By the time you read this, it’ll all be a sweet memory — the smoked pork congee and the salmon belly crudo, the curried deviled ham and the Maple Leaf Farms duck duo, the green curried short rib and the red wine oxtail arancini and the chocolate pot de creme infused with Coppertail Brewing Co.’s custom porter.
If you missed it, you can, of course, visit these chefs’ respective restaurants throughout the year. And if you didn’t get to actually Meet the Chefs in person, I present the next best thing: excerpts from my roundtable discussion with them last month at Coppertail, where they gathered to choose beer pairings prior to the tasting event and hung around to satisfy my curiosity about their high-pressure, highly creative culinary endeavors.
As I told them at the start, I’m not a restaurant critic — I leave that to the estimable Jon Palmer Claridge — but I am an enthusiastic eater, and after having enjoyed each of their restaurants, I wanted to know how they got to where they are.
Ferrell Alvarez, Tony Bruno and Greg Baker had all worked for Blitz at one point at Mise en Place, and everyone recognized that without his pioneering efforts back in 1986, there would be no booming restaurant scene in Tampa Bay.
We began the conversation with Marty’s recollections of what it was like at the beginning, before his business expanded from catering to becoming an influential bastion of New American cuisine.
DW: Tell us about those early days, Marty.
DW: Those of you who have opened restaurants recently — do you think it’s harder or easier now than it was in 1986?
Rosana Rivera: There’s just more zeroes attached.
Greg Baker: I opened The Refinery five years ago with $80,000 in hand and that went just like that. The first week and a half we were open, we couldn’t even afford a sign. Now to get Fodder & Shine opened… more than a million, less than 2 million to get it open.
DW: Does a rising tide lift all boats?
Andy King: And hopefully in an opening you find a solid fan base that’s going to come back after they try the other restaurants.
DW: What are the benefits and the risks of branching out?
Blitz: I like the challenge of it, but I also like the balance, of having a good lifestyle. I’m a pretty hands-on guy, so if I do more projects I can’t be as hands-on as I would like to be.
DW: Greg, at Fodder & Shine did you feel you could do things there you couldn’t do at The Refinery?
Baker: The whole Florida cracker thing [at F&S] was just, well… [laughs] We’ve been restructuring ourselves a little bit, changing our menus around. But it was just another idea, another concept we would work with.
Ferrell Alvarez: I worked for Marty for seven and a half years, [when] Tony Bruno was executive chef there. Then I took the executive chef job at Cafe Dufrain for four and a half years, and all through that tenure I was with my now business partner Ty Rodriguez. He was Marty’s GM, our GM. After Cafe Dufrain, it was like, you know, now what? You kind of want to do your own thing.… We opened up Rooster & the Till with $100,000. We’re now 18 months into it, and we’ll be finished with our expansion in another month.
DW: Tony, would you ever want to own a restaurant? I asked Andy earlier, and he said no. It’s enough being a culinary director at three places.
Tony Bruno: Yes and no. You get tired of making people money. But then how much freedom they give you, and how much creativity they give you, and how much funding they have just in case you want to go crazy with an app…
Bruno: That’s a big part of it. Yes and no, I would say. Down the road I definitely will open my own place.
DW: Michael, are you a co-owner?
Michael Buttacavoli: No, just executive chef.
DW: Just executive chef, that’s it.
King: I just run everything, that’s all I do.
Buttacavoli: I think what I’ve done — I worked for Jeannie Pierola for 11 years, three years at Boca in Ybor, eight years at SideBern’s under her. She and Marty are the pioneers of the town. What I’m doing now is thanks to them — to be able to see the products that we saw, to be able to use the products we had… And the same thing kinda goes for Cena. It’s not my money out there, but as the executive chef you want to spend their money in the right way.
DW: Are you watching your customers’ reactions? Do you hear reports back from the floor?
Ricardo Castro: It’s like a radio. You have it on, you hear it all the time. You hear the good things and the bad. That’s what keeps you going — all those little goods that come through. That’s when you say, OK, this is working. And I think all of [us] can agree: You feed out of that. I know you heard that cliche, a chef will work for nothing. I think all of us, if you give us right now a restaurant we’ll have fun even if you don’t give us any payment. But we need to pay bills.
DW: Would all of you, if you were financially secure, still cook? Would you cook for the joy of it?
Baker: I think at this level you have to do that. It’s a state of mind.
King: What else would we do? We’d be sitting here drinking water with nothing to talk about.
Castro: If you think about that, when you’re opening a restaurant, for many years you are doing that.
DW: You aren’t making any money.
Castro: You’re doing it for the love of it in the meantime.
DW: What’s the one thing that you want people coming to your restaurant to try?
King: The eggs barbacoa at Datz. It’s got our house-braised pulled pork, it’s got a Colorado sauce, which is like a New Mexican chili sauce, Monterey Jack cheese, eggs, tortillas. It’s like a giant mountain of food, and it’s fantastic.
Bruno: We have a nice beef poutine, we’re making our own roast beef, fresh mozz, handcut fries, nice gravy on top — nice sharable type dish.
Buttacavoli: I’d definitely say the branzino with the escarole, the white beans and the roast peppers, or the oxtail and the gnocchi.
Castro: Short rib benedict with chipotle hollandaise and a lemon thyme scone.
Baker: By the time I say anything about this, it’s not going to be there anymore [because of The Refinery’s locally and seasonally driven menu]. Right now the thing on the menu I’m excited about is the Ms. Crunchy. It’s a croque madame with beef tongue instead of ham. As far as Fodder & Shine goes, I stand by our fried chicken. It’s unique in that it’s cornmeal-breaded and fried in chicken fat.
DW: I don’t think I’ve ever had beef tongue. What’s it like?
Baker: It’s like the best pot roast you’ve ever had.
Alvarez: I don’t have anything on my menu that’s been on my menu since I opened. People get fixed on the pork belly and the gnocchi and things like that, and I purposely change those dishes to push them to try something different…
DW: Right now, if I went in tonight…
Alvarez: Last week we did a shrimp dish — Aleppo blackened gulf white shrimp head-on, with roasted potato, pickled ramp bulb, shrimp-head vinaigrette and pickling spice mayo.
Blitz: One of the dishes that people love and that I like — fresh, light — we do a sous vide lobster tail with jicama, avocado, grapefruit, ahi amarillo yuzu vinaigrette and rice crackers, and an edamame mush crumb dumpling with it.
DW: Do you guys share information, or are there some things you have to keep as trade secrets?
King: I don’t do any secrets. If anybody asks me anything, I’m an open book. It’s just food, it’s not rocket science.
Baker: Even if you tell somebody how to make something, everybody here at this table is going to make their own version.
King: We’ve actually given out our recipes to customers that have come in.
Alvarez: I talk to Marty about things…
Blitz: He told me one thing the other day. I said, goddamn, bro, I’m taking that from you, man.
Alvarez: I ask Marty to come in on Mondays sometimes, and he’ll just talk to me about my food. Also Michael’s badass pastry chef [Evan Schmidt], one of the best in Tampa in my opinion. I’ve been talking to him a lot about pastries. I’ve been talking to [Buttacovoli] for the past two, three months a lot as well.
“That’s the hardest part — getting them through that door.”
DW: What if the only reason people come to Piquant is to order a croissant doughnut, otherwise known as a cronut? Do you wish sometimes they’d just come in and sit down?
Rivera: I think both. But we’re happy they’re coming through the door every day regardless, because they know we have a good product.
Castro: That’s the hardest part — getting them through that door. If you get ’em for the bread you made and they like it, kudos to you.
Baker: When I used to play in bands, one band in particular, people would always scream for this horrible cover song that we did. I used to get chapped about it: “We’ve just played an entire set of original stuff that I firmly believe in and all you want to hear is this stupid frickin’ cover.” And sometimes [in restaurants] I’ve thought in that same way. In the early days of The Refinery, we had a late-night menu of build-your-own poutine and people would come in half an hour before we released the menu, and you’d ask if they’d like to order anything, and they’d say, no we’ll just wait for the poutine. “You realize that I have 18 other items that are not that, that you could just possibly [try]?” But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. They’re there because it’s something they like. They’re here, we feed ‘em, we take their money. They keep coming back. You know, retention is a huge thing.
Buttacavoli: One of my examples is definitely the chicken marsala. It’s not the most [cutting-edge] — but people eat it up. Part of me says, hey, this dish needs to go, we need to change something up. But are people who come for that gonna come back?
Alvarez: A lot of that has to do with your location. When people come up to Seminole Heights, it’s like they lose that attitude of, well I’m going to change this, or I’m gonna substitute that, or I only like chicken marsala, or I want a steak…
DW: What’s your biggest beef about critics, in publications like CL and on sites like Yelp? And what’s the biggest value?
Bruno: If you’re talking about Yelp and stuff like that, you gotta take that with a grain of salt. Like, how many are disgruntled employees, how many of ‘em are your opposing restaurants? Definitely read ‘em and be alert to what’s going on, obviously. If you have enough passion in your food and you know what you’re doing is right, you can only let so much bother you, I mean, F them if they don’t like it. I’m putting out my heart and soul on this plate and I know it’s good, and if you don’t think it is, then sorry to hear that, have a nice day.
Castro: I’d like to hear what Marty has to say about the dynamic now, when you have all this social media, compared to when you started out.
Blitz: I don’t have Twitter, Instagram. It’s just not my thing, but I know you need it now. I do have Facebook, and I’m friends with a lot of chefs, because it’s cool to see what they’re doing. I think it’s awesome.
Castro: But back then it was…
Blitz: Back then it was just word of mouth. There wasn’t a lot of stuff going on, so when a review came out, that was it, man…
Rivera: I think reviews are important. You have to listen to the good and the bad and the ugly.
Bruno: That’s the hard part.
Rivera: And not let it get under your skin, because it’s not personal. You make mistakes in the kitchen, you want to fix what needs to be fixed and not fix what’s not broken. But you’re doing your craft because you love it. Critics shouldn’t be your only thing.
Baker: The crowd-sourcing review sites have gotten very, very interesting. Everybody wants to be first to the party and say, “Oh, I was here and these are the problems I found.” Why? So you can sit behind your anonymous keyboard and point out all the flaws in a business that’s only been open for two days? Great! How do you feel about that? But there is some validity to these. I’ve gotten very adept at distilling within a few seconds whether the review is, “I couldn’t find a place to park…”
King: We get that one a lot in South Tampa. That’s our biggest thing.
Rivera: People have criticized our wallpaper.
Baker: I had a review by somebody who didn’t even go through the door. “I showed up, it looked like a liberal hipster place, I turned around and left.”
DW: Did you write “Thank you”?
Baker: For our 300th Yelp review I actually compiled a list of our [worst] reviews… Gave them dramatic readings, put ’em out on social media.
DW: Do you all remember your opening nights?
[Group groan.]
Bruno: Our power went out, it was horrible.
Baker: I had to race to get open at Fodder & Shine because basically the staff wasn’t going to wait around any longer to come to work. I had a day — that’s being generous — I had like three hours to train my kitchen staff, and we opened the doors the next day.
King: Our first soft open at Roux we had this smoker-like grill, and our hood system went down, so it just completely filled the back of the restaurant up with smoke. That was crazy. You couldn’t see the guy next to you.
DW: Was Cena difficult the first couple of days? People had to find you.
Buttacavoli: That’s the hard part. We’ve had so much trouble with the location on Google and them trying to find us and them not realizing there was a parking garage. Then we had our AC, where the intake was a few feet from the hood, so every time you got going the AC would shut off — and it would be 100 degrees in there, but…
Bruno: You endured.
Buttacavoli: We endured, and got all the stuff moved.
Bruno: It’s a battle.
Buttacavoli: For Mother’s Day brunch we were pluggin’ in extra equipment, circuits [were] poppin’… It’s interesting what you have to do to really make things happen. But you get ‘em done and you end up having a good service.
DW: Do you all taste everything that goes out?
Blitz: I try to. You know, people break my balls because like, I’m eating a lot of stuff, but you know, I’m not eating because I’m hungry, I’m eating because I catch a lot of stuff that way. I can see things that no one else really sees.
Alvarez: We have four containers of plastic spoons on all stations, we’re tasting things all day long. We go through a case of 1,000 spoons every 10 days. That’s just normal. Marty taught us that.
Bruno: That’s right, I learned that from Marty.
Baker: There’s nothing that comes out of my kitchen that does not get tasted. There’s so many little variances — it may not be right when it’s hitting the plate because it sat in the pass for a few minutes. You’re not living in the here and now, you’re living in when it hits the table — you have to make these adjustments.
Rivera: I taste everything. I love eating pastries, everything that we have in those cases I taste once or twice, sometimes three, and I take some home sometimes.
Bruno: To make sure it’s good.
Rivera: It’s a tough industry in terms of keeping an eating habit. It’s kind of hard for parents, you come home and say, “I’m starving,” and your kids say, “How come? Why didn’t you eat at the restaurant?” You don’t have a chance to really eat.
DW: A lot of tasting, not a lot of actual eating.
Bruno: So you eat at 3 in the morning, too?
Rivera: You eat at 3 in the morning, and you enjoy that a lot. When you’re tasting you’re not taking account of how many proteins you’re getting or any of that, you’re just testing. So when you get home you’re starving.
DW: Finally, I’ll start with you, Marty. What’s the one thing that would surprise people about your restaurant that you’d like them to know?
Blitz: I don’t know…
Alvarez: Should we say what we did back in the day? [Laughter.]
DW: So Anthony Bourdain was telling the complete truth, was he?
Blitz: You don’t wanna know — I could fill a book big time, that’s all I’m sayin’.
DW: What’s the reason people should come to Mise en Place?
Blitz: We have a lot of passion for what we do. I’m still cooking hands on, making soups, sauces. I’m there just about every night.
DW: Ferrell, what’s the one thing you want people to know about Rooster & the Till?
Alvarez: The fact that we pull off our menu, that we don’t buy anything that we could possibly make — from burrata and ricotta to every pastry product, we make everything ourselves. And also that my crew’s been with me anywhere from four to 10 years now, in terms of kitchen staff. That’s a rarity.
DW: And what should people know about your restaurants, Greg?
Baker: It’s just honest cooking. I like to play with my food at one place, I like to do down-home Southern food at the other place. At the root of it, it’s country cooking no matter which country it happens to come from. It’s just simple and honest.
DW: And Piquant?
Rivera: I want people to remember that we care about the quality of the food and we care that it has the right flavor and the right execution.
DW: And Cena?
Buttacavoli: We’re a modern Italian restaurant. I’m not trying to change the world culinary-wise, but some of the things are definitely classics, some have spins, some are just fun variations on Italian food.
DW: And The Living Room?
Bruno: We’re old-school preparation, new-school presentation, real casual. I love to cook, it’s therapy for me. It’s a curse and a blessing at the same time. For me it’s something that came to me naturally at a young age, coming from a big Italian family, making meatballs at 5 years old. To me it’s like making a painting.
DW: Or you’re making really good meatballs.
Bruno: The best you’ve ever had.
DW: And Datz?
King: It’s really good food. Some of it’s really simple, some of it’s kind of intricate, but at the end of the day it’s all really good.
DW: What’s next? We’ve been through so many trends, from blackened to cilantro to kale to farm to table…
Baker: Kale jumped the shark today [McDonald’s had just added the McKale breakfast bowl to its menu]. Pork belly and kale? Nano food?
Castro: I think all of us, we just want to make good food. We just want people to be happy.
DW: What are you going to eat tonight?
Baker: I got some left over pasta fazool in the fridge.
Bruno or King [tape is unclear]: Can’t go wrong…
DW [misunderstanding]: Kangaroo?
All: Can’t go wrong!
DW: Kangaroo is the next trend!
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2015.