What happens when you put eight local chefs together at a table and ask them to dish on their industry? We decided to find out.
Our recent roundtable discussion with a group of local DJs sparked so much conversation that we decided to try the format again. This time, we gave Boston’s chefs the floor, allowing them a muchneeded chance to share their opinions and air their grievances. We agonized over the guest list, looking for the perfect combination of styles, experiences, and personalities. In the end, we lured eight of the city’s finest culinary talents out of their kitchens for a few hours one Friday afternoon, plying them with food and drink in the private dining room at Eastern Standard. At the table: Rebecca Newell (the Beehive), Will Gilson (Garden at the Cellar), Brian Reyelt (Franklin Café), Adam Fuller (Great Bay), Tom Fosnot (Rocca), Mary Dumont (Harvest), Marco Suarez (Eastern Standard), and, after being detained by a meeting and Boston’s notorious traffic, Marc Orfaly (Pigalle and Marco).
Q: O Ya was recently singled out by The New York Times’ Frank Bruni as the country’s top new restaurant; Ken Oringer bested Cat Cora on Iron Chef America. Do achievements like these mean that people are finally starting to pay attention to Boston as a dining destination?
Marco Suarez: I was in Manhattan not too long ago, and it was interesting, somebody asked me where I worked; I mentioned this place, and they said, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Eastern Standard.” We got into this huge talk about how people down there are starting to hear about restaurants up here, and they were naming places like Clio and KO [Prime] and the Beehive. It was interesting to think that some random restaurant in Brooklyn had heard of Boston and was even following the scene that was going on up here.
Q: How do you respond to the naysayers? What chefs or restaurants do you send them to?
Tom Fosnot: I’m not trying to blow up Will here, but I send people to Garden at the Cellar.
Will Gilson: I’m blushing.
TF: I think that it has really great food, remarkable prices.
Brian Reyelt: I just went to have lunch, and I go maybe three times a week to Myers + Chang in the South End. I love it. It’s really funky inside. It’s something out of San Francisco, the way it’s laid out. The food’s clean, you can have a nice lunch. It’s a good play on Chinese food. I think Alison [Hearn] is doing a good job.
Rebecca Newell: I’m totally a Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe girl, and I love Zaftigs, and I love Washington Square Tavern. Those are the places that I went to when I first moved to Boston and I really like. If I have a few bucks, I’ll go to Oleana and sit out on the patio. And I like fiery places; I like the East Coast Grill. And Eastern Standard. Ever since it’s opened, I’ve come here. I love it; I love your steak tartare. The food here is awesome, and it’s in the price range that I can afford without making a car payment.
BR: It’s true. My wife is nine months pregnant, and she can’t wait until she has the baby to come have your steak tartare.
WG: If I have a night off, I like to be relatively gluttonous and eat as much meat as possible. I mean, ever since Jamie [Bissonnette] was here [at Eastern Standard] — and everything is still just as good if not better, my man, here — but Jamie is a good buddy of mine and everything he’s doing over at KO is absolutely awesome. He’s such a solid guy and a good talent, and really willing to share stuff too. Like offers to have you come in and take apart a pig head if you want to learn how to do it. It was awesome. Doing demos and just sharing info. Or telling dirty jokes. Either way.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you face as chefs here? What’s the toughest part of your jobs?
TF: Staffing.
RN: For me, the T is the biggest problem in Boston, because it stops running and the Beehive’s still open. What am I supposed to tell the dishwashers? Now we’re just paying for cabs, hundreds of dollars every week, for them to stay and wash dishes. Last week I had this great idea that I would just send them home at 12 anyway, and it didn’t work. I’m just telling the sous [chefs], “Just send home the dishwashers.” They’re like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yeah, man. We’re not going to have that many plates.” That wasn’t smart.
Adam Fuller: Valet is a problem here. Marco, I’m sure you guys run into it. With the two restaurants, Eastern Standard and Great Bay here, there’s a point [during] Red Sox games where we can’t take another guest. People who are driving literally can’t park. Keeping the prices down in restaurants helps, because people are paying $25 to valet park every night; that’s another added expense that nobody really thinks about in Boston. It’s like, you think your menu is affordable, and then you think about driving from the suburbs and paying gas and then paying for valet. That’s another $100 on top of whatever anyone’s charging.
TF: I think the challenge for us is, people expect prices still to be low, yet [food] prices keep going up. I’m not an owner, but I know that being responsible for the costs, it’s a real challenge. Our expectations are that food shouldn’t cost that much, but it does, and it’s ridiculous now.
WG: And people don’t understand the other costs that go into it. I just had my real food cost. I’m like, I just want to pay for the food [and] have the fuel cost be a totally different thing, because it’s jacking things up. It’s like, that’s not the price of salmon, that’s not the price of halibut — it’s the price of gas.
Q: Describe your typical Boston diners. Do you consider them hardtoplease and unwilling to experiment, as is the stereotype?
AF: I think that it’s more of a myth. I mean, I think the dining scene’s come a long way in Boston in the last five or six years. But I think that just in general, with more publications, the Internet, ... people [are] able to read and see more food, even if it’s pictures of food — [and] they know better what to expect in the restaurants now.
BR: I think a lot of people are considering themselves foodies, too. Because they watch more television.
AF: Like Bravo, blogs, that type of thing.
BR: Everybody thinks they know what they’re doing.
RN: What sucks a little bit about the foodies is that sometimes they have no idea what it takes to put together some of the items and put the menu in a streamlined [manner]. Beehive is known for an eclectic menu, but how to string it all together and how to open up an 80seat patio and have it collaborate with the menu inside and have two different things going? It’d be great if you published this because I would appreciate it, but someone said on Chowhound, “What kind of idiot is running Beehive kitchen?” And I was like, “You wanna try it on? You can come in and wear this chef coat. You’ll cry in an hour.”
WG: That’s the other thing. Chowhound and Citysearch and things ike that make it so hard for you to feel as though you’re in control. For the longest time, it was just the reviewers in the city that were writing those articles. And now anybody can write whatever they want about you and it’s on there.
MD: You open your restaurant and, boom, up comes a blog.
WG: Yeah, up comes a blog [on] Chowhound that says, like, “I went there and everything sucked.” And it’s like, okay, that guy got fired that day, came, and had a really bad time. And now I’ve got to listen to this rant.
RN: The guy that called me an idiot said, “I have never been to Beehive, but whoever’s running that kitchen must be an idiot.”
BR: I think the best advice is like a ballplayer, how they never watch the news or read the paper, you know? ’Cause everybody’s going to have something to say about everything. So why bother? Let them do what they’re going to do; they’re going to do it anyway.
Q: What do you think about the whole concept of the celebrity chef?
MD: I think it’s positive as long as you don’t become an ass.
MS: It has a tendency of making people into a monster that they’re not originally. I think how the system is set up and how you become a chef automatically instills some of that in some people, and then to go that one step further and say, “Hey, we’re going to stick you on TV” — it can be rough. I don’t want to name names, but it’s tough to work for those people a lot of the time, and it’s tough to bring them back to reality.
WG: You reach an imbalance, too, with how people who want to become cooks look at the industry. Kids going through culinary school now are like, “Oh, I want to grow up and I want to be Emeril,” and then they actually are like, “What do you mean, I have to work 80 hours a week?” It’s like, yes, it’s not easy.
BR: TV just makes it look a lot more glamorous than it really is. Shows like Top Chef or any of those things make it look like so much fun — you do all this, you do a couple of challenges, here’s $100,000, go open a restaurant. And it’s not that easy.
MD: The people on Hell’s Kitchen are making $250,000 a year, and they’re terrible. None of them would make it as a line cook.
MS: I went to a culinaryschool graduation for one of my cooks who graduated recently, and the class that was graduating was four times the size of my graduating class when I graduated — that was in 2001. They’re pumping kids out of these schools, and these kids have no idea.
Q: In the time that you’ve been working and cooking in Boston, how do you think the restaurant scene has changed here?
Marc Orfaly: I think it’s great. Because we’re so close to New York ... I think Boston would probably feel a whole lot better about itself if we were next to, like, Minneapolis or something. We just happened to be next to one of the greatest cities in the world, but I think it’s paid off that a lot of the guys from New York come here; there’s a ton of influence here. In the last five years, I think the younger generation has helped change the landscape of restaurants in Boston. We don’t have just uppertier restaurants anymore. There’s Craigie [Street Bistrot], there’s TW [Food].
WG: The other thing to mention is what people will invest in now. The more people that keep going to steak houses, all they’re going to keep opening is steak houses because they know that they’re a sure win. Anything else that you want to open up is so tough, because no one’s continually educating people on what’s going on today. Like “Mary’s using rams from Maine,” or “You’re using some great maple syrup from wherever.” And to keep pumping the public like that, so they can know. They’re like, “Yeah, Great Bay’s got some awesome black bass. I’ve never had black bass, let me try it.”
Q: What’s next for the Boston restaurant scene?
MD: I think the one really great thing for the restaurants and the chefs in this area is that the economy, as much as it’s hurting, is going to work for us, because people will stay here. They’re going to want to look to eat here and be local, and not outsource to, say, New York. They’re not going to travel as much, which is unfortunate for a lot of places, but it’s great locally.
MS: They’re also not going to eat out as much, though.
WG: There’s some sort of study though, where they say that the last recreation that people give up in a time of
recession is going out to dinner.
RN: Even when I’m broke, I’ll spend my last $10 on a beer and a Cuban at Anchovies. I’m like, screw it. I’ll do it; it doesn’t matter.
MO: I think the chefs are doing a great job in town, and I hope the media continues helping educate the clientele here, and I hope the clientele is able to become more aware of the different options that they have out there. People [need to] keep expanding their horizons a little around here and look outside the box.
TF: You would hope the trend continues to be independent restaurants with chefs doing creative food. Places like O Ya or TW Food — you hope that’s the trend.
MS: Wherever Boston is going, it’s on an upward trend. I made two hires before this baseball season: a kid from Michigan and a kid from Montandon, Pennsylvania — I don’t even know where that is. But either way, those kids had heard of Boston, decided not to go to New York, and they’ve come to Boston, so we’re doing something right. There’s this kid from Detroit who came here, and I brought him to do an event at the State Room last week, and his eyes were lit up. He’s like, “I was a sous chef in Michigan for three years, and I never got to go to an event.” He’s like, “You know that chef and you know that chef, and how do you guys all know each other?” And I was like, “Well, it’s like a little incestual scene, you know? We all know each other a little bit.” He was just blown away by it. So, we’re doing good. Whatever that may be, we’re doing it well.
