Chef Salad Highlights Part II: The Smart, Funny and Sometimes Provocative Comments Our Local Chefs Made in 2012
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| Buchanan |
| Keenan Bosworth, Clayton MacGregor and Josh Riesner at Pig & Pickle |
Describe your experience at Rancho Pinot: When you go to work for Chrysa, that's a good introduction to this town. She's very demanding. She can be across the room and totally catch something going on in the kitchen. She suffers no fools, and she doesn't sweet-talk you. She breaks people. But her goal is to be massively consistent, and it's all about the customer experience.
Describe Phoenix as a food town: Everybody wants to bite and chew everyone else up. You can get away with pedestrian shit here if you're flamboyant and have your hair a certain way.
Josh Riesner, chef and co-owner of Pig & Pickle
What is your bartender-partner Clayton MacGregor's style?: He doesn't do the "light your Tiki drink on fire" bullshit, just straight-up, old-school cocktails. I don't need a guy in a newsboy cap and ostrich-skin boots making my drinks, and I don't need $30 booze in my martini. This neighborhood doesn't give a shit about that.
MJ Coe, master baker and owner of MJ Bread, pizza dough maker for Federal Pizza
I think it's safe to say your favorite thing to work with is bread, but why? Bread is so simple. It's the first thing to arrive at the table and the last thing to be taken away. Once you learn the cause and effect of ingredients you can basically tailor the dough's taste, texture, color, all of it. And to me the manipulation of that is just - I don't want to say it's a God complex, but to have control over something like that versus someone in culinary handling a protein, there are just a lot more variable to making bread.
What are the hours like for a baker who's also a small-business owner?: It's a blatant disregard for sleep. There have been nights where I get a call at 2 a.m. because our mixer isn't working and I have no idea how to do electrical work. Electrical scares the hell out of me but it needs to be fixed. So you look at the puzzle, find a solution, and fix it.
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Barrio Cafe
2814 N. 16th St., Phoenix, AZ
Category: Restaurant
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