Whatever You Do, Don’t Describe This Chef’s Restaurants as ‘Fine Dining’

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Chef Hugo Matheson runs The Kitchen, a chain of farm to table restaurants in Colorado and Illinois. Photo credit: The Kitchen

Hugo Matheson always wanted to know where things come from. “I used to drive people crazy,” the British chef and restaurateur admits. “I’d sit there with a carpenter while shelves were being built in my bedroom, asking questions all day long.” That same curiosity is what he feeds at The Kitchen, a chain of farm-to-table eateries and bars in Colorado and Chicago, as well as The Kitchen Community, a non-profit that builds learning gardens in underprivileged cities to encourage younger people to learn about food and farming. The restaurants use local farmers, purveyors, and artisans to supply their food and drink at each locale, creating a symbiotic relationship between those who grow food and those who eat it. Or, as the company describes it, creating “community through food.”

Matheson started his career at the famed River Café in London, and later relocated to Boulder, Colo. It was there a chance encounter with entrepreneur Kimbal Musk, brother of Tesla founder Elon Musk, led to creating The Kitchen and The Kitchen Community learning gardens. Next year, The Kitchen will open restaurants in Memphis, which is undergoing a food revolution beyond its barbecue and Southern cooking roots.

Matheson, who also holds an interior design degree, recently appeared on a panel called “Lessons in Design from the $30 Burger: A Culinary Perspective on Interiors” during industry trade event Design Chicago. He, along with architecture and design editor Michael Wollaeger and Franck Nataf, who runs flooring maker Exquisite Surfaces, discussed how the latest trends in food — from farm-to-table dining and sustainable practices — can be best applied to the design world (As a senior editor for Yahoo Food, I moderated the panel). “To me, number one is the relationship with people and understanding what we’re consuming, whether in design or food,” Matheson explained.

I spoke with Matheson about his career, his philosophy behind The Kitchen, and why he cringes at the idea of his restaurants being considered “fine dining.”

How did you start your career?

I was actually front of house in London. I was a bartender for a while. The River Café was one of those places where you got a job through connections, but they offered a job wherever they were open. I’d left restaurants for a year or so before leaving London and did some development work. Then I came to Colorado, looking at Parsons and Pratt and schools for interior design. I found a school in Denver and did a degree in interior design for 3 or 4 years. I personally don’t look at myself as a chef. I can cook, but I can build furniture and design a space people like. My wife jokes [how] one day I built a table, and made dinner for eight on the table I built. I went down to the navy yard, bought some scrap wood, and then built a garden table while cooking dinner. Her father was staying with us and he was there and he said, “You’re a lunatic.”

How did you meet your co-founder, Kimbal Musk?

I met Kimbal in Colorado, sitting outside having a coffee and his dog jumped in my lap. We started talking and I invited him over for dinner. He’s a good cook. He went to [culinary] school in New York. We cooked together for the first year at the restaurant.

How do your learning gardens work?

It’s really an outdoor classroom and has a growing side that people can use in science or math to measure humidity temperature moisture and heat, things like that. We’re in about 200 schools. The goal is to get every classroom out into that [outdoor] classroom twice a year, through science or math — getting teachers to believe, ‘Hey this is a resource that we can use on a regular basis.’ I’m a huge believer that kids learn more when they’re out of their environment. Even if just used for a reading circle once a week, where a teacher would say, ‘Let’s go to the garden to read today.’ We’re also doing a high school program where … they’re actually growing produce and selling it here as part of our entrepreneurship program.

Are they big or expensive?

The goal is to get in for the cost of $5K a year annual maintenance, including staffing, which is not a lot of money compared to what it could cost. Some garden art projects costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain. You can have four beds and have a little circle, maybe 300 square feet.

What do you hope the gardens will teach young people, besides how to grow vegetables?

The biggest thing is letting people see there’s jobs in this industry beyond the fast food world. As long as your keen and enthusiastic, and willing to work hard, there are good opportunities, as opposed to a lot of people in the food industry who end up opening a packet and microwaving. Hopefully, you build confidence and self-esteem learning some skills you can apply them in your life. Or cook for your mother or girlfriend or kids and say, ‘Look what I learned.’

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Hugo and his team gather for a few beers and some fish at The Kitchen. (Photo credit: The Kitchen)

So you’re trying to deter them from working in fast food?

The smell of dirty oil in a McDonald’s is not as inspiring. But in the fast food world, Chipotle has the smell of chicken grilling. Even at a level like Chipotle, there’s cooking going on, there’s people chopping tomatoes, onions, making guacamole, and grilling chicken, and genuinely people are happy in there. And not a false happiness! I had Chipotle yesterday for lunch: we were with the kids at a bowling alley and there was pizza in the bowling alley. I looked at it and grimaced. So we went to the nearest Chipotle and had a burrito bowl and it was great!

So cheap food can be good for you? It’s interesting to hear a fine dining chef talk about Chipotle in such a positive way.

I was trying to avoid the word cheap. Approachability is something we always focus on. When you mention fine dining, it makes me freeze up. I have that challenge. When people eat, they want to feel good when they get there, and there’s nothing more to it than that. I want to feel good in the space I go in. I love understanding why it feels good to be here.

But isn’t it more expensive to eat sustainably?

For dinner, our average ticket is $40-$50. People come in and have a bowl of mussels and a glass of wine and that’s it. The halibut, that’s enough for a meal. Or people have two appetizers, and spend $28. They share starters. I like seeing that, as opposed to some restaurants where it’s designed that you each have your own entrée. A lot of ours share and split.

What are the challenges you face working with smaller purveyors?

One challenge in using any new farmer or producer is trust. The number one thing you hear is farmers or producers or people who feel that they were promised something that wasn’t there in the end. You understand why it happens: people have an idea that ‘I’m going to buy all this local product.’ And then you realize from a business standpoint how much work and energy goes into it. You come from an environment where you pick up the phone to one truck and you get on your computer and you click click click click click, and the next morning all of your clicks arrive. Whereas in small production there’s price, there’s supply, there’s ‘oh our harvest didn’t come in,’ or ‘we’re running late, we can’t do that.’ Then companies decide it’s too expensive, it’s too hard, we can’t run out business like this, and focus on simplifying. So farmers lose trust.

Is there an example where going to a bigger company is your only option?

Ketchup is a great example where we tried to work with a local provider in Colorado. At first off we were like, this doesn’t taste like ketchup. It didn’t taste like what 99 percent of America, or the world, thinks of as ketchup. This tasted like Granny’s recipe. We use Muir Glen organic, which is a different texture to Heinz, but it tastes like ketchup. We use Heinz organic in our Next Door restaurants because it’s the only place that has an upside down squeeze bottle in organic.

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