Greg Baxtrom: Boy Scout restaurateur

By Brian Braiker

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Greg Baxtrom may owe it all to the Boy Scouts. The serial restauranteur is behind acclaimed Prospect Heights staples Olmsted, Maison Yaki and relative newcomer Patti Ann’s Family Restaurant — all of which exist within two-and-a-half-blocks of each other on Vanderbilt. A little over a week ago he launched a fourth restaurant a few blocks to the north, in Rockefeller Center. Five Acres features an all-American menu rich in veggies and also dabbles in lobster, smoked oysters and game birds like squab and guinea hen.

Baxtrom has had a remarkable career by any definition, which started at Chicago’s Alinea — to this day the city’s only three starred Michelin restaurant — and moved on to stints at Per Se in Manhattan, at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Norway and elsewhere. Before hanging his own shingle as a restaurateur he had a gig as the personal chef for the Seinfelds. Yes, those Seinfelds.

This week Baxtrom joins us on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” to discuss his mini Vanderbilt Avenue empire and his first foray into Manhattan. He describes how he discovered he wanted to be a chef in the first place — turns out learning how to make beef stew in the Boy Scouts had something to do with it. As did the discipline the Scouts imbued in him at an early age. We talk about his resume — which is impressive by design. Baxtrom walks us through his many pandemic pivots, the culinary scene at large, food trends that bore him, learning to not be one of those asshole chefs and where he eats when he’s not working, which is not very often.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. You can listen to it in its entirety in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

You’re coming off a big week. How are you feeling? How did it go?
They’re definitely getting easier, these openings. We did two this year. We did Patti Ann’s earlier in the year and then Five Acres just this past week. And I got to say, we have a really strong team, so it’s going really well.

I’ve listened to a few industry podcasts with you and I think if my understanding is correct, you actually got into cooking first as a Boy Scout, is that correct?
Yeah, in the Boy Scouts there’s a lot of adults passing down very rudimentary skills that everyone should have and so it starts out where you’re a Cub Scout or you’re a Tiger Cub and basically the adults are doing everything for you. I mean I was there for the Boy Scouts for 15 years.

Oh wow. What level did you rise to? Were you an Eagle Scout?
For sure. I was an Eagle Scout and then I was in the OA, which is a secret society within the Boy Scouts because you’re such a Boy Scout. Eventually when they start to teach you to cook, they give you a can opener and a can of beef stew, and they tell you to warm it up and don’t burn yourself. Then eventually they give you piece of chuck roast and some potatoes and they tell you to do it that way instead. And then what’s so nice about it is then as you get older, then you’re the one responsible for teaching the kids younger how to make the beef stew.

So you were an executive chef at 13 or whatever? Ordering your sous chefs around.
Yeah. I knew pretty early on I was going to do this, so there were cooking competitions at camp and stuff like that that I would compete in.

What was the first recipe you remember owning?
I have a really hard time reading, so I immediately just look at the pictures and then just decipher what’s going on there and then I make it up. The first thing I was allowed to make really was popcorn, and I loved that the butter would melt on the stove. If you forgot about it, it changed, but it wasn’t so bad and then eventually it would get really bad. I just liked the degrees of brown butter and stuff, so then I just thought that meant butter made everything better, so I would grill chicken. My trick was that I would buy powdered butter. You could buy it to put it on microwave popcorn and I would marinate the chicken in the powdered butter. I did that all through high school. That was my thing. I put powdered butter on chicken with parsley powder and garlic salt.

That doesn’t sound bad.
It was good.

So you knew early on this is what you wanted to do? You were entering cooking competitions as a teenager. You were sort of self-taught, it sounds like. How did you learn initially?
We didn’t have cable or anything growing up, but PBS, there was Jacques Pépin and Rick Bayless every once in a while. Jamie Oliver would be on there, and honestly, watching someone so passionately talk about something that you’re kind of into was very infectious. So one year in high school I went to a culinary school that had a cooking camp and I liked it so much that that was the culinary school I went to after I graduated high school. I just really lucked out that, by 15 for sure, but probably even earlier I knew that this is what I wanted. I wanted to own restaurants, be the chef of them.

Own restaurants specifically, not just cook?
I was raised in a way that if you’re going to do it, just do it. If you’re going to do all those hours and you’re going to work your ass off, then just be your own boss. My dad is self-employed. He’s a carpenter.

He’s built out your restaurants, right?
He’s literally built to completion a couple of them from start to finish and other ones he’s just put elements to it. I’m sure it’s just psychological. He didn’t work for someone. I admire him so much: “Fuck that. I’m not going to work for someone and I like it this way.”

You didn’t start this way though, and I think your career is so fascinating. Early on you were at Alinea, it’s the only three-star Chicago Michelin star restaurant. As a young sous chef, was that your first professional gig? Because it was certainly early in your career.
I was like 19 years old and had braces.

First of all, how’d you get that gig? And second of all, I guess the intensity of the kitchen didn’t turn you off of things?
If you count Wendy’s, then that would be my first kitchen job. But I mean, same thing. When I was in culinary school, it was like, if you were taking this seriously, it meant you did your internship in France. So I just was like, okay, if that’s what people are saying, then I’m going to France. So I did that and when I got back, Alinea was just about to open back then. There was a thing called eGullet. It was before Instagram, basically the same time as Facebook and stuff, but us chef nerds would be on there looking at what other people were blogging about.

It was like a blog or Reddit for chefs, right?
Exactly. Very primitive. And Grant Achatz was messing around in Nick Kokonas‘s house, the partners of Alinea, and it was food porn. There were 12 of us all huddled around a computer flipping through. He was putting up images that he was going to do at Alinea when it opened. I applied and well, really what happened is I called for a school project to interview someone that had just opened up a restaurant. That’s how naive I was. I called Alinea to assist me with my school project.

So when I showed up, they just thought I was a stage, like a free trial for the day to see it. The whole project got kind of tossed out the window and he told me that I did a good job. So then I just kept coming. He wasn’t paying me, I just kept showing up, because I was enamored with the restaurant and everything. Eventually there was an opportunity where a cook wasn’t really cutting it, didn’t want to be there anymore, and he said, “Either I find someone else or you take his job.”

And that was literally right at the beginning of the restaurant?
That was two weeks into me hanging out there. So then I just stayed for four years with Chef Achatz. I had a really good relationship. Not very many spoken words, but I was willing to give everything I had and I have a lot of fond memories and he’s been in my corner ever since.

He was a young guy at the time too. I mean he’s only 48 or something now.
When people would come into the kitchen, they wouldn’t think he was the chef. He was in his early thirties.

So you had a sense just from his blogging and photos that this was going to be a thing?
He was just treating it like a profession. That was the draw. For sure, the food was really cool and neat and stuff like that. But I’m a serious guy. I’m a dry, serious person. I take what I do very, very seriously because most of my existence is doing this, so I’m going to take it very seriously. I knew that even when I was just getting started that I was all in. I think he saw that in me and so he was probably harder on me because I could take it and I was learning a lot because he was constantly giving me criticism and feedback and support to the point where, when I was there for four years, I was like, everyone has just said we are the best in the United States. Is that true? How do I know that that’s true? Unless I find that information out myself.

When I put in my notice, I was like, I don’t even know the way we clean trash cans [is the best]. Do we have the cleanest trash cans too? Do we make the best ice cream? I have no idea. I’ve never been anywhere else. So he was very supportive and he helped set me up in Spain where I went to El Bulli and Arzak and Mugaritz for almost five or six months. And then he helped me set up my trail at Per Se. And then even when I left Per Se, he was there again. He had dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and my name came up in conversation with Dan Barber and two weeks later I jumped ship and I became a chef at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

These are some of the most impressive kitchens in the country, if not world, the Blue Hills, the Per Ses. You worked in Norway. I’ve heard you say in another interview that your resume can come off as “obnoxious or intimidating to the wrong consumer.” I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit.
I was. When I opened up Olmsted, it was seven years ago and I didn’t want to be another chef doing another $85 tasting menu or even a more expensive one, and then two years later it closes because enough people had gotten their fill and time to move on. It’s not that everything I do is going to be a slam dunk, but I worked really, really hard. I was very protective of my resume. I would even not take chef positions because I didn’t want them to get to use my resume as clout to build their restaurant. I wanted, when everybody discovered me, for it to be in the business that I owned, because that was always the objective.

Let’s talk about that moment because you were at Per Se, Blue Hill, all that. What was the moment where you decided, it sounds like you always wanted to work for yourself, but going from working in other people’s kitchens to opening your own and working for yourself, that’s a big shift from chef to owner. What deliberations did you make, or what did that imply for your day-to-day life?
I would be at Blue Hill at Stone Burns and I would be like, I’m not meeting rich people that are going to give money. I’m not networking in this position. If I’m working a hundred hours a week, I’m not doing any networking. Nothing is changing. Of course, I’m getting more talented. I’m learning how to lead better, all these things. But I got to a point where I was like, I’m not meeting anyone now. I just have to do something else and hope that it works.

So that was when I bounced around every six months, I was just helping another restaurant open, hoping that that was the right decision. That, okay, well if I want to open one, then I need to start seeing more openings so I can compare what this person did versus what that person did. And I don’t know, it’s really scary.

While I was in Norway and I was doing that bouncing around, my best friend is this really talented guy. He’s got a bunch of restaurants in Norway now, but when he just started his first one, it was before Olmsted opened. I went out there for about six months and helped him. And there was another one of these moments where he had a shit kitchen. Now it’s remodeling, it’s gorgeous, and he just won a Michelin Star this year and all this stuff. But he was getting all of his stoves very cheap, shitty equipment to work on and I was cooking Per Se food on it.

And so I had another one of these moments where I was like, okay, so basically I could cook anything anywhere. I’m able to adapt pretty well in that. But again, I have no network. I don’t know anything about a PNL sheet. So it just became all about getting that information, putting myself in situations to where I was talking to people that were opening up a restaurant. Sometimes I would talk to people that I knew 100 percent I would never do anything with them, but I just wanted the conversation to go on for as long as possible so that way I could then apply it to the next conversation.

Yeah, deliberately networking. I mean that’s smart. A lot of the things you’ve done are smart. Working for free when you’re really young and just hoping…
A lot. I know that that’s against the grain these days, but I didn’t care. I want the information. I know what I’m going to do with it. I know what I’m going to do with all the information. I’m going to dominate [the] restaurant scene. So pay me or don’t.

In your experience watching people open restaurants, what was the most common mistake?
You got to bend a knee. You got to accommodate allergies. Don’t be the prick that is like “We don’t accommodate allergies and we won’t modify a dish so that way someone can eat it.” That I think is absurd. I think that our industry is very interesting. I think it’s very broad. I think it’s one of these things where someone can look at it as a craft and others can look at it as a sport and others can look at it as art. But it’s still the hospitality industry. So if someone’s trying to give you some money and they just don’t want the chives on top of it, let’s not make a big deal about it.

You’ve left these best kitchens in the world and you’re networking, you’re still doing stage, you’re doing personal chef stuff. You end up the personal chef of the Seinfelds at one point?
Yeah, for two years. They’re such great people, they’re really supportive. They’ve been to the restaurants and even after leaving, I’ve done dinners with them and stuff, but that job allowed me to do more networking. Not through them, but just through working 40 hours in a week, not 80 hours a week. Hell, I was able to walk around the city and go, “okay, so that’s that square footage and they want that much money.” There is a point where, okay, I was having these conversations and I was being such a prick, not intentionally, but just like, “I want to own 51 percent and no one could tell me what to do, take it or leave it. And then just get out of my face.”

And eventually after that had happened a dozen times or so, somebody, probably Grant, told me, “you got to get a lawyer. A lawyer needs to tell you everything you’re saying wrong in your spiels.” And eventually I did. I sucked it up and I gave a lawyer like two grand and I sat with them for four hours and learned stuff. And then after a couple more times, I was able to meet these people that had a failing restaurant and they were like, “So we want you to consult.” And so I said, “Okay, well maybe we would do this or that and the other.” And they were like, “Well, what if we gave you the restaurant?” And I was like, “Well, it would mean this and that and I want to own this much of it, but it could be over this amount of time and I want there to be things that… We achieve certain goals that I want. This, that and the other.” And so that all worked. That is Olmsted.

Having done all the consulting and all that, did you nail it? I mean, obviously by reputation you did, but…
I still don’t know what I’m doing.

Were you prepared?
No. Now I have four restaurants and I’ve poured so much into Olmsted that I do think that as long as I keep my head down with that one, that one could be around for a while. That could be a 20-year restaurant. Who knows?

Maison Yaki?
Maison Yaki, who knows? It’s really busy on the weekends, but it’s a harder one for the neighborhood. So sometimes I think maybe I should move that concept maybe into the city or somewhere and go a little bit more French bistro. It doesn’t need to be dumbed down, but just a little safer.

I had my first skewered chicken heart there. It was great.
I really liked that concept a lot. It’s really fun for me, creatively. That’s what they all are. They’re all just creative outlets. They all shop at the same places. They all get their stuff from the farmer’s market. But the one is creative vegetable stuff. The other one is basically just small French food. And then the Chicago family style restaurant.

That’s Patti Ann’s.
Yeah, Patti Ann’s, that we’re going to add pizzas to. It was always, part of it was to eventually have Chicago tavern style pizza. That’s going to happen in January or February. And then with Five Acres, it seemed like a really natural … If I was going to leave the neighborhood, why not go for the biggest landmark in New York City?

Well, it’s interesting. Rockefeller Center is not historically or until very recently known for marquee dining. But now there’s, even just this fall, there’s Le Rock, there’s Naro, there’s Jupiter. Now this I guess quartet of high-end restaurants in Rockefeller Center. What’s the goal? I imagine it’s not stuff you’re doing at Olmsted anyway. You want a different outlet.
It’s definitely the most similar to Olstead, but there are a lot of things that we don’t do at Olmsted, so that way I can keep the price down. Prior to Covid, everything was $24. Hell, at Maison Yaki, everything was under $10. And so that got thrown out the window due to Covid and expenses and stuff.

Olmsted is Olmsted and it’s a bit of a thing and we’re very fortunate, I don’t really put squab on the menu. I don’t put expensive tunas on the menu, anything that would be basically small and really expensive. And I love squab, but I’ve never had it on my first restaurant that I adore and that I live right down the street from.

Things like that, bringing not just peekytoe crab, but crab legs into the mix. All again, coming from sustainable sources and trusted sources. But for example, there’s a lobster dish at Five Acres. I can’t really make lobster cheap. It’s ridiculously expensive. But what I could do is I can make it worth it by pouring a lot into it and not just giving you a tail. You get pierogies that are stuffed with lobstered mushrooms that have the lobster and a very Per Se, saffron vanilla sauce over the top of it. You get a lobster chicharron with lobster coral oil. You get a lobster tail with knuckles and claw and everything inside of a butter sauce made from roasted lobster bones. So it’s like nose to tail lobster, to be cheesy and cheeky, but it’s certainly worth whatever we’re charging. It’s not even 60 bucks. That’s where the expenses start to come from. The labor really.

And I would imagine the real estate isn’t cheap?
For sure. Definitely not. We’re going to be open breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All of us have to be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week basically. That’s part of the deal here. In all of these new spots.

Who’s the clientele? People who work nearby?
It’s all over the place. Hopefully the drunk Santas the other day from SantaCon or whatever is a one-off. But other than that, they’re pretty upstanding citizens. I mean, it sounds so silly.

I own these three little restaurants in Brooklyn. They’re tiny. They don’t even add up to whatever Rockefeller’s going to be. But I’ve never had a restaurant where there’s a bar scene. There are people that just come have a drink while their kids are ice skating. They’re wanting to kill a minute. Or a lot of single diners that want a glass of wine and the soup. And I think that’s super, super neat. But I’ve never had a restaurant that does stuff like that, that’s had that appeal.

Olmsted is a thing, so you just come and you’re staying for Olmsted. You’re not popping in and out. Maison Yaki is much more young dates. You could tell there’s a lot of first dates in there, because it’s kind of loud and whatever. And at Patti Ann’s, there’s lot of rowdy kids in the first seating. And then there’s just people that want comfort food for the second. So by December 21st, we will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner all the time. I’m just getting it over with.

You mentioned the pandemic. You guys were very good at pivoting. You created a food bank in under a week, something like that. You formed the New York Hospitality Coalition to unite city hospitality businesses and workers. You were sort of forced to develop these skills that I’m sure you didn’t necessarily already have. What was that first month like?
It was really awful at first. Not that it wasn’t entirely awful the whole year, but what I mean is, just being in the Boy Scouts, I’ve done at least 500 hours of community service before I was even 20. That’s in my DNA to do that kind of stuff. So it was miserable when I didn’t know what was going to happen. When I was just sitting in my apartment.

When Covid happened, we had to lay everybody off and we didn’t know anything. I literally went to the restaurant being very poorly educated on how disease is transmitted and I held my breath. I walked in and I held my breath and I just started shoving everything into whatever freezers I had. I was like, well, I’m not going to have money when we reopen. I’m not going to make shit happen. But by the end of the week when it was, oh, I could just be a soup kitchen, I could just do that. Then it became, oh, and then we could do like this and then we could do that, and then we could do that. It really helped me focus a little bit with how to spend my time.

I remember when stuff started opening again, I’m over on Vanderbilt a lot and Washington Ave. a lot, and I did go a couple times. You were doing pop-up kitchens there. You were hosting other chefs at Maison Yaki and at first I was bummed ’cause I wanted to eat at Maison Yaki. But you had guest chefs there. Was this part of the Black entrepreneurial series that you also started?
Yeah, we did that in 2020 and then we did a little part two in the following year, but there wasn’t enough stuff to bring back more employees, which just meant that restaurant stayed closed and it was just a light bulb moment. Oh shit, let’s just do a pop-up series. It was very, very hard to do.

Was it?
Well, every two weeks, a brand-new chef with a brand-new concept with different artwork on the walls and packaging and stuff. Met a lot of friends that I’m still friends with to this day. Some have gone on to take great positions elsewhere and stuff. So it was really just a great use of an empty space.

You’ve mentioned sustainability a few times in this conversation. I know that you’re going to the farmer’s market and stuff. How do you think about sustainability in your restaurants and do you approach it differently at each one?
I’m bipolar and I’m very black and white.

Are you literally bipolar?
Yeah. So when I say I want to be sustainable, it means all in or just shut it down. I have to actively fight that and sort of take the wins when I can get it. An example of that is when I opened up the restaurant, I was like, why aren’t we composting? And it was because we don’t make any money. It’s more expensive to compost than to just throw something in a landfill. That’s a lot to wrestle with because my integrity and the way my brain works, it’s like, “well then forget it because I should be doing the right thing and I’m not. So forget it. It’s not worth it.” And obviously that’s not a reason to just throw a restaurant away.

But cut to six months later, we were able to onboard composting and now I have four restaurants that compost. So that was a win. In the beginning. I could shop a little bit at the farmer’s market. I could buy the focal ingredient of each dish, but I couldn’t also buy the onions and the garlic and stuff like that. It just doesn’t make sense. Now, quite literally, the majority of the money that we make gets spent at the farmer’s market. And a point of pride for me is even the ones that I shop the least at, I still spend about 50 grand a year at that farm. And then there are ones that I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at. That is a very cool thing for me. I go to the market and I don’t mean in some obnoxious romantic chefy thing, I go there and I shoot the shit with the farmers and it makes me really happy that I could spend a lot of the money that my business does on them.

Is there a market in the city that you like above the others?
I go to the Union Market, of course, ’cause it’s the biggest one and I’m there about three times a week. It’s closed during the winter, but there is a really good one at the roundabout at Grand Army Plaza leading into Prospect Park on Saturdays. That’s only two blocks from Olmsted and there’s great farms at that one too.

You mentioned integrity and we’re talking about sustainability. Blue Hill and Dan Barber, who you worked with, were subjects of an Eater takedown earlier this year. You worked with him and other high-end restaurants. The popular perceptions of these places is that their high intensity head chefs are domineering, can be abusive, assholes, whatever. How much truth is there to that perception? How did you read that Eater piece?
People need to make a career, that’s why they write those things. But I’m sure there’s truth to everything. In my experience, I had left by then. I’m sure there’s things that get exaggerated, but by what he’s achieving, is he trying to push the envelope forward? I don’t know. I think it’s complicated. How many people stood by him when that thing came out and now that story’s gone? Nobody reads that story.

Right, a hundred staffers signed a letter in support. So forget about that because you weren’t there. And that’s off topic a little bit, but this perception of the type A chef: Have you ever been that guy?
Sure. I mean, of course I’ve been that guy and I’ve regretted being that guy. I mean, I told you I’m bipolar. And I think the industry is moving forward. It is really, really lovely that it’s becoming more accepting of mental health issues and needs. And I would say one, that doesn’t just mean the employees then. That would also mean the employers and the chef. So if we’re going to be more accepting, then we have to really mean that.

But if you are in the wrong place, then I don’t think that the business is doing anything wrong when you are underperforming on a regular basis because you have to talk about everything. Then you have to talk about the person that’s getting all of that food and having to pay for it. Every night, the person that’s getting the food from the person that’s fumbling the ball, what are we doing? Are we comping that meal every time that person comes in? Things have consequences.

So I am not saying that a chef should just start screaming at people. I can turn it on and I can be intimidating, but I don’t scream a lot anymore. So I have found that way. But to take that conversation even further, all of those people that are usually screaming, typically, are people that are new to management that just were previously not in management and now they’ve been given to it. So really what they need is they need to learn how to be a mature adult and that will take time.

So same thing. Are we accepting that that person is going to have to grow as a human, not over days, but over months, to get to that point? Maybe years. To learn from their mistakes, to say the wrong thing. And who takes the burden of that? Is it me, the business owner, has to take the burden of that angry sous chef that yells too many times and the line cook doesn’t like it? Is it that person himself?

But you can’t talk about one part of it. You got to even talk about all of it or stay out of the conversation because it’s so much bigger and it does need to be talked about. I wish there were more open forum conversations about this kind of stuff. I think it would help accelerate and get us to a place where everybody was in the right job and everyone was feeling supported.

Are there food trends in themselves that annoy you or that you’re over with?
Oh, don’t even get me started. That’s why I don’t talk much. I just think everybody’s food looks the same these days. But I don’t know. I would like to get back into fine dining, tasting menu, fine dining.

Didn’t you do that at the beginning of this year at Olmsted I think? Or was it this year? I guess it was pandemic forced a little bit.
Yeah, it was Omicron-induced. Employees and guests were dropping like flies and it was the easiest way to shrink the business and save it and it went over well. People liked it. We kept it under a hundred bucks. And if I were to do it, I would want it to feel a little different. I wouldn’t want it to feel like it was in this very black esoteric room or something and all my food had a white sauce broken With green oil. It would have to be a little bit more. It doesn’t need to be reinventing anything.

When I first thought about having a restaurant, I wanted there to be a soup kitchen attached to it. I wanted it to be a three Michelin star restaurant that had a soup kitchen attached to it and all of the trim and stuff like that from the food would go to support it and stuff. That would need some really rich guy to help support it. And I don’t know any of those people.

Well, you know more of them now than you used to.
Rich people are rich because they keep their money not because they give it to me.

So when you’re not at one of your restaurants, I can’t believe how hard you must work to keep all four going. Do you go out at all? Where do you like to eat that’s not one of your places?
I really don’t. I mean it’s sad, but I like neighborhood spots. I like Walter’s in Fort Green or Rucola still does it for me. I’m fascinated by the neighborhood restaurant that never has to change its menu because I feel like I always have to change my menu for it to stay relevant or interesting. I really wanted that for Maison Yaki. I wanted it to be like, just write this really kind of big menu. You could come there like three or four times and have a different menu every time. The places I like to go to, I don’t want anything to change.

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