How do I open so many restaurants?
I have a secret team of chefs. Meet Charisse Grey.
Hola my friends,
Last week I wrote about my 30 year anniversary at Jaleo in Washington DC! I loved sharing memories of opening this restaurant, and also being able to shout out a few people on my team who have been with me since the start—Elmer, who has worked at Jaleo for 29 years (he started 3 months after we opened), and Maria, who has been here for 29 years as well.
I love being able to shine a light on some of these wonderful team members with you, so you can get to know them and also understand that while people might think a restaurant has one chef behind it, they actually belong to so many more people, an entire team of dedicated, very hard-working and talented people who are the reason we can do what we do.
I want to share today with you a little about someone else on my team…Charisse Grey, who has been with me for 13 years now, and is my Senior Director of R&D (that stands for research and development…keep your eyes open to my YouTube channel later this week for a new series from our R&D kitchen!). Charisse was born in Hawaii where she grew up surfing and working on her family’s organic farm, learning to cook from her mother and grandmother. Charisse is one of our secret weapons. (Well maybe not so secret anymore after this post!) She has helped us open new restaurants, fine-tune recipes, and feed hurricane victims all while genuinely being one of the smartest and kindest people I know.
Charisse started out with me as a cook at minibar after she had cooked with Michel Richard. When I hired her in October of 2010, she only stayed there for a few months before I was opening a few new restaurants in the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas and moved her over there to help get the kitchens ready.
Back then, minibar was a small restaurant with only three chefs, and I began using that team as my Delta Force — my A-team to open restaurants. I’d shut down Minibar for a few weeks and take those chefs with me to help get my new kitchens opened and my teams organized. That’s how Charisse got started with me…working at minibar, but also on this group of chefs that traveled with me and my R&D team to open new projects all over the country.
Charisse answered some questions about what it’s really like to work on the R&D team and all the different jobs she does for the restaurants and José Andrés Group as a company. She’s just amazing.
What does it mean to be an R&D chef?
It’s a little bit of everything, really. I think the title doesn’t really capture all of the work and responsibility of what happens. When people ask me what it is that I do, the shortest answer is that my job and goal is to bring José’s ideas to fruition. So if he sees an ingredient, an event, or a concept that inspires him, those are all things that I will diligently work on to ensure they come to life.
We work in the R&D kitchen at the office but we also work in the restaurant kitchens. We have so many different concepts—a food truck, concepts in stadiums and a two star Michelin restaurant, and everything in between—and we create dishes for all of them. We focus on the service style and price points and conceptually different types of food, always looking for inspiration from José when we are creating. You really need to learn José first to create food that reflects what he loves and enjoys.
When we design a menu, we are looking at how a menu item reads, what it looks like on the plate, how it tastes and in that sense I am always putting myself in the perspective of the guest. But I am also looking at it from the cook’s side: how it is prepared, what are the steps to making it delicious, but also making it efficiently.
Can you take us through “a day in the life”?
Sure…it’s always a little different but normally we arrive at work at the office around 10am and the chefs begin cooking and testing recipes. We’ll be talking about ideas and projects or a particular ingredient we like for spring, or a festival or holiday that’s coming up. Maybe someone will say we need to do something with green almonds, so each chef goes off and makes a recipe and then we all taste it and discuss it. The goal is for chefs to understand the ingredient so that they can create something with it.
We work in a big open area and we are also a resource for the company, so if chefs have questions about a recipe or a technique or the history of a dish, we have a big library of books to use as a reference.
How do you handle giving chefs feedback, especially when some of it is not going to be positive?
It is a lot of cooking and critiquing and sharing feedback which can be tricky, so one of the most important things we need to have with one another is trust. We make sure it is a safe space so that we can be honest, and trust that the person means you no harm when they give you their feedback. We all taste the dishes, and there are things you won’t like. You can say this is a good start. And then there are things that you love, we go through how did you do it, and then that becomes a mark point and then we record what we did exactly. It’s very detailed. We record everything and at the end of the week we have the good results and not so good results and see if there is anything we can get from that. Even the ideas we abandon are recorded. Nothing is lost.
And do the dishes you like end up on menus?
For the dishes we like, we look at what we can do with it…can this be an element that we can put together with something else to create a dish? Because we have such a big variety of restaurants everything we create should be able to find a home. So we land a dish and then we are like what is the matching restaurant? Maybe it’s too technical for Jaleo, but not minibar, but it’s perfect for Bazaar?
Then we can take the recipe to the chef at the restaurant and we train the cooks on it and work with the team to cook, plate, and put it together. Then of course we ask the chef of the restaurant what they think. They can say, yes I love it, or actually let’s tweak it, and we work together with the chefs to make it feel more like theirs.
Are you creating menus for all the restaurants or are the individual chefs making their menus?
The chefs are absolutely doing their own menus. We focus more on specials, seasonal dishes, and holidays or festivals. The restaurant chefs also do that too of course. They are not beholden to our R&D team – they can do their own twists. A restaurant should represent its executive chef. As much as chefs want to change the menu they can, they are empowered to do what they want, but I like to know when the menu change happens so I can understand and confirm that would be something José would like. José has a unique style so once you understand him, you can understand why he loves that dish, and why that has a place on the menu.
What is it like opening a new restaurant?
When we are opening a restaurant we talk a lot about the inspiration for the food and the concept. For the Conrad Hotel in LA, for instance, we spent two months building out the menu, testing techniques and ingredients. We developed 80 dishes but only 20 hit the menu (check out the menus for San Laurel and Agua Viva). You’re not only looking at what it tastes like but what it takes to produce the dish. We can’t have too many dishes with long prep times. That can impact the flow of the line.
What about cookbooks? Are you also involved in those?
Yes, I also help with the cookbooks, making sure the recipes are fine-tuned and work well for home cooks, so that is another facet of the job. And we do menus for special events, we travel with him a lot. We also do these fun one-off projects like creating the paella that was launched into space. His appetite for doing these things is unlimited; he wants to do many things and he tries to respect the team and our time and makes sure we have the time and the interest to do a project.
Can you share what are some of the highlights from your career, or favorite projects?
There have been a lot of successes and triumphs over the years. Every time you open restaurants it is a great feeling. And you get to watch them grow and become bigger and greater than you had anticipated when you first put the concept together. You watch them grow, like your children in some ways.
One of my favorite projects was the space paella. It was amazing, and I didn't realize how cool that was until people were like: Charisse, I don't think you understand what you did! That was really like nothing I have ever done and so many challenges. I made over 100 different versions of the space paella. I can only do what I do because of the people I work with and who support me and how we support each other. I am very thankful for my team.
Sounds like one smart and clever woman! Cudos to you! You are obviously very creative and culinarily knowledgeable; but when you pair that with your ability to sincerely lift up and commend those who you work with, you have the skill set of a real champ for any job in the industry. Jose is a lucky man - as are the rest of us who dine at these establishments. My experiences at his restaurants have never been anything less than a stellar and delicious learning experience for me. Best wishes to you
I saw the announcement for the 'space paella' last year -- How did you make it work for zero gravity? What a cool idea!