Chef Ed Harris

Conversation with a chef: Hi, Ed. Nice to meet you. I’m in Melbourne and you’re in Atlanta. What’s Atlanta looking like at the moment? 

Ed Harris: It’s cool, the leaves are finally changing. Nice. I’d love to hear about what you’re doing now, but first I’d like to hear a little bit about how it all started. I know you grew up in St. Lucia and you were surrounded by Guyanese food. Can you tell me what was happening with food in your house when you were growing up? 

Food in my house was actually really interesting because my parents were Guyanese, but they travelled a lot. So food was sort of South American, but with little twists here and there. My dad did a really amazing pasta. But my mum did all of the, I would say, more local Guyanese food. But food was always delicious in my house. Vegetables were something I really needed to change my feelings towards because I was very picky as a kid eating. 

Did you help out in the kitchen?

Yes, I was always in the kitchen with my mum, even with my grandfather. Every chance I got, I was either cutting something up or peeling, shelling, just getting food ready. You couldn’t keep me out of the kitchen. 

What made you move to Brooklyn as a teenager? 

My parents travelled a lot while we were younger, and Brooklyn was just one of the places they ended up settling. So that’s how we ended up in Brooklyn.

Was that a big change, or if you were used to travelling around, maybe not so much? 

It was different because a lot of the places that I went were still within the Caribbean. Even with those cultures being very distinct, it still wasn’t anything like the Northern Hemisphere, another part of the world. So that was definitely a culture shock for multiple things, especially the weather. Because when we got here, it was ’96 and it was a crazy snowstorm. Wow.

I’ve been in New York when there was an Arctic freeze, over New Year’s maybe about 12 years ago, and it’s pretty cold. When it’s cold in New York, it’s really cold. So, you did a bit of cooking and you helped out in the kitchen. When did you get the idea that you might want to make that your career?

I think for me, that was the last year in high school. We got visited by a representative for the Art Institute at the time, and I just loved everything they presented. Right after graduation, I decided to go into culinary school, and that’s the school I went with. And I haven’t looked back since.

What is it that you love and loved about it? 

I think for me, it was a few things. One, the money was right to be able to go to school, and then two, it was in New York City. I would be able to go to Chinatown, go to all these different places, Koreatown, Spanish Harlem, and just really enjoy those different cultures without having to travel too far.

Were there things that surprised you about different techniques or approaches at culinary school, that you thought, I hadn’t expected that? 

I think in the last year of culinary school, one of the final exams, we were learning these different techniques over the course of the time we were in school, but just these French terminologies in terms of different sizes of cuts. It was very, very structured, very streamlined, and it was just something I didn’t expect. When would I ever really need to cut carrots this way, or julienne sticks, macédoine? That threw me off for a second, but it makes sense looking back at it, because some restaurants, that’s the way you cut.

You worked at some really big-name restaurants: Jean-Georges, The River Café and Buddakan. What were those kitchens like for a young chef? 

Really amazing. Each one of those places has a very special place in my heart. At Buddakan, I learned a lot of Asian techniques, got to really expand my knowledge of Southeast Asian food. Then you have Jean-Georges, which was really amazing because he’s such a talented chef as well. I was able to work in two of his restaurants at the time when I was working at Jean-Georges. So learning French techniques with a little bit of Asian to it was really nice for the different restaurants he had at that moment. And then with The River Café, that’s a go-to spot in New York, really fine dining, really high-end, just really amazing food. The techniques, just the culture there was really nice as well. That’s one of the places I first learned that for dinner you needed to have a blazer. You couldn’t just show up in a T-shirt. They would have rentals if you needed, but you couldn’t sit in the dining room unless you had a blazer.

It sounds like a really incredible place to dine at, but also to work at. You worked across lots of different kitchen roles: saucier, tournant, expeditor. Do you think that’s really important, to work across different stations in a kitchen? 

I think it’s important if your goal is to be an executive chef, to be an owner, to be someone of more value, so you can then ask for bigger pay or just do different things right. It really just depends on the individual. For me, I always deemed it necessary to learn as much as I can in the kitchen from different areas. This way I’m a more rounded chef myself, so I can go into just about any kitchen and jump in wherever I need to be and get my feet wet.

I crave being in the kitchen. I love being in that atmosphere. I just love all aspects of it. But for the most part, I love being able to create the oohs and aahs for people coming in, being a part of that experience where people are coming to celebrate anniversaries, weddings, birthdays and whatnot. To be able to help facilitate that is really gratifying for me.

Ed Harris, Atlanta, Georgia

You are always learning as a chef, but was there a point when you thought, yep, I’m a really good chef now? 

That’s funny. I thought that way when I was really young. One of the restaurants I worked in, and this was Michael’s in New York, and the only reason I thought that way was because at that particular moment, I was doing the sous chef’s job, a line cook’s job and sometimes the executive chef’s job, but without the pay. So at that point I was like, hmm…But that lasted very little, of course you can’t be too over-confident because things happen. So let’s learn. It was a long time ago, but at the end of the day, for me, I consider myself a sponge: I’m always learning. You can never learn enough when it comes to food and different cultures and technique. Every day I try to learn something.

I guess that’s maybe the reason you decided to go into the food competition on TV: Chopped. Did you need that challenge as well?

I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to see if I could do it, and when I did it, it was such, one of the hottest shows on TV, on Food Network, and, to get on there was one thing, but then to win is something completely different. So I really wanted to just see how much information I had in my head, how much knowledge I had, would I be able to create these dishes on the fly without having any idea what they would be, till we open the basket. For me, it was definitely a challenge that I happily accepted. 

Congratulations. I feel like though, sometimes it’s not just about cooking food on those shows, is it? The filming side of it is maybe a little bit unexpected because you think you’re just going to be there cooking, but they like a bit of drama as well, don’t they?

It’s funny you bring that up because when you’re doing that show, it’s an hour of TV, but you’re there literally for almost 20 hours, depending on what time you get chopped. And then the deliberation in between. But it’s always funny because they’ll ask you questions post you doing what happens, so you have to speak in the present tense. But it’s really fun to go through that whole process.

Do you think that cooking and food shows give people at home a realistic idea of what it’s like to be a chef or to cook? 

Maybe ten years ago, yes. There’s different levels of chefs: you have chefs that are on TV that sometimes don’t really cook because of the way the show is set up, you have prep people that get everything ready for you, so you’re basically just assembling things and swapping out, right? So, it looks very glamorous, but I’ve been in kitchens where it’s really, really hard, and it’s nothing like TV. That’s just a hyper glamorisation of what cooking could be or what people might want it to be. But the reality is, last week I worked 80 hours at this one particular hotel. So there are a lot of variables. It really just depends on what kind of establishment you’re in, what kind of restaurant, the organisation behind it, how much money they have to give you access to these really amazing pieces of equipment. But sometimes the kitchens, the equipment’s broken, the ovens don’t work. The stove knob is falling off. But that’s just what you have.

I think it’s interesting, and I imagine it’s similar over there to here, people love to watch cooking shows and food shows. But increasingly, people are not cooking at home themselves. We’re buying ready-made things from the supermarket or getting take aways. So we have this fascination with chefs and cooking, but we’re not really doing it ourselves as much. 

I think the fascination comes from the fact that it’s like watching a doctor at work or, watching a highly specialised person. It’s a skill that you can clearly see. It’s almost entertaining to watch someone put food together, taking raw vegetables and ingredients and preparing them into this amazing dish when it’s all said and done. I feel the fascination is the fact that people would love to do that, but don’t really know how to. So they end up just settling for second best, which is watching it happen. I think if more people could afford to actually have a chef cook for them, they probably would because then they get a fulfilling idea and situation. 

Do you think that everyone can become a good chef, an excellent chef?

I think so. If they care about food, I think you have to really deep down care about the food that you’re cooking. And if you honestly care about the food, then I think it’s almost 100% possible for anyone to get really good at cooking food.

You made your career in restaurants and then you made the decision to step away. Was that a difficult decision?

I wouldn’t say it was difficult. It was a little tricky because I stepped away, but I didn’t fully step away. I did events, I did training and things that would allow me to step into the kitchen for five minutes and then just bounce back out. I was in and out at different moments of time. It was very purposeful. I crave being in the kitchen. I love being in that atmosphere. I just love all aspects of it, except for when people don’t show up to work. But for the most part, I love being able to create the oohs and aahs for people coming in, being a part of that experience where people are coming to celebrate anniversaries, weddings, birthdays and whatnot. To be able to help facilitate that is really gratifying for me. I think that’s one of the main reasons. 

I guess it becomes part of your identity, doesn’t it? Was the idea to maybe spend more time with your family?

Definitely. I freshly became a dad, and, we had just started one of our e-commerce businesses. So me stepping away because my hours at the current place I was working, which was Buddakan, I was going in at about 12 in the afternoon and leaving at two, three o’clock in the morning. And that was five days a week. So having our first child, we decided, what would that look like if we were to start our own business so we can have more freedom of time? And it worked out for us. Thank God. We were able to step away from our nine-to-fives and work on our business from home. That allowed us to step away, and that’s how I left the restaurant, but not really leaving the restaurant and just taking on more of a consulting role.

You’ve got a few businesses now. Tell me about them.

Knife & Spoon is my first brand that I did solo, and that’s a spice blend brand. We create aprons, that’s where my cookbooks are housed. And that’s where all my blends are. Later on, down the line, Chef Angelo Sosa, who’s another Food Network chef and Bravo chef, we worked together on a new company called Flavour Bombe. That one is more blends for high-end hotels and restaurants and things like that. We do blends for the Hyatt, the Marriott, St. Regis, custom blends for different hotel groups and larger groups. 

I saw on your website too, that you do a lot of consulting and business consulting, but also culinary consulting as well. You must be very busy. 

I am very busy. My consulting business is definitely taking me a lot of different places. We just helped open up three restaurants in California over the last two years, creating the wok program for one of the restaurants, an Asian restaurant. I got hired to create the wok program, train the staff on how to cook on the woks, and facilitate that whole experience for the diners and for the guests and employees. With consulting, it really just depends. We have clients for different things, for recipe development, menu development, or just coming in and training staff to make food come out more efficiently.

And your big passion now is plant-based cooking. I guess for yourself and your own health and well-being, but also you want to help people understand how they can incorporate that into their own lives. Tell me where that came from.

My kids, my wife and I, we all sat down about ten years ago or so, and we watched What the Health on Netflix. And we went down the rabbit hole of all these different documentaries, and we decided, let’s try and cut out meat for a little bit and see what happens. One day turned into two days, into a week, months, and slowly but surely, we decided as a family collectively that we wouldn’t eat meat anymore and cut out dairy, seafood, and we haven’t really looked back. A lot of people do it for different reasons, health, environment. For us, it was just more of a conscious effort to eat more vegetables and just see how that goes. 

People seem to find it tricky to maybe get into doing that and using and becoming more plant-based. What is it that we’re missing? How can we make it easier for ourselves to do that if we’re not a chef? 

Great question. I think the first thing is re-educating ourselves on what’s possible, what actually plant-based means. Because at the end of the day, we’re all plant-based, regardless of whether you eat meat or not, it’s just different ends of the spectrum based on if you’re 100% plant-based or, maybe you just do meat a couple days a week. I think it’s just first really understanding what plant-based means and then realising how many vegetables you actually want to have in your diet every day versus meat or seafood or poultry. I think once you understand that, then the second part of that is to just look into other cultures: what do they eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? You’ll see that there’s so many options already available. It’s just a matter of tweaking a few ingredients, swapping out a few, and you can make a bunch of different things plant-based. I think that’s major in terms of what people are missing that want to be more plant-based. It’s knowing that you can have a soup for breakfast. If you’re in Japan, you’re eating miso soup for breakfast, and you can make it vegan. You can make it different ways. In Africa there are different things, there’s sauces that you’re eating for breakfast. Those are all vegetarian and vegan. It just takes going into different cultures and seeing what they’re having and then incorporating that into your lifestyle.

That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about that approach, and that’s a really good one because there are lots of cultures that are a lot more plant-based than our cultures perhaps traditionally are or were. It is becoming increasingly popular to be plant-based, particularly in Melbourne. And meat costs so much as well. I can see people having a desire to learn more, but maybe wondering about, I know this is the old chestnut, but will I get enough protein? Will I get enough nutrients from plant-based? What’s your answer to that? 

It’s a question that, like you said, always comes up, where do you get your protein from, or are you going to get enough protein? And the thing is, protein is in literally everything we eat. You will never not get protein, and there is almost never going to be a study or a situation that says people are not getting enough protein. It’s just this thing that people have created and have got people into believing that that’s the case. But there’s protein in quinoa. There’s protein in broccoli, peas, fava beans, you name it. The thing is, what makes people on a plant-based diet really successful is that you have to remember to eat the rainbow. What I mean by that is eating different colours of fruits and vegetables daily. Don’t just stick to a bunch of greens or a bunch of cruciferous vegetables. You have to eat the reds, the purples, the blacks, the greens, the yellows, orange. Obviously you can’t eat all of them in one day, but the goal is to, throughout the week, eat as many as you can. So breakfast looks different. Lunch looks different, dinner looks different, but incorporating nuts, berries, seeds, legumes, your vegetables, your grains, and you’re going to be in a good place. Of course, even with people that eat meat today, or seafood, they still need to take vitamins too. So it doesn’t matter if you’re vegan or a carnivore or vegetarian, pescatarian, you still have to take vitamins. It’s one of those things that they also tell you to make it seem like if you go plant-based, you’re not going to get your nutrients. But no one’s getting nutrients.

I did like your approach. I saw some recipes and a video where you were talking about being vegan-ish, and that perhaps people can do a soft launch, or they can have a little try, as you say, for a few days of the week, and they don’t have to commit. But then maybe that’ll become easier for them and more part of their life. 

100%. I think it’s important to just start with one day. And with that one day it could be just breakfast. You don’t have to do the entire day. So maybe you just leave out all meat by-products for breakfast, or lunch or dinner, whichever one’s easier for you. And you start with that, and then you do it again the next day, and then two days, three days, next thing you know, you’ve done seven days, no meat for breakfast. And then you can just add on lunch maybe here and there or make it Meatless Mondays or meatless Fridays. There’s a lot you can do to just dip your toes in without feeling this massive pressure. 

I created a bunch of different free resources that point people in the right direction, give them a few recipes to start, a few guidelines, things like that. So if you go to my website, knifeandspoon.com, there is a resource there on how to be more plant-based, and it’s completely free. It points you in the right direction and it’s a really great source for people to get some preliminary information and then dive deeper if they want to.

There’s a really cute photo of your son on that website. Are your family all involved with the cooking?

Yes, my oldest, she’s 16. She loves to cook, she loves to bake. She’s actually really good. And my two youngest, 12 and ten, they like to cook when they can. But everyone loves to jump into the kitchen. So, no, no finicky eaters there. They love to eat. 

I guess, as a full-circle thing, is you’ve maintained ties with St. Lucia, and you’ve been involved in initiatives to help young people entering hospitality there. Why is that important to you? 

I feel it’s really important to share the knowledge that you acquire over the years, over your lifetime. We’re all put here to exchange information with each other. That’s what makes the world an amazing place. I love being able to share and exchange the knowledge that I’ve acquired over the years, and there’s no better feeling than passing that information and that knowledge on to a younger generation that can then turn that into something even more spectacular. I love that.

What advice do you give young people entering the industry? 

I tell them to really make sure this is something they want to do, because it’s not something to take lightly. It’s a very serious career path, and if you are very serious about it, then just keep going forward. You’re going to make mistakes, but the goal is to learn from those mistakes and then just know what to not do next time. Don’t be too hard on yourself, even if you’re trying to be this particular type of chef, make sure that the things that you’re doing work towards that final goal and not just randomly work at any place just because it’s a job kind of thing.

You’ve had a lot of success over your career in all different areas, in the restaurants, in the cooking shows, in your businesses. What does success look like to you now compared to perhaps when you were a young chef starting out in New York? 

Success to me now is being able to hang out with my kids, travel, take time off. We were in St. Lucia for a month two years ago, and we’re actually getting ready to go to China for three weeks in about a week. So that’s success to me, being able to spend quality time with the family, travel. I love to travel and just learn. So, success is being able to afford to travel and not have to worry about work, for a couple weeks at a time. 

It’s been such a pleasure talking to you and I really appreciate it. There’s so much wisdom in there.

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