Mentored at Braise, he starts eclectic catering business
When Nathan Heck started cooking, it was all about hustle and hard work for payday. A decade into his chosen career, he’s shifted his focus to farmers, local foods and building a business of his own.
The shift comes directly from his four years working in the kitchens at Braise, where chefs Dave Swanson and Matt Plummer showed him a different approach.
Since 2016 he’s been the chef at Phoenix Cocktail Club, where they’ve stopped offering a daily menu, so he’s now cooking only for events. It seemed the perfect time for him to take the leap, and in September he officially opened Factotum Custom Catering with his girlfriend, Laura Maigatter. The couple, who live in Bay View, are doing catering and pop-ups incorporating local foods and world flavors.
Look for their next pop-up, a fivecourse Wisconsin holiday dinner plus snacks paired with cocktails from Dock 18, coffee from Hawthorne, and desserts from Miss Molly’s from 6 to 8 p.m. Dec. 16. Tickets are $80. To purchase tickets, go to the Facebook pages for Factotum Custom Catering, Hawthorne Coffee or Dock 18.
Restaurant roots
My grandpa had a restaurant, only up until I was about 6, on Mitchell St. The restaurant closed, and my mom was just cooking at home. We’d go visit family in Indiana, and 90% of our time there was eating food. Food was a very big thing growing up.
My first kitchen job, when I was 19 or 20, that was just working at a catering company at MSOE. I really got interested in it from there.
His driving force
At the beginning, it was a fun, highpaced style of work. As I went forward, I got introduced to different chefs, restaurants and books that had more of a passion for the quality of food and the health aspect of it. The importance of locally driven food, and that responsibility, became more of the interest and passion.
Milwaukee mentors
I worked at Braise for about four years. Every year was a different step of learning. Prior to that, all the chefs I knew taught me a good work ethic: you put the work in, you get pay. At Braise, between chef/owner Dave Swanson and Matt Plummer, chef de cuisine, they taught me a lot about organization, creating recipes and being very focused.
Creating his company
We have a lot of interest in a lot of different kinds of foods, from American barbecue to Indian to vegan. We wanted that to be something that if someone had an interest, they could come to us for catering and we’d meet them where they want.
We were looking at Factotum and synonyms, and it means do-all. It fit. For instance, we did a wedding, and they wanted to do a bunch of breakfast food. They were also all gluten-free. We made that happen for about 200 people.
Home cooking
We don’t cook often at home, it is usually an early morning out and late night in. We do make tacos at home, those are good any time of day. My girlfriend is vegetarian, so we eat a lot of vegetarian food.
His twist
One thing I do is using ingredients from different cuisines. Maybe not showcasing that ingredient, but to help flavor a dish. A fermented pepper paste, or miso or soy sauce, just adds a little bit of extra umami.
Cookbooks on his shelf
I usually buy like six cookbooks at a time. One I hold dearly is “The Art of Fermentation” by Sandor Katz.
The last one I got is “Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking.” It tells you how to make fish sauce and soy sauce. Those are the books I like, to find base recipes for ingredients.
In his kitchen
I like bringing in some sort of fermentation. There are mason jars and buckets with me wherever I go. That is probably my favorite thing, pickling and fermenting.
Introducing…
My favorite ingredient is fermented soybean paste. That one is a fun one to introduce to people. I remember the first time I had it, from Seoul (Restaurant). It was so spicy without being spicy, just all that fermentation.
Then I went and bought a jar. It was a lot stronger than what they had, and I didn’t like it. I needed to find out more, so every day I tried something new. Now I’ve found the right one.
Discovering new ingredients
One I had to hunt down was calamansi, a citrus from the Philippines. It is about the size of a Key lime, from the description I was getting online, and it has a mandarin orange/citrusy flavor. We couldn’t find it anywhere, so we were going to go to Chicago. I ended up buying the pulp from a market on S. 27th St. across from Leon’s. I also go to International Asian Market on 35th and National, I like that one because it is a little smaller, too.
Holiday traditions
We’ll do a lot of the same dishes from when my grandpa was around, and at Christmas we do a weird combination of things. Polish sausages, duck blood soup (czarnina), pierogi, creamed herring, shrimp cocktail, that’s an oddball one to throw in there, but we always do those, and some sort of smoked salmon or cured fish. Another tradition is to pass the (oplatki) wafer, take a piece off and pass it to the person next to you and say something to them. Then we drink hot toddies. It’s always a good time.
Fork. Spoon. Life. explores the everyday relationship that local notables (within the food community and without) have with food. To suggest future personalities to profile, email nstohs@journalsentinel.com.