Search Weight Loss Topics:

Home » How to lose weight safely » The making of chef Gabriel Rucker: talent, hard work and 'Ruck Luck'

On a cold, sunny Sunday in early January, Le Pigeon chef Gabriel Rucker lies next to 6-month-old son Gus on the living room floor of his compact home, a football game on the TV. In the kitchen, Rucker's wife, Hana Kaufman, spoons vegetarian chili from a pot. Hanging nearby is the gold medallion Rucker won at last year's James Beard Awards naming him the best young chef in the United States.

In many ways, the vegetarian chili says more about Rucker than the cooking award. The chef, who has liberally loaded twisted takes on classic French fare with rich goose liver, veal cheeks and beef tongue for the past half-decade at his Southeast Portland restaurant, is on a meat-free kick. "We both gained a lot of baby weight," his wife quips. Rucker has stuck to the diet, at least at home, to lose a few pounds and get healthy, hoping to be a better father to Gus.

From the moment he decided to pursue a career in food, few have doubted Rucker's talent or drive. But the climb has been steep. In the past 10 years, he has risen from a party-hard college dropout to Portland's most highly decorated young chef.

He's not resting on his laurels. Just over a year ago, with strong support from staff and friends, he opened a second restaurant, a downtown bistro called Little Bird. A cookbook is in the works. But Rucker is no empire builder. Right now, he's happiest cooking on the line at Le Pigeon and spending time with his family.

Earlier the same week, Le Pigeon is a haven from the cold rain beating down on East Burnside Street, all brick and copper and pilot flames burning on the range. Rucker, carrying a tray of avocados, walks up from the basement prep kitchen, where a handful of young, bearded cooks are helping get ready for the night's service.

The 30-year-old chef is tall, but no longer lanky. A caricaturist might zero in on his large nose and ears, but his most dynamic feature are his dark, slightly asymmetrical eyes, which alternately shine -- as when he juts his lower teeth in a mischievous grin -- then dart about guardedly, as if he's about to get jumped. Still, he's handsome, rakish even. Today, Rucker is wearing one of his signature trucker caps cocked at a 45-degree angle from his forehead.

As Rucker slices avocados, a man with a bluetooth device in his ear walks in and asks to see Le Pigeon's last two electric bills. The owners of Le Pigeon's three-story building are looking into putting solar panels on the roof, he says.

"Go downstairs and find Fairlie (McCollough, a manager)," Rucker says. "I don't touch the bills."

Freeing himself from restaurant management tasks -- like paying bills, or even knowing where to find them -- is a way for Rucker to concentrate on his strong suits, cooking and recipe creation.

James Beard voters, made up of "expert" panelists and former award winners (now including Rucker), are not required to explain their picks. But if there's been a theme to the positive critical reception to Rucker's cooking, it's been praise for his natural creativity.

Rucker started cooking relatively late in life and rarely consults cookbooks, preferring to build recipes in his head. His cooking is truly personal, with recipes riffing on everything from inside jokes and wordplay to something he ate the night before.

Like Wendy's, Le Pigeon's burger comes with a square patty. A peanut butter milk dessert was similarly inspired by the Dairy Queen near Rucker's house. An entree of pan-seared pigeon with angel hair pasta, pesto and parmesan, added to the menu last month, would have had walnuts, but Rucker, who prefers alliteration, chose pecans.

His recipes often sound bizarre: Barbecued eel toast, foie gras profiteroles. But the results display a surprising balance, marrying salt with acid, cooked food with raw.

Ask Rucker why he won the James Beard award, given to "a chef aged 30 or younger who displays an impressive talent and who is likely to make a significant impact on the industry in years to come," and he'll shrug.

"It's just a piece of metal hanging in my kitchen," Rucker says. "I don't think about it on a daily basis."

But for those who have known him the longest, watching Rucker on stage at last year's James Beard Awards in his black suit and purple Vans (he accidentally packed two left dress shoes) was a moment hardly imaginable a decade ago.

Rucker grew up on a quiet street in Napa, Calif., close geographically, but light-years culturally, from the limousine-chauffeured wine country tours and four-star restaurants of the greater Napa Valley. His father, Dave Rucker, was a civilian machinist at Travis Air Force Base. His mother, Laurie, was a teacher at a Napa elementary school.

He wasn't exactly a cooking prodigy. "People think that he must have been interested in cooking since he was knee high to a grasshopper," Laurie Rucker says. "I mean, he could make toast..."

In high school, Rucker was restless, seeking a new, more-anonymous circle of friends amid the music and drug culture of the Bay Area's booming rave scene. (He still plays techno music occasionally during prep shifts at Le Pigeon, but these days, he spends most nights at home.)

At his mother's insistence, Rucker finished high school, and, in 1999, enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College. Bored by a math class on his second day, he approached an adviser and, picking blindly from a list of vocational programs, landed in cooking school. "It sounded like good, blue-collar work," Rucker says.

The cooking classes, with their archaic lessons on the "five mother sauces," weren't exactly thrilling. But Rucker soaked up the lessons like a sponge. The once homework-hating student found himself picking up the cookbook of the French Laundry, noted chef Thomas Keller's Yountville, Calif. restaurant, and reading it, cover-to-cover, on his own time. Twice.

But the more advanced students in Rucker's class were those already working in restaurants. He left the program after one year and took a job at Napa's Silverado Resort & Spa. Eventually, he set off for Santa Cruz, walking up to a bistro's back door in his chef's whites to apply for a job.

"He was a recovering roller-blader with baggie jeans who listened to techno music and had no tattoos," says David Reamer, who cooked at the restaurant and remains a friend. "He was absolutely, 100 percent the opposite of what he is today."

The bistro gave him a job, the first of many in which Rucker enjoyed near-absolute creative freedom, with lightly supervised culinary experimentation and heavy on-duty drinking. But he was already accelerating past his peers.

"It was just obvious from day one that he was an unbelievably talented cook," Reamer says. "Even when he messed up it showed signs of greatness."

In 2003, Rucker and Reamer -- along with childhood friend Jacob Sims -- moved to Portland and landed in a low-rent Southeast Portland house. Rucker found a job at Paley's Place, where he picked up discipline and organization. But he was soon poached, along with fellow Paley's cook Jason Barwikowski, to help open North Portland's Gotham Building Tavern.

On a bright blue day in July 2004, Rucker's friends and Gotham coworkers drove to Washington's Washougal River for a day in the sun. Rucker and Barwikowski, by now close friends and friendly rivals, wandered off looking for big rock jumps. They found one, a 60-foot drop from the edge of a hiking trail.

Rucker leapt first, landing safely in the water. Barwikowski followed, but as he fell, onlookers gasped. He hadn't jumped far enough away from the cliff. On impact, Barwikowski glanced off a rock ledge, breaking his back in two places, shattering his tailbone, lacerating his liver and collapsing his lung.

Rucker, still in the water, pulled Barwikowski to shore and cradled him until an ambulance arrived.

"Gabe is a very calm, collected person, and very centered when he needs to be," says Barwikowski, who recovered after several months of physical therapy and is now executive chef at the newly opened Woodsman Tavern. "He was so kind and so gentle and helpful and solid. Afterward, he said it shook him up terribly. There was no doubt that he saved my life."

A few weeks later, Rucker got the first of many tattoos, a shark drawn by Barwikowski before the injury.

With Barwikowski in the hospital, Rucker began to take on more responsibility running the kitchen at Gotham.

"It was hard for him to be a sous chef," says former Gotham co-chef Tommy Habetz, himself a former sous to Mario Batali. "He's just naturally gifted and gutsy. I knew right away that he was on par with anyone I'd cooked with in New York."

Gotham, along with the larger Ripe restaurant group, collapsed on Rucker's 24th birthday. (There was a bright note to this period: It was the year Rucker met Kaufman, a Gotham server.)

Gabriel Rucker

Age: 30

Hometown: Napa, Calif.

Family: Wife, Hana Kaufman; son, Augustus Lightning Bolt

Restaurants: Le Pigeon, Little Bird

(A)typical dishes: Beef cheek bourguignon, square pattied-burger, foie gras profiteroles

Accolades for Rucker, Le Pigeon: The Oregonian Rising Star 2007, Food & Wine magazine Best New Chef 2007, The Oregonian Restaurant of the Year 2008, James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year 2011.

Significance of Beard Award: Five Portland chefs have won James Beard awards in the Northwest region, which stretches from Alaska to Wyoming. Rucker's rising star award, which came on his fourth nomination, pitted him against talented young chefs across the country. It was the clearest sign to date that Portland's dining scene has arrived on the national stage.

Less than a year later, in 2006, Rucker was offered his first head chef position. He would take over Colleen's Bistro, a small restaurant on East Burnside. In meetings about the new concept, named for the tattooed birds now flocking up his right arm, Rucker was told he had two months to make the struggling restaurant profitable.

Le Pigeon broke even two months later.

By 4:45 p.m. on a Friday in January, 10 people have already gathered outside Le Pigeon. The group includes a trio of young Portlanders in the wine business, a Nike consultant from New York who "always eats at Le Pigeon" and two young women visiting from the Ukraine.

The avocado Rucker sliced that afternoon has been turned into a terrine, a foundation for an architectural construction of crab leg, heart of palm, Meyer lemon sorbet and a Kryptonite-green compressed cucumber slice -- a masterwork of color and flavor. Rucker hands it across the counter to a customer.

Rucker is supremely confident on the line, trading jokes with cooks and describing dishes to diners. The kitchen is open and lively, and nearly every longtime staff member has a nickname -- "Bones," "Puma" "Mastodon." Rucker, sometimes called "Young Turk," prides himself on his restaurant's constancy. But like it or not, change has come to Le Pigeon. Five years ago, Rucker was the youngest chef in his own kitchen. Today he's the oldest.

When the restaurant opened in spring 2006, there were so few customers, Rucker cooked all the food himself. Owner Paul Brady placed 10 percent-off coupons in local phone books. Among Rucker's first customers were his parents.

"He had a menu posted on the glass window, and that wonderful logo, the pigeon made up of cooking implements, but nobody knew about it," Laurie Rucker says. "People would stop, look at the menu, occasionally someone would open the door."

Word soon got out, first for the brunch, then for Rucker himself, who charmed customers, remembering names and favorite dishes. The coupons disappeared, then the brunch, replaced by nightly crowds gathered under Burnside's covered walkway.

They came for the cooks in dirty T-shirts; the chipped plates and silverware bought from the Goodwill; the service with a slice of attitude; and most of all for Rucker, the chef who'd never (and still hasn't) been to France but was reinventing French food. It all added up to a kind of magic, with fellow Gotham-refugees Erik Van Kley and Su-Lien Pino helping make Rucker's recipes a reality.

Rucker was named one of Food & Wine magazines best new chefs in 2007. Later that year, Andy Fortgang, a high-impact manager who grew up in upscale New York restaurants, came on board. Service eventually met the high standards of the cooking. Le Pigeon was named The Oregonian's 2008 co-restaurant of the year.

"It was crazy at that time," Fortgang says. "A basic thing in restaurants is position numbers. Every seat in a restaurant has a number so you can give people what they ordered. When I got there, servers would walk up to a table and say, 'Who's got the chicken?'"

In 2010, Rucker, Fortgang and Van Kley began brainstorming a second restaurant, partly as a way to give Van Kley his own kitchen. Little Bird, a handsome downtown bistro that shares an affinity for avian nomenclature with Le Pigeon, opened that December.

And a Le Pigeon cookbook is beginning to receive offers from publishing houses. The book will be written by Meredith Erickson, who co-wrote last year's impressive Joe Beef cookbook, with photos from Reamer, who has remade himself into a food photographer.

Right now, the mere idea of another big restaurant opening gives Rucker more headaches than excitement.

Kaufman, who works one night a week at Le Pigeon, agrees. "We talk about how fun it would be to live in New York, or live in Paris," she says. "But it's just fantasy stuff. It wouldn't be fun to have to live in those places and run restaurants. It's just so much work."

In many ways, Rucker has already exceeded any reasonable goal he could have set in his career. The Beard award, the first national cooking honor for a Northwest chef (five Portlanders have won regional Beard awards), was the icing on the cake. But he holds his Food & Wine best new chef honor -- a goal he set in his early 20s -- closer.

More important than the personal accolade, which Rucker attributes to the hard work of his staff and a healthy dose of happenstance (his family calls it "Ruck Luck), was the people the Beard award brought to his restaurants. After the ceremony, the 36-seat Le Pigeon served more than 100 diners a night, four nights in a row.

If anything, Rucker's roots in Portland are growing deeper. His parents recently bought a condo in Northeast Portland, stopping by Rucker's compact home two Sundays ago for a (yes, vegetarian) meal.

"I'm focusing on different goals outside my career right now," Rucker says. "Just being a restaurateur isn't the end all, be all. I'm lucky that I hit those goals, but now it's all about growing in a different facet of my life.

"Keeping the restaurants on par, being an excellent dad, an excellent husband. To come home, see my son smiling, and to know that my wife is happy. That's bigger than the James Beard Award that's sitting in my kitchen."

-- Michael Russell

Originally posted here:
The making of chef Gabriel Rucker: talent, hard work and 'Ruck Luck'

Your Full Name
Your Email
Your Phone Number
Select your age (30+ only)	30313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120
Select Your US State	Select Your StateAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWashington,DCWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming
Program Choice	Select Your ProgramInjectable HGHInjectable TestoteroneInjectable SermorelinInjectable Weight LossInjectable HCG DietInjectable Vitamins
Confirm over 30 years old	Yes
Confirm that you resident in USA	Yes
This is a Serious Inquiry	Yes
Message:

Home » How to lose weight safely » The making of chef Gabriel Rucker: talent, hard work and 'Ruck Luck'