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

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.