“I wanted to put something on my arm to brand me in my craft…. It was probably impulsive, but I guess most tattoos are.”
—Jesse Schenker
Growing up in Florida, Jesse Schenker always loved to cook. At an early age, he began requesting menus from his parents’ dinners and began to invest in a cookbook collection that has since grown to more than 300 titles. His first official kitchen job was at the age of fifteen working the line at a McDonald’s. Bitten by the “cooking bug,” Jesse enrolled in vocational school for cooking and has been in the kitchen ever since.
After graduating from vocational school, Jesse began building his resume in great kitchens in Florida and helped open City Cellar Wine Bar & Grill, a large upscale wine bar in Palm Beach, FL. After learning the ropes of a high-volume restaurant, the corporate chef urged him to challenge himself and move to New York, where he would learn the techniques of culinary perfection while surrounding himself with some of the best chefs in the world. Although the chef didn’t want to lose him in the kitchen, he knew Jesse was destined for bigger and better things.
Upon moving to New York, Jesse accepted a position as chef de partie at the two-Michelin-star rated Gordon Ramsay at the London and found time to stage at Per Se and Jean-Georges. But after a year at the London, Jesse began to set his sights on a restaurant of his own. In January of 2010, at the age of twenty-seven, Jesse (along with his girlfriend and now-wife Lindsay Schenker and Christina Lee, a pastry chef) started Recette, a small thirty-five-seat restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village. He also enlisted the talents of Savoy Bakery owner Brian Ghaw. Together they created tasting menus for exclusive private parties. Since opening Recette, Jesse has been a finalist for the James Beard Award for Best New Chef in 2011 and was named one of Forbes’s “30 under 30" in the Food and Wine category. At the end of 2011, he was invited to compete on Iron Chef, where he took on and beat Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian.
Although Jesse thoroughly enjoys life in his kitchen, he still needs an outlet to change things up and push some boundaries. Out of this need came “Mondays with Jesse.” This monthly culinary event is a chance for Jesse and his kitchen to get creative and experiment. They take about half of the seats out of the dining room and prepare ten-plus-course tasting menus on the second Monday of every month. The dinners have grown in popularity, and some of the favorite dishes have even made their way onto the daily menu.
This passion for cooking extends into Jesse’s tattoos. He got his first tattoo, a tribal image on his left shoulder, in 2002, and over the next two to three years, he built on it, adding a T-bone steak skewered with olive, lettuce, and tomato and expanding the tattoo to the back of his arm, where you’ll find a skull breathing fire, holding ice.
Jesse eventually got a chef’s knife on his left arm and, in 2006, started wrapping it in tattooed caul fat. He even brought a piece of fat into his preferred tattoo parlor, Addictions on St. Marks in New York’s East Village, where they stretched the fat around his arm and, with ink, essentially left it there forever. Jesse also tattooed lyrics from his favorite band Pearl Jam (from the song “Indifference”) around his thigh in 2007. Along his wrist, traced out in his own handwriting, are the words “All or None.” It’s a reminder to this determined chef of how he wants to live his life. Do it to the fullest or don’t do it at all. After the birth of their son Eddie, in 2011, Jesse and Lindsay both got his name tattooed on their right shoulders.
While not ruling out more tattoos, Jesse admits they aren’t really a focus for him anymore. Instead, his attentions are set on his new family and his restaurant. Recette is now running smoothly, and Jesse and Lindsay aspire to open a bigger restaurant somewhere in Manhattan.
NOTES FROM THE CHEF
When buying fish in the market, make sure to tell them that you want your fish skin-off. It’s just easier for cooking.