Five Denver chefs who areon fire right now
The culinary scene in Denver is now on the national map, a dramatic improvement over the past 13 years, back when a national travel magazine ranked Denver 24th out of 25 cities by residents and visitors when it came to food.
“That was atrocious,” restaurant consultant John Imbergamo said last week at a culinary panel of chefs that kicked off Denver Restau-rant Week.
Fast- forward to this year, when seven restaurants and chefs in metro Denver made the semifinals for the James Beard Foundation Awards.
“That’s never happened before,” said Imbergamo. “It’s a very strong indication that people are paying attention to Denver.”
Kevin Taylor, who started his first restaurant in Denver in 1987, reflected on how the food scene has changed since then— a hotly competitive scene, with many more good restaurants and top talents mentoring a new generation.
“Chefs are responsible for other chefs, and giving good training,” Taylor said.
Right now, rising stars are working hard in restaurants across the Front Range, and here are a few of those aspiring chefs.
Franco Ruiz, 28
Chef de cuisine, Fruition His passion for cooking started when he was a kid growing up in
Southern California.
“My dad was a chef in San Diego, and I started cooking with him in his kitchen at 13,” he said. “It was a big inspiration for me.”
At age 17, Ruiz entered the San Diego Culinary Institute. After graduating, he went to work in Spain at such Michelin- starred restaurants as Ni Neu in San Sebastian, which focuses on contemporary Basque cuisine.
“Working at aMichelin- starred restaurant is a lot more intense,” said Ruiz, 28. It teaches you a lot about professionalism, about caring for the product and about how you carry yourself, he said.
He left Spain and came to Denver to help a friend open Hops & Pie in the Berkeley neighborhood. He’d planned to return to California but got hooked by Denver’s culinary boom. He began staging at restaurants around town.
At Fruition, he prepared a fourcourse tasting for chef- owner Alex Seidel, who immediately hired him as sous chef.
Since then, he’s won two local culinary competitions, including the People’s Choice award for best food and wine pairing at the Denver InternationalWine Festival, put on by theWine Country Network.
On Sunday, he’s competing in Cochon 555, the heritage pig cooking competition at Denver’s Ritz- Carlton.
“I’m going to make my traditionalMexican food, with my own twist becausemy cuisine has evolved over the years,” he said. “My inspiration with pork has always been my heritage, growing up in the kitchen with my father and my mom.”
Luke Bergman, 34
Executive sous chef, ChoLon
He moved to Denver just six months ago, lured by long- time friend Lon Symensma. They met in culinary school and shared the same mentor, Xavier Le Roux, who had worked in such legendary classical French kitchens as Le Pavillon in New York.
Bergman, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., graduated from the Culinary Institute of America then worked as chef de cuisine at Tom Colicchio’s Colicchio & Sons and as executive sous chef at DannyMeyer’s The Modern at the Museum ofModern Art in Manhattan.
In 2010, he was the first American to win first place at the International Trophy Passion Cooking Competition in Paris, organized by the Academie Culinaire.
He came to Denver fromMiami Beach, Fla., where he was executive chef at 1826 Restaurant, and is working with Symensma to start a restaurant with modern American cuisine in Stapleton’s Eastbridge Town Center, expected to open this fall.
“My style is definitely progres- sive,” he said.
He likes to show technique— but with a twist, “like showcasing a radish ( with) fresh goat cheese rolled in the zest of a lemon, and presenting it in a way that looks different.”
He’ll be executive chef at the new place and plans to serve contemporary cuisine with influences of his travels around the world, from Switzerland and Tokyo to France and Barcelona.
Gabriela Navas, 36
Pastry chef, Panzano
Born in Honduras, she emigrated to Miami at age 5 and planned to become a broadcaster.
She enrolled at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale to get a broadcasting degree and in her free time she baked cakes from scratch to sell at school fundraisers.
Her artful creations triggered such a positive response that, after getting her broadcasting degree, she enrolled in the Art Institute’s culinary program.
After earning a degree in baking and pastry, she started selling her customized cakes— tiered and sculpted with elaborate fondant work in shapes such as Gucci bags and sushi plates.
Eventually, she moved with her husband to Denver, and executive chef EliseWiggins hired her as pastry chef at Panzano because of her ability to combine artistry with complex layers of flavor.
“I love to eat, and I love desserts,” Navas said. “I just love working for a restaurant where you can focus on the creative and artistic side and can create beautiful desserts.”
Navas makes all Panzano’s desserts, from the apple crostada to the chocolate hazelnut tart, along with customized wedding cakes in such shapes as a Chanel purse.
This summer she’s going with Wiggins on a culinary trip to Italy, where she’ll learn to bake rustic wood- fired breads and traditional Neopolitan desserts and pastry such as sfogliatella, a light flaky delight that looks like a seashell because of its many layers of tiny ridges.
“I’m super- excited about learning how to make it from Italian experts,” she said. “It’s challenging. You need the right texture in the dough, layering it with butter. It has to be rolled tightly, almost like a cigar, with all those layers of butter in between. When it’s done, it’s like a nice buttery clam.”
Peter Varkonyi, 27
Chef de cuisine at Beast + Bottle
As a kid, he spent lots of time at his grandfather’s bakeries in Queens, sampling his Eastern European breads and pastries. By 13, he’d already set upon his future career and enrolled at the Chantilly Culinary Academy during his final two years of high school, moving on to earn a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts at the New England Culinary Institute.
After graduation, he landed a job as executive chef at the Home Hill Country Inn in New Hampshire and started building relationships with local farmers and experimented with nose- totail butchery, which helped him the 2013 Best Seasonal InnMenu award from “Yankee Magazine.”
Wanting to test his skill in a larger market, he moved to Napa, Calif., in 2014 to work with Chef Brad Farmerie, who had earned a Michelin star at New York’s Public restaurant— and recently had taken the helm at the historic Fagiani’s in Napa.
“I’d never had a mentor,” said Varkonyi. “He had a stylistic approach I’d never seen from a chef before and the willingness to take some extraordinary risks.”
But when Fagiani’s rebranded, Varkonyi wanted to move on. Farmerie told him about Paul Reilly and his nose- to- tail restaurant, Beast + Bottle, in Denver.
“Chef Paul was in New York cooking for the James Beard Foundation, and he used Chef Brad’s kitchen,” said Varkonyi. “It’s the constant camaraderie of the brotherhood of chefs.”
Reilly thought the young chef demonstrated an “incredible mastery of charcuterie,” and hired him six months ago.
Varkonyi is excited by the restaurant and the city.
“I was looking for a food area that was growing, evolving and wanted to develop,” he said. “Denver is on that cusp.”
Spencer White, 27
Sous chef, Black Eye Coffee
He got hooked on restaurants while waiting tables to make money while attending Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs.
And after transferring to the University of Colorado Denver for a bachelor of arts degree in communications, he landed a job as garde manger chef at Frank Bonanno’s Luca d’Italia, where he impressed Bonanno with his passion for cooking and infectious optimism.
By the time he graduated, in 2013, he also had done a public relations internship with Bonanno Concepts but “missed all the excitement in the kitchen,” he said.
So White headed to Europe, backpacking around to experience the different culinary cultures and food halls. He landed in Copenhagen.
“I really wanted to work at Noma, the number one restaurant in the world,” he said of the two- Michelin- star restaurant of Nordic chef Rene Redzepi. “I was very interested in the food they were doing. It was very cuttingedge, hip and cool.”
Instead, he landed a stage— an unpaid internship where cooks and chefs work briefly in a respected chef’s kitchen to learn new techniques— at Bror, a hot new Copenhagen restaurant started by two sous chefs from Noma, Sam Nutter and Victor Wagman.
“It was January, the middle of winter, and it was great to see all these cool things they’d foraged, preserved and fermented in summer that they were using in winter,” he said.
When he got back to Denver, he found a job at the Populist as a line cook then caught the attention of Alex Figura, co- owner and head chef at the Lower 48, who hired White as sous chef.
When Lower 48 closed last year, the two went on to consult at Black Eye Coffee and are planning to open a restaurant in RiNo.
“It’s so rewarding to make something with my hands all day,” he said. “I love the team atmosphere ( of the kitchen), and you become family after awhile.”