In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn By cover art

In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn

By: Nation's Restaurant News
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  • Podcast by In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn
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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
Art Food & Wine
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