There’s a telling photograph from an August dinner at Millwright’s Restaurant, where eight of greater Hartford’s top chefs filled the Simsbury kitchen to produce a multi-course feast. In the image, five hands stir an enormous pan of seafood paella, enough to feed 65 guests. Chefs Steve Cavagnaro, Scott Miller and Billy Grant, whose faces are visible, are furrowing their brows in concentration.
The paella, the third of seven courses, was a contribution from Barcelona Wine Bar executive chef Adam Greenberg. It had to be made a la minute, said Millwright’s chef-owner Tyler Anderson, which required precise timing and quite a bit of labor. But the final product, served with a crisp Spanish Albariño, turned out perfectly. “We certainly had…enough educated, strong culinary minds there,” he said of the group dinner.
Many Connecticut chefs, eager to share their talents and knowledge, don’t subscribe to the notion that too many cooks spoil the broth. Instead, they’re joining forces in each other’s kitchens, designing joint menus and pooling resources, creativity and intelligence for next-level dining experiences.
The eight-chef fundraiser August dinner, which raised almost $8,000 for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, was the largest collaborative event Anderson has handled, he said. A meal of that size has many moving parts, but organization was key to its success, with a composed flow of courses. Dinner started with a fluke crudo and progressed with vegetable, seafood, pasta and meats, with each chef signing up for a course.
In a state like Connecticut, where chefs are geographically scattered, there isn’t as much opportunity to meet up and share ideas, Anderson said. “[In] cities, there’s a culture among chefs, cooks. You see them at the bar [after a dinner shift,] talk about what you’re doing at work…I think we have that talent level here in Connecticut, but it’s more of a statewide stretch. It’s important that we are able to reach out to each other, collaborate. You get so many ideas from working with your peers.”
So at his stylish farm-to-table restaurant, which has a unique loft space, Anderson created the “Dinner with Friends” series, welcoming a different Connecticut chef each month for a special collaborative event. Ryan Jones, whose Mill at 2T is less than 5 miles away in Tariffville, was one of the first guest chefs in the loft.
While brainstorming menu ideas over a few beers, Jones suggested using some sort of fish cheek in one of the courses. After more discussion and research, they settled on an underutilized tender piece from skate wing, which was “one of the best pieces of fish I’ve ever eaten,” Anderson said. “If he hadn’t brought up the idea of cooking [that piece] for dinner, we wouldn’t have done the research. No way would I have found that on my own.”
Jones, who says he likes these events as a break from the “grind” of normal dinner service, enjoys their educational aspect as well. “Tyler does a lot of modern techniques that I don’t generally use — [he uses] a circulator, a cryovac machine, a sous vide machine,” he said. “To have someone like [Tyler] cooking for a night, puts a whole different experience on what I’m doing.”
Collaborations can take several forms, Anderson said: a “true” collaboration where the chefs design a menu together; a dinner where chefs alternate courses, or a “takeover,” where chefs essentially swap restaurants. Last fall, Anderson’s team exchanged nights with Joel Viehland and his team from Community Table; the Litchfield County-based crew took over the Simsbury kitchen for an evening in October, and the Millwright’s staff cooked in Washington at a November dinner.
Teamwork
Another distinctive partnership between an ambitious European chef and a cocktail king turned into a 13-course Nordic-inspired pop-up this past March. Community Table’s Marcell Davidsen, a native of Denmark, approached 116 Crown owner John Ginnetti about melding their talents for an evening.
They named the event NyHaven, reflecting Davidsen’s heritage and the event’s location in New Haven (“Ny” means “new” in Danish.) He and pastry chef Tommy Juliano wrote the menu — which included duck with blueberries, spruce and smoked parsnips and baby shore crabs with dill and seaweed powder — and explained the flavor profiles to Ginnetti, who went to work with his spirits.
“He came up with amazing drinks,” Davidsen wrote in an email. “It’s the beauty of working with talented people.”
“One reason I wanted to do [the collaboration] is because Marcell’s a pretty special talent,” Ginnetti said. “I liked him as a guy before I even saw his food. I saw a couple things and thought they were extraordinary. With the popup, I wanted to know if he could make magic happen 13 times in a row.”
Ginnetti came up with the idea to use Aquavit, a Scandinavian spirit, in unconventional cocktails. He introduced the crowd of 30 to the liqueur early in the night, mixing it with coffee. “I wanted to show people that this wasn’t the typical dinner,” he said. “It would set the stage, reflect [Davidsen’s] new-Nordic sensibility but giving them the ‘after the meal’ thing before it starts. I get caught up in the romance of the meal.”
Ginnetti said he’d do another similar event, but that any potential team would need to be as pulled-together and prepared as Davidsen and crew had been. “There was a lot of potential for a problem. The food was very specific. Drinks were very specific. Feeding that amount of people in that time is not simple,” he said. “…But [Davidsen] had a holistic vision for what this was going to be. He had his i’s dotted and his t’s crossed.”
“You have to have rapport enough with the person to be comfortable creating with them,” says Viehland, who has collaborated on several occasions at various events throughout the country. Most recently, he and Anderson shared the kitchen at the James Beard House in July, cooking a “seasonal New England” menu.
“Chefs most of the time don’t really like to share,” Viehland said. “In the spirit of humility, creative sharing, mutual respect, you can make it work and come up with amazing stuff.”
Viehland agrees that organization and planning are vital when multiple chefs come together with different visions. If the visiting chef doesn’t execute everything well, he says, “you’re the host chef…and if it affects your customers, it looks negative to you. Some chefs are very wary to do these kinds of collaborations.”
But in the best-case scenario, “it’s good promotion for your restaurant, good individual promotion,” he said. “It introduces you to maybe a different set of clientele who might not know who you are, [might not] be familiiar with your cuisine. It’s also inspiring for your cooks and staff to see what someone else does, [what a ] leader, chef, creative force can come up with.”
For Anderson, that continuing education is what drives him. “That’s what I love about cooking,” he said. “You’re never done learning. You never even know half of it.”
