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.