Jun062010
Missoulian Article: Executive chef's roots show in elegant menu
As seen in the 6/3 Missoulian newspaper.
Executive chef’s roots show in elegant menu
By
LORI GRANNIS for the Missoulian
Original
Story is here: http://missoulian.com/article_4733e866-6e87-11df-88af-001cc4c03286.html
Like all good chefs, whose influences are an amalgam of kitchen
culture and life experience, Ranch Club executive chef Jason Lovell
takes his cues from the people and places in his life. Places like
Atlanta, Ga., Yellowstone, Arlee, and people like Anthony Bourdain and
his caustically humorous musings.
But this small-town Georgian's Southern upbringing rises like cream
to the top.
Lovell will tell you that comfort food was born in the South: grits,
biscuits and gravy, sweet potatoes, green tomatoes, inexpensive cuts of
meat - all bathed in more gravy, and fried within an inch of its life.
It is the lifeblood coursing through the veins of even famed chefs such
as Paula Deen and Emeril Lagasse.
Southern food is often characterized by the sheer caloric parade of
fat- and sugar-laden dishes that draw influence from three continents.
Comfort food, soul food, Creole, and Cajun - since Lovell's arrival
last year, business in the dining room that overlooks the 18th hole of
the golf course has nearly tripled.
The menu is full of whimsical nuances and hints at Southern fare. But
don't expect lowbrow.
"I try to keep things simple using subtle complexities, rather than
actually doing straight-up Southern food," says Lovell. "I suppose you
could say it's comfort food with my own twist."
That twist first took shape last spring, with wild boar spareribs
alongside chayote squash slaw and poblano chile hush puppies.
Last summer's menu featured an appetizer of crawfish cake atop zucchini
linguine, with sweet creamed corn, Cotija aioli and jalapeno ham, and a
whimsically spun main course of Southern-fried organic chicken and
crispy potato waffles. Wildly popular with Missoula diners, it was a
staff-concocted nod to the chicken and waffle houses that dot the South.
This season, alligator bratwurst takes an even deeper stab into
Southern culture - something that seems to delight an otherwise
poker-faced chef.
Like most Southerners, Lovell grew up in the
kitchen, and the family porch was as much a makeshift mealtime prep
station as a place for social oiling.
Balmy afternoons revolved around food. Hours spent alongside
generations of kin, snapping bushels of peas, set an improvisational
stage for unseemly gossip, plates of fried pork chops, and deafening
concerts of crickets.
A natural flare for food, passed on by his mother, coupled with a
fascination for how things work, led to an unexpected stab at an
accounting education, but soon gave way to a culinary school at the Art
Institute of Atlanta in 2000.
Curriculum on everything from saucing to sautéing led Lovell, then
22, to a plum, out-of-the-gate executive chef spot in Atlanta at an
Italian eatery called "Brooklyn Cafe."
For a time, Lovell bounced in and out of kitchens, trying to find
his calling. But he always boomeranged back to food, he says.
"At one point I was shooting for a business degree, but then cooking
just kind of took over and stuck," he says.
Over the course of 10
years, chef stints in Atlanta, at Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn, and at
Missoula's Blue Canyon Kitchen & Tavern - coupled with a butchery
apprenticeship under Arlee butcher Rick Johnson - all served to prepare
Lovell, now 32, for the executive chef slot at Colleen and John Powers'
Ranch Club.
"We needed a chef at the time, and Jason walked into the
club one day, introduced himself, told me what he was doing, and said,
‘I'd like to be your chef,' and that was it," says John Powers. "The
timing was impeccable and we needed each other."
The restaurant, now
headed into its fourth season, is open to the public despite a recent
privatization push of golf course and pool, and the couple say they
couldn't be happier to have Lovell at the helm.
***
The good ol'
boy in Lovell finds unlikely resonance in rough-hewn New Yorker Anthony
Bourdain, whose gritty, cynical books depicting life deep within
kitchens spoke to Lovell like nothing else.
"His views on the
subculture of being a chef, and a chef's lifestyle, are something I've
always really identified with," he says.
"A lot of people don't
understand how hard we work. It's the most challenging job to be a
chef."
Books such as "Nasty Bits," "Kitchen Confidential," and "No
Reservations," helped Lovell understand his place in kitchen culture,
and helped define a dynamic he had always known existed in serious
galleys, but could never name.
"In ‘Nasty Bits' he talks about System
D - people who can get things done. I really identify with that because
it's how we work in the kitchen here," says Lovell.
System D, an
abbreviation of the French word "debrouillard," defines a kind of street
smart resourcefulness, and the ability to handle any problem on the
fly. Bourdain borrowed the phrase from the Nicolas Freeling memoir "The
Kitchen," which chronicles his days cooking at the Grand Hotel in
Paris.
As Bourdain says, being a chef is "the grim pride of the
journeyman professional, the cook who's got moves, who can kick ass
on the line, who can do serious numbers and get through."
The
nicotine-stained, salt-and-pepper Bourdain might well flash a rueful
smile and cast corrosive judgment on any chef for answering a
Craigslist ad, but that's precisely how Lovell's culinary trek to
Montana began, when he saw the kitchen post in Yellowstone.
Lovell
says he identifies with Bourdain, and by his description of himself on
his Facebook page - hardworking chef, lover of one, loving son of a
great family, proud redneck of the South, hiker, hunter, good-timer,
whiskey shooter - he appears, like Bourdain, to have no reservations.
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