“Thanks to the beautiful irony of nature, it just so happens that many of the things that I love are in fact very good for me.”
—Seamus Mullen
Seamus Mullen learned butchery and got his start in restaurants while growing up on an organic farm in Vermont. However, it wasn’t until a trip he took his senior year in high school to Spain that he found his culinary calling. Enamored with the country’s food and culture, he returned to enroll at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he concentrated on Spanish language and literature. He then returned to Spain to study at Universidad Autonoma de Extremadura in Cáceres and take in the ancient city’s rich history before graduating in 1996. After returning home, he was encouraged by his grandmother Mutti to make cooking a career and eventually ended up in San Francisco working at Mecca, a modern American restaurant and lounge that focused on high-quality local produce; at the time the San Francisco Chronicle had given Mecca a three-star rating. Seeking the next challenge, Seamus moved to New York to work for Floyd Cardoz at The New York Times two-star contemporary Indian restaurant Tabla. There, Seamus says he learned more about spices from Floyd than anyone else. In 2003, he went on to open Crudo and crafted a Mediterranean-inspired menu based on raw fish.
Wanting to learn more about Spanish cuisines, Seamus moved back to Spain in 2003 and went on to work some of the best restaurants in the country, including Mugaritz (given two Michelin stars), in Errenteria, and both Abac and Alkimia, in Barcelona. After two years, Seamus returned to New York to become a founding partner in Boqueria, a casual but authentic Spanish tapas restaurant that opened in 2006. After earning a strong local following with Boqueria’s traditional tapas menu, Seamus gained national recognition in 2009 on Food Network’s Next Iron Chef.
While still working at Boqueria, Seamus was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a particularly terrible disease for a chef who spends fourteen hours a day on his feet. While Seamus was able to manage the disease with medication, it also sent him down the path toward treating himself with what he already knew best: food. Seamus’s experiments in the kitchen eventually led to the publication of his first cookbook: Hero Food: How Cooking with Delicious Things Can Make Us Feel Better. Unfortunately, unable to resolve a difference in the vision for Boqueria with his partner Yann de Rochefort, Seamus eventually struck out on his own. Today, Seamus is the chef and owner of Spanish restaurant Tertulia in Manhattan’s West Village. Tertulia received three stars from New York magazine and two stars from The New York Times and was named one of the “Top 10 New Restaurants of 2011" by Sam Sifton of The New York Times.
Seamus got his Asian-inspired 3⁄4 sleeves early in his career, not bringing them fully down so he could still cover them with a chef’s coat. However, he has one culinary tattoo that is particularly meaningful to him. Across his chest is an artichoke. Why an artichoke? Without missing a beat, Seamus says, “They are the poet warriors of vegetables.” While you might get the thorns on the outside, artichokes have a soft heart in the center. In addition, in Seamus’s view, artichokes are one of the hardest things to cook. When he has new chefs training at his restaurant, during a trial phase to see if they will make it, his favorite thing to give them is an artichoke. Like the tales of the final test at culinary school being to cook a perfect egg, he views the ability to properly cook an artichoke as a true test of a cook’s skill.
