The Knife's Edge: Three Twin Cities Up-and-Coming Chefs

Landon “Colonel Mustard” Schoenefeld is working the grill station at Nick and Eddie, strategically placing burger patties around a metal grate on top of a mound of coals. “They told me I’d be frying hamburgers for the rest of my life,” he says, as he places two more on the sizzling hot grate and quickly pulls his fingers away. “And they were right.”

It’s a Thursday night in June, and Landon is starting to sweat through his restaurant-provided white coat in a space just small enough for a grill cook, a sauté cook, and a salad cook (and a reporter). He’s in a good mood right now—grooving on the buoyancy that comes at the start of the dinner rush. Despite the close quarters, you can tell he enjoys the attention paid to this weird set of skills he’s mastered. His boyish features—fair skin with rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes with strawberry blond hair—perk up when he talks about the ingredients he’s working with or the techniques he’s picked up along the way in his itinerant career cutting a swath through Twin Cities kitchens.

As he talks, he works quickly with his hands—they’re delicate, pink, and pudgy. They look like they’re in danger of splitting open like Ball Park Franks. They’re the hands of a fat man, despite Landon’s success shedding weight in the last year—30 pounds, give or take. He lost the weight by literally working his ass off—in the past two years he’s worked at Barbette (as head chef), Café Levain (on the line), Trattoria Tosca (head chef), Porter & Frye (line), and Brasa (line) before taking the spot on the line at Nick and Eddie*. He jokes that he’s “the Kevin Bacon of chefs.” He’s even pulling two shifts a week at The Wienery—the hot dog joint on Cedar. “It’s just me and a waitress there; we split tips,” he says. “And sometimes I walk with $150 cash. To a cook, that’s like stripper money!”

A cute server walks by. “Hi Ruby,” he says cheerfully. “How’s it going?” He turns to me and stage whispers, “How would you like it if a 28-year-old line cook ruined your life?”

A lot is revealed standing next to a cook for a few hours during his shift. There’s a mutual distrust on the part of cooks and servers—conversations are short and snarky, like a conversation with an ex-girlfriend, if your ex-girlfriend was armed with an array of expensive knives. I’ve been in a restaurant as a server and customer, and the only time a customer gets to have a conversation with a cook is if that cook is the head chef—or, better yet, a star chef. A star chef is swathed in linen as immaculate as it is monogrammed. He’s inevitably a former cook himself, who has 15 years working his way up out of the inferno and is finally rewarded with the opportunity to hobnob tableside and shake your hand as he admires the steak his own sweaty grill man fired up, back in that inferno.

It’s a longstanding joke that in our towns the only real “celebrities” are news anchors. In fact, the definition can be expanded to professional athletes, the more colorful politicians, and a handful of local restaurateurs and chefs. In this shallow pool of celebrity, the tadpoles with the most degrading route through the primordial ooze to stardom are the chefs. Despite our collective urge to romanticize Gordon Ramsay or Mario Batali, they emerge from perhaps the most celebrity-averse career path possible: Every chef starts out as a cook, making around $10–$12 an hour (much less than many waiters make—one of the many reasons for all that tension between front and back of house). They are strange-looking, angry individuals who burn their hands slaving away on sharp and white-hot metal utensils. They work punishing, unorthodox hours that encourage hollow-eyed drug and alcohol addiction. From my own less-than-empirical survey, there is a more than 60% chance they are tattooed and listen to bands that are also tattooed—bands that you’ve either outgrown or have never, ever heard of. Most important, possibly because of the hazardous, absurdly constricted spaces they inhabit, they are forced to be social with each other but are basically uncomfortable around everybody else. If you’re a functional human being enjoying your social adjustment in one of their restaurants, odds are they don’t like you very much.

The reality is that the kitchen is the only place they’ll ever be accepted in the first place, but success means escaping it into a clean white uniform, filling out paperwork, and signing off on lesser chefs’ efforts on the line. It’s a cruel irony of one of the cruelest businesses that nevertheless retains its glamour and appeal.

Like the children’s rhyme about the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, there seem to be common culinary archetypes with dissimilar paths to the brass ring. One of each of these archetypes allowed me on the other side of the “pass” and into the world besotted diners and critics never see. There is a chance that someday one of them will come up to your table wearing an immaculate, monogrammed white coat, shake your hand, and admire the dish one of their cooks fired up for you back in their kitchen. A small chance.

Landon Schoenefeld: Hold the Mustard
In March 2007, Landon Schoenefeld was the chef at Bulldog NE. When Bulldog opened in 2006, it was a place where high-end technique and ingredients were applied to comfort food staples, like burgers and fries. And Landon’s menu was successful, so successful that he was working ridiculous, round-the-clock hours. He was admittedly fried. One night in March, when a bartender requested an order with salad dressing on the side, the way so many women order salads, Landon flipped out, flew out from the kitchen, and drenched him in mustard. Landon was fired the following day. “The thing is,” he protests, “it wasn’t even the worst thing I did when I was there.” There was the time he fed the entire staff pot cookies. Or the time he was forcibly removed from the Wells Fargo next door after trying to cash a check without a valid ID.

For six months after “the mustard incident,” anytime Landon went out to eat, a server would bring him a bottle of mustard. Each time, the cooks would peek into the dining room and snicker at the most widespread inside joke in the industry. The mustard bottle has become emblematic of his and his career’s volatility. Last winter, he walked away from Barbette. “(Owner) Kim Bartmann and I had different ideas about food,” he says. “At one point, she actually told me my vegetable of the day had ‘too much flavor.’” Landon cops to not being in a great psychological place when he took the job—after losing his gig at the Bulldog he was initially going to move and work in a kitchen somewhere out west until Bartmann convinced him to take over hers. “But I was burnt out,” he says. He went to a Widespread Panic concert in Florida one weekend, came back, and gave his notice.

Despite the notoriety, Landon is clearly talented—he made me an incredible country ribs on polenta with fennel slaw that felt like a flyweight mixed martial arts title bout in my mouth—and he’s passionate about the work. He’s been working in kitchens since he was a teenage dishwasher in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and he continues to be a student of the game, whether that means re-reading Orwell’s classic Down and Out in Paris and London or viewing Kenny Shopsin’s food documentary I Like Killing Flies.

He keeps getting hired for all sorts of reasons, but most of all because he can flat-out cook. After Barbette, Landon returned to Harvey McLain at Café Levain—he staged (French for internship) for Steven Brown when Brown was running the fancier Restaurant Levain back in the day—and he worked for McLain until he was offered the head chef position at McLain’s new Linden Hills place, Trattoria Tosca. But that didn’t work out. “Harvey didn’t like my food,” he says. “There’s nothing I could cook that could make that man happy.” McLain ended up pushing Landon out and hiring another, albeit safer, young chef, Adam Vickerman.

And suddenly Landon is at Nick and Eddie, along with Steven Brown, the latest additions to Doug Anderson’s menagerie of weirdos and castoffs. Anderson’s working tonight—he’s wearing his Ramones T-shirt and conducting the avant-garde theater troupe that is his dining room clientele. Landon is monitoring a grill full of steaks and burgers with one eye and assembling a taco with his hands. He tells me that when he started here, Steve Vranian, Anderson’s partner, took a sort of paternal interest in him, but that now he’s been told that Vranian is “taking a step back,” and that Landon and Brown will be able to be more assertive with the menu. This seems to be as close to satisfied as Landon is going to get under somebody else’s roof. He tells me his dream is to stop at the farmers’ market on the way into work each day and come up with the specials from scratch. But then he says, “I don’t want to be pushing 50 and working on the line somewhere. I want my own empire! I want a house in Mexico!”

Landon has put together a group of young investors who believe in his passion and ideas, investors with as much as $500,000 of real money, and for the last two years they’ve been looking around for a place. That’s a lot of ching, but the group has hard parameters—they can’t afford a big build-out, so they need a modest-sized space that’s been used as a restaurant before. His vision is along the lines of the early Bulldog. “I wanted to call it Flavor Country,” he says. “But my mom thinks Haute Dish is the better name.” Landon is impatient. He whines that Alex Roberts had a place by the time he was 28. He says he’s been going to bed thinking about the menu for the last two years. Maybe that’s why at the end of every shift, “the melancholy” starts to seep in. “Just last night the salad guy was saying, ‘Don’t go to the dark side, Landon.’ ”

Landon has considered using all that personality in an even more overt way: Last year, a Top Chef producer called him to request an audition tape, but he didn’t get a callback. Did the producers not share his high opinion of his potential? To get a better understanding of likely career arc, I called the only celebrity chef I know personally to do some handicapping: our own Andrew Zimmern, who believes Landon is at a crossroads. “This is why I think Landon is going to be successful over a lot of other people: Landon is able to gather his thoughts and go into the room, metaphorically speaking, and tell that crowd what they want to hear. If they want a chef who comes off as a brash idealist who understands the history of cooking and where it comes from—he can walk in and talk about Ferdinand Point.”

But Zimmern says he giggles when he hears a young chef like Landon talking this way—“because all they’re doing is reading it in books.” He thinks Landon should leave town for awhile, go to Europe or New York and work in a star chef’s kitchen—something that Zimmern did for 16 months at Thomas Keller’s Rakel in New York, and something that Landon considered doing immediately after Bulldog. “With television and magazines over here, the distractions for young American chefs are crazy,” Zimmern says. “I think if Landon doesn’t get the seasoning now it will haunt him later. Twenty years ago that was not the case. But 20 years ago you didn’t have 10,000 people on a waiting list to stage at the French Laundry.”

Landon is unlikely to take the advice. He is 28, has already staged all over town, and unlike some of his peers, he actually has $500K on the table. He wants it now.

Corinne Sherbert: Creative Discipline
Then there is the curious case of the pastry chef, the technician inhabiting a niche that is more science than art, often the feminine ghetto in kitchens, away from the searing heat and high-wire pressure of a 7 pm rush on the line.

A year ago, 30-year-old Corinne Sherbert was actually promoted from her pastry chef position to sous chef (and then to executive sous chef) at 20.21, an unusually fast track for someone on “the sweet side.” She’s only been in the restaurant business four years, having spent most of her working life in retail—she managed the Old Navy at the Mall of America and a Target in Bloomington—before going back to school to get a culinary degree at The Art Institutes International Minnesota. She was at 20.21 for only two years before earning her promotion by impressing Puck’s corporate brass at the Masquerade Ball, a four-course seated dinner for 650 people at the Basilica. “The captains weren’t communicating,” Corinne says, “so I stepped in.”

As executive sous, she is second-in-command under executive chef Asher Miller, who ultimately answers to the leadership at Puck (as well as communicating daily with another layer of overlordship at the Walker Art Center). Corinne’s primary responsibilities seem to be managing the cooks Miller has hired to work the line, and—unusual for a cook—the servers running the food out to the diners sitting in the 80 seats. To make her point, she beckons a server over to her spot in front of the line. “Jack, what’s our new phrase?” she asks, raising well-manicured eyebrows and assuming the arch tone of a Disney villain. Thus prompted, Jack noticeably holds back an eye roll and responds, “Talk to Corinne.”

Unsurprisingly, this protocol actually adds to the tension between the front and the back of the house—and the proof is in the turnover. According to the souce, 20.21 has gone through more than 10 front-of-the-house managers in the five years it has been open (that’s a lot, even in the restaurant business). Corinne, whom the servers describe as “detail oriented” or “rigid” (or worse) behind her back, doesn’t seem to mind living up to their descriptions. “Working in retail for 10 years with 16-year-olds—I have no problem correcting people.”

Corinne and Miller preside over an open kitchen, close enough to all the action in the dining room that it is actually possible for the chef to see which stage of the meal his diners are at. Sous chefs are often responsible for “plating,” putting together all the disparate elements provided by the other cooks—the sauces the starches the proteins—all on one artfully presented piece of china. It’s more than just presentation, however—it’s a kind of foremanship, where the sous double-checks the craftsmanship of the cooks on the line while tying it all together with a finishing élan. But Corinne rarely steps behind the line—she scoops rice out of the twin rice cookers and puts it into bowls when the dish requires it, and wipes edges of plates, but for the most part she hovers on the outside, giving attention to the tables and the plates equally. She lets me know in no uncertain terms that the Wolfgang model is “kitchen-driven,” apparently meaning the sous works as a hybrid half-sous/half-maitre’d. And to drive home the point she says, “When a server complains about something I just say, ‘You know, you’re just a glorified cocktailer... pretty easy job.’”

Corinne retained her pastry chef duties along with her new ones as sous, leaving her with a rather unique position within the stratified corporate structure: Even though she plays disciplinarian to Miller’s laid-back CEO, she’s the only one on the premises who actually creates recipes. “Yeah, all of our recipes come from corporate,” Miller says. “We execute them to the best of our abilities, but they come from California.” Except for Corinne’s almond cake, or her concord grape panna cotta with hazelnut peanut brittle, or her squash soup with prosciutto spoons—recipes that emerge from Corinne’s dreams. “I wake up with a lot of my ideas,” she says.

Corinne softens up when talking about her more creative duties in the kitchen, away from the line—creating new desserts is the “play” part of her job. She’ll often come in a couple hours before a shift to experiment with ingredients, trying to imagine different flavor combinations. “Executing a corporate menu day after day isn’t inspiring,” she tells me. “And I don’t see myself at a corporate restaurant forever.”

But her creativity with the interplay of flavors and textures isn’t the reason she’s moved up the ranks so quickly, and she seems to have mixed feelings about so enthusiastically fulfilling the role of the control-freak bitch.

Maybe her exuberant toughness is a reaction to operating within such a masculine environment, which most restaurant kitchens remain. The vibe is relentless and the emotional language of women little in evidence. Chefs who can’t abide it can’t make it, by and large. Though the corporate Puck milieu is surely less rough than many, her ability to thrive in it proves her point: “I don’t get offended very easily.” Such as when, during her stage at Solera, one of the line cooks told her he would love to “bend her over.”

Gender has proven to be less of an issue than her facility with sugar. Her fiancé, Mike “Young Chef”*** DeCamp, chef de cuisine at La Belle Vie, says, “It’s hard [enough] to find good line cooks on the savory side.” He notes that the LBV organization, for one, rarely even thinks to “look to the sweet side.”

Zimmern takes it as a given that Corinne can break through the rock candy ceiling. He notes that pastry chefs have actually been ahead of the gastronomic curve: “They understood food chemistry before the Ferran Adriàs of the world made it hip,” he says. He contends Corinne is in a great spot, in a great company.

“A chef creates her own curriculum. And right now, Corinne is working on the management part of her game.” Being responsible for group outcomes will be good for her. “She’s smart, she’s measured, and she’s decisive,” he says. If Corinne puts in a killer year, works to tighten up the things Puck and Miller have asked her to, then she can ask Puck for a chance to stage at one of his marquee restaurants, Zimmern says. And if he doesn’t have a spot for her, “Wolfgang has a lot of friends.

“Alfred Portale, the chef at Gotham Restaurant in New York, famously said, ‘I’m the last guy in the world that belongs in this conversation—but I knew at an early age that I’m not the most talented or creative, but I work the hardest.’"

*** Young Chef because he's been working with Tim McKee at La Belle Vie since he was a teenager. And the team camaraderie/frat-hazing ethos of the kitchen demands that every cook receive at least one nickname.

Jim Christiansen: Technique & Timing
The brightest star in the Twin Cities restaurant scene is unquestionably Tim McKee. At six foot four, he literally towers over the kitchens he runs, but he is as soft spoken and unassuming as young pups like Landon and Corinne are nervous and intense. When I asked him to point me in the direction of the future of local cuisine, he directed me to his longtime sous chef, Jim Christiansen, another nondescript, soft-spoken technical wizard. McKee brought “Jimmuh,” as Jim is known in the La Belle Vie family, over to the new operation at Sea Change to make sure things are done the McKee way.

The first time I visited the kitchen, a few weeks before opening, it was a dramatic departure from both Nick and Eddie and 20.21. It reminded me of the scene in Restaurant Confidential when Anthony Bourdain leaves the insane confines of Les Halles to visit the coldly clinical seafood laboratory that is Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin. Sea Change had the same vibe—in the prep kitchen behind the open kitchen, the air conditioning was set to operating room levels, with gleaming stainless steel tables and drawers and racks****. There were at least a dozen cooks circulating through from back to front, but the tempo fell well short of anything resembling panic.

In many ways, Sea Change is as corporate as 20.21. When Culinaire, the Dallas-based catering operator, took over the Guthrie’s food operations this spring, it wanted a local celebrity chef to drive the first-floor restaurant concept. McKee won the contract with his sustainable seafood pitch and reputation. It was imperative that it would be Minneapolis’s, if not the entire Midwest’s, most important seafood restaurant from the opening day. McKee hired Erik Anderson, a talented chef wasting away at the mainstreamed Porter & Frye, to write Sea Change’s menu, and he gave Jim, La Belle Vie’s second most talented cook (behind Mike DeCamp), to Anderson for what a manufacturing business would term quality control.

Those two hired the cooks, many of whom have worked at Solera or La Belle Vie, but some of whom were stowaways from Cue, or Anderson-loyalists from Porter & Frye. Regardless, they all had plenty of questions, and the day I was there, Jim had them working in two-man teams as he walked them through Anderson’s entire menu, each recipe, step by step. A cook interrupted him as he was searching for tuna poke in the walk-in and asked him how to fry mint leaves. Another stopped him on the way out to ask him to demonstrate how to pierce the head of a jumbo prawn with a toothpick. Each time, Jim turned his body dramatically toward the inquisitor and bugged his eyes nearly out of their sockets. I couldn’t tell if this was for theatric effect, or if his compassion and interest were just that potent.

Jim, 28, is slim and athletic-looking, with the boyish features—to extend the hospital metaphor—of a young Noah Wyle. His hair is buzzed. He doesn’t have any visible tattoos. Oh, and he’s gay. This seems like it should be a big deal, with the constant locker room hazing that goes on inside the kitchen (“Look, this knife has been specially engineered for Jim’s limp-wristed cutting style,” Anderson points out during one of my visits), but unlike Corinne, who chooses to retain an aloof professional cool, Jim is quick to return fire. When one of the guys whines about his love life, and Anderson asks, “Why don’t you just turn gay—like Jim?” Jim takes less than a beat. “C’mon, you guys are just like me,” he says. “Two beer queers.” In some ways, Jim’s sedate, grounded lifestyle could be the not-such-a-secret to his success. When his shift’s over, Jim will have a few (sometimes more than a few), but then he goes home to his boyfriend, an office building manager 13 years his senior. In the morning, he gets up and goes to yoga.

Eventually the circumstances of an opening test Jim’s eastern serenity. When he’s faced with the first of three full 150-person turns plating food, his cheeks flush like he’s in one of his CorePower classes. On the first Friday night, he’s stationed between the sauté cook and the saucier plating fish. He consults with the cook regarding how to best prepare a piece of bass—every piece is different, a little thinner or thicker, no matter how perfectly he butchered the fish that morning—before briskly turning away to concentrate on plating a trout fillet. He makes sure the cauliflower foam swooshes just so before putting the fish on the side of the plate. He takes a spoon and taps out a bit of sofrito to the side of the fillet before wiping the edge of the plate with a napkin and placing the dish within a server’s reach just as she approaches the line.

There is something Chaplinesque to the routine, but they are not just cogs in a gigantic culinary conveyor belt—there are millions of variables throughout the shift: The plate combinations are infinite, and the pace is dictated by the whim of the diners. Oh, and the colorful little pieces of fish and vegetable are works of food jewelry. Taking in the choreography, Anderson explains that great cooking is about technique and timing, and Jim is, like his mentor McKee, a cookbook geek and an incredible technical chef. “If I ask for, say, a gelatin that won’t break down under heat and tastes like nori, Jim can give it to me.” And if art is at least in part the pursuit of beauty, then Jim is as close to an artist as a cook will get.

He is the one of the three that will not openly own broader ambitions, though it’s unclear how candid he’s being. Currently, Jim is content to be a great technician, working in the Twin Cities’ food version of Warhol’s factory. “I’m just kind of happy doing what I’m doing,” he says.

Zimmern maintains there are two ways to become a star chef—Landon is taking one path, Jim the other. “I don’t want to say he’s the next Tim McKee, but he has technical skill and people rely on him for expertise. They all of a sudden just announce, ‘I’m opening my own restaurant.’”

He says, without a hint of irony, that the best chefs in the country—Keller, Ripert, Portale, Boulud, Vongerichten—do not aspire to celebrity and pop-culture notoriety. “Do you watch Top Chef?” Zimmern asks. “Because there are a whole bunch of Landons on it, but very few Jims.”

Zimmern references Grant Achatz, a precise, contained technician, “the youngest guy at The French Laundry when he started there. Became the sous chef. Then one day he left for Chicago—no TV, no fanfare—and popped up as the head chef at Trio, an excellent suburban restaurant. Meanwhile he’s biding his time and looking around before finding a two-floor spot just across from the Steppenwolf Theater, and then he opens the doors and just starts blowing people away.” That restaurant is Alinea, a spot Zimmern calls “arguably the most important restaurant in America.”

**** I'm not pulling the surgical metaphor out of the blue here—there is an inversion circulator in Sea Change's prep kitchen, a medical device that keeps pre-transplant organs warm. Here, it's used to cook octopus at extremely low heat for an extremely long time--75 degrees for 10 hours.

In the middle of this story, I came home from my summer vacation for Sea Change’s opening week, and who did I see expertly frying pot stickers in the prep kitchen? The Colonel. He told me he left Nick and Eddie and that I should come by The Wienery on Sunday to talk about it. “I’ll be working with this waitress who lives with her parents and comes down early to go down by the river to drink vodka from a plastic bottle.” He smiled big. “You’ll see.”

When I showed up, Landon was wearing a big white apron and a blue bandana tied around his head—a different get-up than his super-pro white linens at Sea Change. A guy named Fred was complaining about the temperature of his pancakes. Landon fixed me a Chicago dog and an order of The Wienery’s “picnic fries”4—two potatoes worth of hand-sliced fries, coleslaw, chili, and cheese. While I was out of town, Landon and his investors missed out on landing the Java Jack’s space on 46th Street. “It would’ve been perfect. We had an agreement with the owner but he came back from a weekend away and said he wanted to open his own restaurant.”

As to his jump to Sea Change, a restaurant that seems the antithesis of his style, Landon says that “Nick and Eddie wasn’t the right environment for me, man.” I couldn’t help but look around at the filthy hot dog joint. “Aw, you know what I mean—I was sick of doing burgers and tacos. And this is a chance to work for Tim McKee. I’ve always wanted to work for that guy. I’m a little in awe, actually. And Erik offered me a pretty good deal, so I took it.”

We made plans to grab a beer and talk about his menu for Haute Dish, things like deconstructed (“I would say refined, not deconstructed”) Tater Tot hot dish and an update on egg in the hole using “classic Ferdinand Point technique. I’ve been thinking about some of these dishes for three years, man.”

And then, on the day we went to press, Landon made me tear up my conclusion. “I signed a lease today,” he told me on the phone. “I got the fucking spot.” Landon and his three partners plan to open Haute Dish in the old Café Havana spot on Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapolis by January.

I asked him how he felt. “I feel weird, man—nervous, excited.” I asked one more stupid question, banking that he would bail me out with one more good quote. “Why? It’s going to be a big undertaking, and there’s been a lot of hype.” He took a beat, “I don’t want to fail.”