“I have so many more [tattoos] to get. It’s going to be a lifetime’s work.”
—Scott Anderson
If you have ever been to Princeton, New Jersey—a charming, small college town with an excellent food scene and a pretty decent brewery—hopefully you stopped into one of the best things about the town: Scott Anderson’s restaurant Elements. There, chef and co-owner Scott Anderson has been making dishes that go head-to-head with many of the top restaurants in the big cities across the country since October 2008.
Scott was born in New Jersey, but grew up in Florida and Japan as his father traveled working for IBM. Scott had, from a young age, worked as a busser or server for spending money but when he was eighteen and working in a small restaurant in Florida the dishwasher didn’t show and Scott filled in. In addition to washing dishes he was soon helping with prep and raw ingredients. Scott says, “I was good at it and worked really fast so the chef asked if I would rather work in the kitchen and learn to cook, rather than just be a busser.”
Scott enrolled at Rutgers University in1991 to study psychology and sociology but says “Too many Phish shows and girls got in the way.” He spent the next several years traveling and cooking until he landed in Princeton, New Jersey, cooking at Teresa’s Café, a casual Italian restaurant that was part of the Terra Momo Restaurant group, a local restaurant group that owned several Italian-themed restaurants in the area. In 1997 he was able to take a head chef role at Mediterra Restaurant and Tavern the group’s main higher end Italian Restaurant. From there the group had Scott move to Denver to be the head chef for their new Mediterra location. Scott lived in Denver for ten months but things didn’t work out and he moved back to New Jersey. When he returned Scott started to become uneasy at the Princeton Mediterra location as he started to feel stifled creatively. He says, “I was experimenting a lot with my pastas and dishes and they really just wanted me to cook the same food.”
In 2001 Scott left to take a line cook position at the Ryland Inn, the modern American fine dining restaurant and New Jersey’s only ever New York Times 4 star restaurant. There, working under head chef Craig Shelton, Scott began to learn and take his cooking to another level. He worked his way up through the ranks in the kitchen and eventually took over as sous-chef. He worked as sous for eight months before a water main burst, flooding the restaurant, and eventually forcing it to close in 2007.
While unfortunate, the Ryland’s closure left Scott free to work on his own concept with his soon-to-be new partner, Stephen Distler, a semiretired private-equity executive turned restaurateur. In October of 2008 they opened Elements. Scott’s success there led him to be named one of Esquire magazine’s “Best New Chefs of 2011.” The magazine states, “If Anderson had merely given Princeton its one great eatery, he’d be a hero, but he is in fact in the vanguard of modern global-American cuisine.” Also, in 2012, Opinionated About Dining ranked Elements as number thirty-five on its list of “Top 100 U.S. Restaurants.” Scott is constantly working to improve his cooking and that same attitude flows into his tattoos and, with quite a few already, he is not sure he will ever be finished. Scott got his first tattoo, a back piece that combines Japanese symbols with the Anderson tartan, when he was eighteen years old living in Florida. In fact, you can see the Asian influences from his time growing up in Japan throughout Scott’s ink. His right arm sports the Steal Your Face Skull of the band The Grateful Dead with the sitting Buddha. Below this are Scott’s crossed Zakuri shashimi knives. The piece combined forms a Jolly Roger–style pirate symbol. Under that is the Chinese symbols for Wu Wei or “effortless action” placed purposely on his knife hand and on the other side of his wrist is the logo for Elements. His left arm sports a lotus blossom with a passage from the Tao te Ching, the fundamental text to both philosophy and religion of Taoism.
In addition to these tattoos, Scott has a symbol of his commitment to his wife inked on his left hand. In 2012 Scott finally got married to his girlfriend of seventeen years. He doesn’t wear jewelry, not wanting anything to get caught in the kitchen, so didn’t want to wear a wedding ring. Soon after they were married Scott went out one morning and got the tattoo on his left hand that combined his love of fishing and his love for her, fishing for the ring all those years. He didn’t tell her about the tattoo in advance, but luckily, she loves it.
Scott continues to grow and improve his cooking and, in 2012, Scott and Stephen opened their second location, Mistral, a casual Mediterranean-inspired tapas restaurant. When not getting tattooed or fishing, Scott can usually be found outside of Elements, replacing yet another small patch of grass to plant herbs for the restaurant.
