Episodes

  • Jason Asher develops ‘immersive concepts’ at Century Grand in Phoenix

    Jason Asher develops ‘immersive concepts’ at Century Grand in Phoenix
    Sep 29 2022
    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.
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    37 mins
  • Rob Connoley produces zero-waste food rooted in Ozark cuisine at Bulrush in St. Louis

    Rob Connoley produces zero-waste food rooted in Ozark cuisine at Bulrush in St. Louis
    Sep 9 2022
    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.
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    45 mins
  • Ji Hye Kim makes food inspired by local farmers and Korean history in Ann Arbor, Mich.

    Ji Hye Kim makes food inspired by local farmers and Korean history in Ann Arbor, Mich.
    Aug 31 2022
    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.
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    35 mins
  • Ricky Moore brings a lifetime of travel and experience home to Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, N.C.

    Ricky Moore brings a lifetime of travel and experience home to Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, N.C.
    Aug 11 2022
    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.
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    50 mins
  • Seamus Mullen shares how chefs can live happier, healthier lives

    Seamus Mullen shares how chefs can live happier, healthier lives
    Aug 4 2022
    “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.
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    38 mins
  • Levy Restaurants CEO Andy Lansing shares advice on hiring and keeping staff as Jake Melnick’s Corner Tap celebrates its 20th anniversary

    Levy Restaurants CEO Andy Lansing shares advice on hiring and keeping staff as Jake Melnick’s Corner Tap celebrates its 20th anniversary
    Jul 15 2022
    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.
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    40 mins
  • Robert Ash, culinary head of the Encore Boston Harbor Hotel, discusses labor and supply chain strategies

    Robert Ash, culinary head of the Encore Boston Harbor Hotel, discusses labor and supply chain strategies
    Jul 7 2022
    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.
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    27 mins
  • Andrew Black creates memories at Grey Sweater and Black Walnut in Oklahoma City

    Andrew Black creates memories at Grey Sweater and Black Walnut in Oklahoma City
    Jun 30 2022
    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.
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    53 mins