There is likely no bigger name in the Minnesota food scene than Gavin Kaysen. He is the brains behind Spoon and Stable, Bellecour, Demi and Mara. Kaysen has been recognized nationally with a James Beard Award for Best Midwestern Chef in 2018.
Kaysen, who was trained by French chefs and was groomed by super star chef Daniel Boulud in Manhattan, returned to his native Minnesota in 2014 and quickly gave Minneapolis star chef pedigree. Spoon and Stable in the North Loop neighborhood in Minneapolis was almost instantly the best restaurant in the Twin Cities.
Now, he’s working on helping the at-home chef with a new book, "At Home with Gavin Kaysen".
It's Kaysen's first book and as a husband and father of three boys, the award-winning chef loves to cook on his days off, and applies the lessons he’s learned in his restaurants to feeding his family and friends. It goes deeper and wider than the typical cookbook, offering step-by-step photography and tips from the star chef.
Kaysen sat down for an in-depth Q&A with Jason DeRusha on this week’s episode of “DeRusha Eats”.
Jason DeRusha: You brought your brand new book, your cookbook just out, “At Home by Gavin Kaysen”. Congratulations.
Gavin Kaysen: Thank you. It's crazy to see it in print.
DeRusha: So you posted a picture on Instagram with you and these stacks of books. What is that like, to see your book?
Kaysen: So it's wild. We’ve been working on this book for about a year and a half. During COVID we did these recipes and these online classes called “GK at Home”. And we would cook these recipes with so many people. And what was beautiful about that is that we learned what they could do and what they couldn't do at home. We learned what their questions might be that we didn't think about, and we would adjust our recipes. So we got through all of it. We had around, I don't know, maybe 60, 70 recipes and we thought, ‘what are we going to do with all this content?’ Somebody on my team said, ‘Chef, do you want to turn it into a cookbook?’ And then here we are, a year and a half later, and I'm signing over 2,500 books in nine hours, and we shipped over two tons of cookbooks yesterday.
DeRusha: Gavin Kason is the chef-owner of Spoon and Stable, Demi, and Mara. You have a catering company now called Spoon Thief Catering.
Kaysen: We have KZ Provisioning, which is also the other catering company, which is more privately based cooking for the sports teams, specifically the Timberwolves, Lynx and the Wild. Of course Bellecour Bakery. And then Socca Cafe, which is also in the Four Seasons.
DeRusha: I did a TV story with you before you opened Spoon and Stable. Did you think, I mean, what has it been? Eight years now?
Kaysen: It'll be eight years in November. Yeah.
DeRusha: Did you envision it playing out the way it has?
Kaysen: I mean, honestly, yeah. Yes I did because I wanted to see us do more, and I still want to see us do more. But more doesn't always mean more restaurants or more bakeries or whatever. More can mean a lot of things in our profession now. And I think that we've learned how to diversify ourselves in ways that are able to give back to our community and our teams. And I love that. So yeah, I definitely came into Minneapolis, and moving back home, with the idea that I wanted to build more than just Spoon and Stable. But how it unfolds and how it has unfolded, no, I didn't know that. How it would be that way, but certainly my dreams were there.
DeRusha: I think what I've always appreciated about you and admired is that often in this state, I think people think too small. So they don't shoot for something big because of, I don't know if it's a combination of Midwestern modesty or an inferiority complex that we're not Chicago or New York. But that's not been your approach. We need people to think bigger.
Related
Kaysen: You know, so every year I write a document for myself and I share it with my team. It's called the Dream Weaving Document. And I just want this document to be about us dreaming about what we want to do. Remove the idea of what you can't do. Remove the idea of what makes you scared, and just put in the document what you want to do. What if you could dream, what would it be? And, you know, it's crazy, I looked at our 2022 document, or the 2021 document. We did everything that we said we wanted to do in that document. We achieved it because we're writing down dreams. But with that, we're writing down goals and we're trying to hold ourselves accountable to what those goals look like. If we don't achieve it, there's no shame to it. It's looking back and saying, what did we do to miss that? Now do we want to do it again?
DeRusha: You said that when you were cooking for your guests, your fans, from regular people, random people, whatever, that they had different questions or thoughts about cooking. What sorts of things do we think about that maybe you were surprised or you didn't think about? Is it like equipment?
Kaysen: Some of it is equipment. A lot of it is intuition and understanding. What certain things go where. I'll give you an example. We were doing a class one day on how to do a red wine braised chicken, or also known as Coq au Vin. So we're braising the chicken. Now I'm teaching them how to make a roux. So that's equal parts fat and flour. In this case, we use butter and flour. You need two tablespoons of flour. So somebody added two cups of flour, not two tablespoons of flour. And they're like, what do I do now? It's over. Throw it away. I mean, you can't fix that. But what that taught me was that's a great tool that we use in the book. It's like, okay, if you break of vinaigrette, what do you do? Add water. Water Fixes it. You fixe so much in the kitchen and we just don't think about it because it's not in the recipe of how to fix something when it's broken. It's only in the recipe that if you follow it, it's going to be perfect. We learned if you follow, it'll turn out great. But here's a couple of tips that it might break and this is how you do to fix it.
DeRusha: Cool. A lot of cookbooks, I have never made a single recipe out of. Because you look and you're like, I'm never going to find all this stuff. I don't have five hours to do all of this. What was your goal with this cookbook?
Kaysen: I wanted to give people confidence at home that they can cook the food that I cook at home for my family and feel good about it. You know, it's the same. So in the restaurant scope, it's kind of the same reason why I opened and built Spoon and Stable before I opened and built Demi. Spoon and Stable allows me to bring the guests in, lots of guests in, and sort of get their trust with what we're doing. And then Demi's the tasting menu restaurant. When we want to do the five hour dish, you know, we can do that with you there. But I wanted to give people an idea of what I cook at home and genuinely it is what I cook at home.
DeRusha: You really make this stuff?
Kaysen: Three of the dishes that are in the book now, I made Saturday. I made the roasted chicken.
DeRusha: You made it for Instagram or you made it for real?
Kaysen: No, for real. For my family. I didn't even post it. Actually, it's funny because somebody on the PR team was like, ‘Chef, you have to post that. It's good for the book’. I'm like, well, whatever. It's a perfect piece of chicken.
DeRusha: Does your family give you grief about, oh, you're doing this for whatever, for the book?
Kaysen: My family gives me grief because they're like, ‘Dad, you look at your phone’. I said, yeah, but I'm looking at Instagram. It's for business, it's for work. And they're like, no it's not. And then it's this whole argument.
DeRusha: My kids don't buy that crap either.
Kaysen: I have to. I lost that argument so long ago.
DeRusha: You'll be at the William Sonoma at the Galleria on December 8th. And then Martin Patrick right in the North Loop right around the corner from you on November 17th. So if you want to do book signings you can do that. We were just talking about Bellecour Bakery, which has been sort of a pandemic-born huge success story?
Kaysen: Yeah. It's been amazing. It's so funny too because Carl and Marie, the owners of Cooks (of Crocus Hill) and I, we always joked about doing a combination store of Bellecour Bakery and Cooks because it was across the street from Spoon and Stable. And I feel like it was one of those conversations that we have here in Minnesota where you say, yes, you'll do it, and then you just never call them to do it because life gets too busy and whatever. It happens. Then sure enough, we then end up doing it as we close the store out in Wayzata and move it down to the North Loop. And then we just sort of see this amazing success of what it is. But you know what, I think also part of it is that they are stewards and geniuses at that retail side of things.
Our mind is hospitality and then production of what we do in the bakery. And when you sort of marry the two together, it's really a phenomenal experience to see because we're sort of managing that from a retail perspective. We go through so much more data and analytics there than we do in any of the other restaurants because of their retail mindset. And I'm learning so much through them. It's been so much fun. So we have the Bellecour Bakery in North Loop. We have the one in St. Paul. And we're going to open up a new one in Edina.
DeRusha: One of our texters was just in Lyon, France and saw Bellecour and that is where the name comes from, right?
Kaysen: So the story behind that, if I can tell it real quick, is the center of Lyon, France is Place Bellecour, and when I went and had dinner at restaurant Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France, who is the pope of cooking for us and has passed away a couple years ago. When he was in World War II, he was shot and left dead in the field and an American soldier, walked past him and saw him and picked him up, brought him to an American hospital and they gave him a blood transfusion. So he flies the American flag in front of his restaurant in Lyon. And I asked Mr. Bocuse why do you fly the American flag? And he told me that story and he says I do it for two reasons. One, I have American blood running through my veins, I say jokingly. He said, but in all seriousness, I fly the American flag because I don't want to ever forget what kept me here. And so I called the restaurant Bellecour and now Bellecour Bakery in honor of the French chefs who have taught me how to cook and bake and be a hospitalitarian. I owe a lot to Daniel (Boulud). I owe a lot to Mr. Bocuse and all of that French generation of chefs. And so that's really my tribute back to them.
DeRusha: Are the restaurants back at full strength? Are they better? What's happening?
Kaysen: They feel back. I mean, they definitely feel back with a lot of energy and excitement.
DeRusha: Is corporate business back?
Kaysen: It is. There's a lot of optimism out there and I feel as though people are remembering what it's like to be taken care of and remembering what it's like to have hospitality.
DeRusha: I know you give talks about your approach to hospitality. You have a phrase that you use?
Kaysen: It's restoration because the word restaurant comes from the word restoration and to be restored. We've been trained to go out to eat, and it's really your job, not mine, but we've been trained to go out to eat and rate an experience. To walk away from an experience and say, well, was it a 1-10? And while there's value to that, to a degree, the question is did you find restoration in the experience? Did you walk away from that dining experience and say, the food was great, the service was great, the ambiance was great, but all in all, I just had an exceptional night having dinner with you. And that was really an important and powerful part of my night or my week. And we're seeing people just get to the restaurant and be willing and open to have that experience. It's just so gratifying to be able to take care of people and to walk to their table and see how they're doing. And they're smiling and they're happy.
DeRusha: How do you train service people? As a critic, I will say one of the failings of food critics is that we focus so much on the food. When really what people remember is whether they were taken care of and delighted as they were in the hands of a server or a bartender or whatever the case may be.
Kaysen: You have to teach that. You do. It’s a total work in progress. I think it's about who you hire. And I think a lot of it comes down to kindness. And do you want to take care of people? Do you want to serve others? And I genuinely believe that if you have a restaurant, and 95% of the entire team is there to serve others, the 5% will basically leave. Because you kind of look around the room and you're like, man, I don't really belong here. Everybody likes to take care of people except me.
You can order Kasen’s book “At Home” here.
Related
Related
