“I was looking for something that says ‘important,’ because that’s exactly what crux means. It’s the definition, the most important part, or a focal point or a puzzling problem.”
—Brandon Baltzley
Brandon is a self-described “Louisiana-born, low-country raised, nomadic chef, musician, writer, lover, fighter, and part-time schizo.” He has lived everywhere from Jacksonville to Savannah to Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. Growing up working in the kitchens of small-town bistros as a way to pay the bills, he focused his youth on the Savannah sludge metal music scene. He even spent several years touring with his band Kylesa. After tiring of being on the road for ten months out of the year, Brandon left the band in 2005.
He spent two years working at Cha Bella, an American-style restaurant focused on organic ingredients, first as sous-chef and later at executive chef. Brandon then moved to New York and spent the next five years working in various kitchens, including Marc Forgione’s (see entry in Part 1) Michelin-star Restaurant Marc Forgione and the brew pub 508 GastroBrewery. All of this experience culminated in Brandon taking the executive chef position at 6th Street Kitchen in East Village, known for its new American cuisine. In 2010, he moved to Chicago to work at the world-renowned restaurant Alinea, a three-Michelin-star restaurant regarded as one of the top restaurants in the world.
Chicago became Brandon’s stage to both reach new culinary highs and yet also fall to his lowest. Struggling to keep his drug addiction under control, Brandon lost or left four jobs at top restaurants across Chicago in less than a year: at Alinea; Schwa, GQ magazine’s 2009 “The Most Revolutionary Restaurant in America”; Mado, which he walked out of as executive chef along with his entire kitchen staff only a month after the opening; and lastly, after winning the executive chef job at Tribute, Brandon didn’t even make it to the opening. Instead, he checked himself into rehab after a five-day-straight binge on cocaine. Once out of rehab, he returned to cooking with a fury and focus like never before. He knew he had a lot to prove to redeem himself, but wasn’t sure how to start. “I wanted to do my own thing, but didn’t have the money to open a restaurant.”
Drawing inspiration from his own struggles with the structure and conformity of a professional kitchen, he formulated a project intended to give a solution to line cooks and sous-chefs who wanted to do their own food for people. In August of 2011, he created CRUX, a monthly pop-up, with a group of local Chicagoans. “I knew a lot of chefs who wanted to do their own dinners and menus but couldn’t use the name of the restaurant or sometimes even their own name because of contractual obligations. CRUX was created to give them an umbrella to have an outlet.” The dinners at first were once a month for around forty people, but soon expanded to weekly dinners for around ten people as well. Six months into starting the dinners in Chicago, Brandon took CRUX on the road and has now collaborated with dozens of chefs and served dinners in Maine, Pittsburgh, Miami, Atlanta, Calgary, New York, and many other locations in the United States. More dinners continue to be planned in more cities every month.
Although he doesn’t intend to fully give up life on the road, Brandon will soon pass CRUX’s reins to another chef, with the intention of it becoming an annual baton passing. CRUX is an outlet for chefs who don’t have a space to express their creativity, and now Brandon is finally getting that outlet. He is currently developing a farm-to-table modern restaurant called TMIP, which is slated to open soon. Situated on a plot of land an hour and a half outside of Chicago, with only ten to fifteen seats, he hopes to have an ever-developing menu based on what can be grown and foraged from the area. He doesn’t truly see his concept being fully farm-to-table, instead jokingly calling it “Hippy Molecular.”
Brandon’s eclectic, ever-changing tattoos echo the years he spent on the road. And there are a lot of tattoos to discuss. Brandon estimates he’ll have spent nearly twenty-two hours in a tattoo parlor just in 2012. Given that he’s been getting tattoos since before he was eighteen, many of them are in the process of being covered up or altered from the type of tattoos he got in his youth. He laughs, “I got a lot of old band logos and really shitily done stick and poke tattoos.” A goat head pentagram is across his stomach, and song lyrics and many of the logos down his left arm are now being reworked into vegetables and cuts of meat. As his rock-and-roll ink is being replaced by his new passion, his skin is a visual metaphor for his own life changes. Still, playful pieces like the crudely scrawled “chomp” (a piece he did himself) across his arm will stay to serve as reminders of the wild journey he has taken to get to where he is today. Others he will keep but hopes to touch up are his “I heart GA” tattoo from his time in Savannah and his “ragn cajn” across his knuckles. His knuckle tattoos he got as a gift from a friend on his nineteenth birthday in Orlando, Florida. A friend brought him there and told him that he would pay to have anything he wanted tattooed on his knuckles and that the next day they were going to Disney World. Prior to getting the tattoo, they drank a whole bottle of Wild Turkey, and the tattoo bled out at the theme park, ensuring its faded quality to this day.
Brandon continues to work on his culinary left sleeve of vegetables and says that he wants it to wrap up around his shoulder. All his work right now is done by John Biswell of Made-Rite Tattoo in Portland, Maine. He met him while doing a farming internship in Maine in preparation for the opening of TMIP. No longer living there, Brandon arranges times to go there and do eight-hour sessions at a time. He says, “It makes for expensive tattoos since I travel up there, but he is really good.”
Taken from the CRUX pop-up dinner at a private home in Lincoln Park, IL, with chef Keith Fuller, on November 1, 2012.
NOTES FROM THE CHEF
Sous-vide is a method of cooking food in a sealed plastic bags in a water bath.
When cutting the squash, I like to peel all twelve edges to give an almost cylindrical aesthetic.