For this star chef, one tropical fruit represents both past and present
NEW ORLEANS: For Nina Compton, who grew up in St. Lucia as the daughter of its prime minister, the idea was to graduate from her boarding school in England and then attend university there. She would study agriculture, because farming is big business back home. But, she said, after scouting some programs, she ultimately decided: “I didn’t want to be mucking around with cows.”
She preferred the kitchen. Specifically, she preferred breakfast.
“In the Caribbean, we have a big breakfast,” she recalled.
“Our house was fun and festive in the morning. Dad was making fresh juices, and we would sit at the table and talk about our day, what we would do.”
Skipping college, she got a three-month tryout cooking at the Sandals Resort in St. Lucia before requesting a transfer to its flagship in Jamaica. The flavours she discovered there ignited her culinary path.
“St. Lucia has French and British influences,” Compton said. “Jamaica has Portuguese, African, Indian, Chinese.” They also ate ackees and saltfish for breakfast. She tasted the combination of fruit and fish and fell in love.
“I went back to St. Lucia, where we have a huge ackee tree in our backyard, to find them all on the ground, and said, ‘What are we doing?’ Wasting these creamy, luscious bites. I never appreciated them because they’re not in our culture. But now, when I go home, my mom cooks them with saltfish, and everyone comes. It’s my feast. My homecoming.”
There has been much to celebrate. After shooting “Top Chef” in New Orleans in 2013
In the Caribbean, we have a big breakfast. Our house was fun and festive in the morning. Dad was making fresh juices, and we would sit at the table and talk about our day, what we would do. Nina Compton, chef
- she lost to Nicholas Elmi but was voted Fan Favorite - she decided she liked New Orleans enough to stay. In 2015, with her husband, Larry Miller, she opened Compère Lapin, serving a personalized mash-up of Caribbean-accented New Orleans cooking that encompasses the French and Italian influences of her earlier career.
In 2017, Food & Wine Magazine named her a Best New Chef, and this year she won the James Beard Award for Best Chef in the South. Last March, with Levi Raines, she opened her second restaurant here, Bywater American Bistro.
I met Compton there recently to talk about her success. At 39, she is naturally warm and free with hugs, yet her poise and focus on the task at hand announce a presence to be reckoned with. When she glides, silently, through the kitchen, the staff parts, like the Red Sea. Miller, a native of Atlanta, runs the dining room with expert charm, but no matter where he is, he seems always to keep a third eye trained on Compton, whom he clearly adores.
How she got here is quite a story.
Her childhood in St. Lucia was a privileged one: riding horses, sailing, travelling to Europe. That she chose a life in the kitchen seems due to her maternal grandmother, Phyllis Clark, a white Englishwoman who was a nurse in Scotland during World War II when she met her future husband, a native St. Lucian. “She is a tough cookie,” Compton said, and then shook her head. “Well, she was.” Clark died in 2017, at 95.
“There were no roads then, limited power. Having a stove was unheard of; they cooked over coal. But she kept her British ways, had afternoon tea every day. We lived in Soufriere, the most beautiful part of the island, which was framed by two mountains. She hated it. She would say, ‘ I felt I was trapped between them and couldn’t leave.’ I was the fourth of five children, and my parents travelled a lot, so my grandmother was the one keeping us in line.”
Clark’s insistence on the kitchen as the centre of their home made its impression. “But I was young, I also wanted to travel,” Compton said. “I wanted to experience more.” That is when she spent two years in Jamaica. “Cooking there opened my eyes,” she said. “I thought to give a dish taste I had to add butter or pork.”
A breakfast in Negril was a turning point. “It was at a roadside shack, and this Rastafarian with dreadlocks to his ankles offered me a coconut porridge. I said, ‘ That looks terrible.’ But it was creamy and sweet with ginger, nutmeg, caramelized plantains. All vegan, and those flavours were so enticing.”
She enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 2001. She then apprenticed for chef Daniel Boulud at Restaurant Daniel in New York. “I looked for the best when I left St. Lucia,” she said. “I wanted that in my repertoire.”
One day, she recalled, Thomas Keller came in for lunch. “Everyone started freaking out. There were cameras in the kitchen; we could see him. Daniel came in and asked, ‘What did he order?’ Lobster salad. I’m on garde manger, the cold food. He comes to my station and first throws my coffee cup into the trash. I am petrified. He’s maybe 5- 6, but his voice went right through you. He saw my mise en place and said, ‘What is this?’ The lobsters were thrown around and he took paper towels and wrapped each one nicely. ‘You have respect for ingredients, they’ll respect you back,’ he said. Then he asked me, ‘Can you select the nicest mussel?’ I’m thinking for Thomas Keller, big is better, so I picked the biggest. ‘No,’ Daniel said, ‘ the medium one is sweeter and more tender.’ He made that dish in a frenzy, the kitchen was on pins and needles. When he was done, he pointed to my station and said, ‘ This is how it should look. Every single time.’” She sighed. “But he could be angelic in the kitchen, too. When he cooked in his long white apron and pressed shirts, it was very thoughtful, the way he did it.”
The experience left its mark. “I would wake up at 4 every morning anxious about making a mistake,” she said.
She moved to Miami, where she stayed for 14 years, cooking first for the chef Norman Van Aken, whose sophisticated take on island ingredients such as conch and yucca inspired her. She then cooked at a private club in the Versace mansion, where she met Miller, and eventually landed at Scott Conant’s Scarpetta. “He once asked me, ‘ Do you know the biggest mistake with Italian food? Too many ingredients. There should be very few, but they have to be the best, so there is no hiding.’ I learned a lot of restraint cooking Italian. I started to appreciate ingredients, letting them shine.”
When she and Miller opened Compère Lapin here, they encountered a labour shortage. “I had no team behind me,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘ There are tons of restaurants, we’ll be fine.’” Desperate, she called a chef friend in Miami who recommended Raines, who was 24. “He drove out that weekend,” she said. “We never met; it was all on blind faith. I watched him cook, the way he thought about things. It was way beyond anything I’d seen.” Eventually, Raines grew restless, and Compton and Miller opened Bywater to make him chef and a partner. Raines shares Compton’s gift of turning disparate ingredients into something unexpectedly delicious. While she and I talked, he brought over tuna sushi dressed with Bloody Mary salsa. As, it turns out, it always should be.“When I moved here, I was petrified,” Compton said. “The city is so rooted in culinary history, but my food is a mix: Jamaica, New York, Miami, then New Orleans, where I can now leave my little footprint. When we opened Compère Lapin, I wanted to put goat on the menu. I could have just done it with curry and white rice, but I wanted to show more technique.” She brined, braised and shredded the goat, cooked it in a cashew and coconut curry and served it with sweet potato gnocchi. “I wasn’t sure it would sell,” she said. “We bought one goat a week. We serve 300 pounds a week now.”
We headed into the kitchen, and I realised that Compton, like Boulud, wore a pressed white shirt and long white apron (in her case, over skinny jeans and striped canvas flats). As she started on the ackee and saltfish, she filled the pan with onions, peppers and garlic, and the steam was fragrant. Has she thought about putting it on the menu? “I don’t know if people would get it,” she said, hesitantly.
“I try to bring people into my world, but I also try not to push it too much. Maybe one day.” She filled a plate. The saltfish was firm, only slightly salty, like smoked whitefish. The ackee, which is in the same family as litchi, didn’t taste as sweet as litchi. The canned version might be blander than the fresh, although it’s also safer; if ackees are improperly harvested, Compton noted, they can make you sick.
She had also made bakes, a traditional accompaniment that are essentially fried biscuits. Compton said you can make regular biscuits instead, or toast. I craved rice. I didn’t want to waste a drop.
Miller appeared stoveside and inhaled. Doesn’t he think this should be on the menu? He nodded. “It’s everything,” he said. “It’s delicious, it’s family, and it’s her.” — WP-Bloomberg