FROM SEED to STALK
Chef Jeremy Fox has a way with vegetables. Laura Brehaut explains.
Chef Jeremy Fox opens his debut cookbook, On Vegetables: Modern Recipes for the Home Kitchen, with a recipe that doesn’t contain a single one. Not an herb, not a leaf, not a petal in his sumptuous, béchamel-laden grilled cheese sandwich.
“It’s something everybody loves, a grilled cheese,” Fox says. “Vegetarian food can be just as … awesome as anything else.”
The more than 80 other recipes are devoted to utilizing vegetables in their entirety: tops, greens, roots, scraps and shells. Fox is not a vegetarian: He cooks pig trotters regularly and enjoys the occasional steak. But he’s a firm believer that vegetables — from “seed-to-stalk” — warrant the same enthrallment as meat.
Fox rose through the ranks at Michelin three-starred California restaurant Manresa, where he first delved into charcuterie. Learning how to make the most of an animal, “nose-to-tail,” laid the groundwork for his innovative approach to vegetables.
“A lot of my food philosophy was taken from Paul Bertolli (author of Cooking by Hand, Clarkson Potter, 2003) without even meeting him, as well as David Kinch (Manresa chef-owner). So, when I started cooking vegetables, that was just the way I knew and it really took on a life of its own,” Fox says.
After moving on from his chef de cuisine position at Manresa, Fox headed the kitchen at vegetarian restaurant Ubuntu in Napa Valley.
The accolades rolled in following a fortuitous review in 2008: “Ubuntu is where virtue meets naughty sensuality,” then-New York Times food critic Frank Bruni wrote.
Among other honours, the restaurant earned a Michelin star. Fox was at a professional high point but his mental health and personal life were suffering; he was self-medicating with prescription drugs.
“Anything I’ve learned, whether it’s through food or life, is from making mistakes,” Fox says. “If you don’t screw up, then you don’t really know how to fix things. You don’t realize how good something is if you haven’t had bad. That’s a running theme throughout food and life.”
He left Ubuntu and started his recovery, eventually moving to Los Angeles and becoming head chef at Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica (where he’s executive chef today). He moved away from the “gorgeous, complicated, hypernatural displays” he had specialized in, ditching the tweezers and 15- to 20-hour work days.
Instead, he started creating “food that looks like itself, but tastes like a better version of itself.”