practical approach. It’s because of the type of food I’ve been cooking for so many years, people think I’m going to do something with an element of surprise, so then I feel the pressure to do something artistic so people don’t say things like, ” Oh, he just gave me a bowl of pasta.” If you can make that bowl of pasta taste good, you can only find the art in flavoring it.
Little things. If you fry a rack of lamb in a pan and baste it with butter… On a cooking show I was judging, I saw a small child drop an anchovy in the pan and start basting the lamb with that butter. I tasted this lamb and thought, “Wow, this 10-year-old just taught me something.” That anchovy gives the lamb a subtle flavor that people weren’t expecting, that’s art.
It’s interesting how you say taste profiling is an art, I’ve never heard it put it that way. I got my creativity from my father who is a chef. The way he cooked, how he brought the flavors into the food and what the restaurant should look like. Chefs have so much creativity, it’s cool to see how you can create art with taste.
Take something like white chocolate and caviar. You’re bringing those two things together — one is so sweet, the other so salty — and if you hear it, it doesn’t make any sense. But if you put it in your mouth, it works. I think those moments are what I try to create. I want people to say, ‘Wait. You put something and what together and it tastes like this? Huh.”
Photo by Bryan Villacres
Finally, let’s talk about the art you wear on your body. Earlier you showed me your first tattoo – a shamrock you got when you were 15 – and mentioned the connection between tattooing and the kitchen. Can you explain that in more detail?
I think any job where you wear a uniform gives you very little room to express yourself. That’s why I think people go for shoes, tattoos, etc. If you’ve worked in a luxurious environment for years, you weren’t allowed to have visible tattoos. I find [by so many chefs having tattoos] we forced it to become normal and it became normal. If they have the skills for the job, how will we discriminate against them? I have had an ongoing relationship with Williams-Sonoma for many years. One of the most memorable experiences I had with them was when I walked into one of their stores and a staff member said to me, “Thank you for being in our catalogue. Once you did that, it was against the dress code and now we can express ourselves a little more freely at work.” He had his sleeves rolled up and was showing me his tattoo, he was super excited. I have never thought about it. I don’t understand why people were so put off by the idea of a tattoo. Why would you look at a person differently because they have tattoos?
It’s come a long way. Part of the way I started getting tattoos was that it forced me to figure out how to make my way without a regular job.
I deliberately threw this thing on my neck because I knew I would have to go out and apply for jobs and hold meetings to convince multimillion-dollar hotel companies that I should be part of their portfolio. It has made me focus more on making sure I have something for them when they can see past all of this. The more tattoos I got, the more I focused on my education, the more I focused on my skills, the more I focused on what I could do physically and mentally so the stigma of tattoos would go away.