Chef Ryan Stone – Collaborating on Earls Chef Collective, Bocuse d’Or, Most Memorable Meal
By Laura Busch Ciraulo
Award winning Canadian Chef Ryan Stone has worked in some of the world’s best kitchens including The Pear Tree in Vancouver and has been awarded stages at Alain Ducasse and L’Atelier by Joël Robuchon. Ryan has been a competitor in the prestigious international cooking competition, the Bocuse d’Or in 2005 and 2011. Most recently, he has been working with a team of award winning chefs to develop dishes for the upscale-casual eatery, Earls Kitchen and Bar. Earls is a restaurant group that has 65 locations in the U.S. and Canada, but it’s far from your typical chain. Earls team of chefs that Ryan works on is known as the the Chef Collective and they’ve developed regional dishes for each location that feature local and regional ingredients. Altogether they’ve developed 47 different menus for Earls.
Now Chicagoans can get a taste of the passion that goes into every dish Ryan and the Chef’s Collective have developed. Earls Kitchen and Bar opens in Chicago on Tuesday, October 27.
While Ryan was visiting Chicago, I had the opportunity to sit down with him to talk about his work with Earls Kitchen and Bar, his most memorable meal, and the extra credit art class project from his high school days that first sparked his interest in cooking.
Laura Busch Ciraulo: How did you fall in love with cooking?
Chef Ryan Stone: I was taking an art class in high school and one of the extra credit projects that we could participate in was a gingerbread house making competition. I discovered that I loved working in the kitchen and I really enjoyed working with the chef in the culinary arts program. He encouraged me to take the culinary program the following year, which I did. I ended up dropping the art class, so I could focus on cooking. Then I got into a three month long exchange program to go to Germany. I was 15 years old and started working my first kitchen job.
Laura: What was your first job experience like?
Chef Ryan: I worked in the kitchen six days a week, eleven hours a day, and I just fell in love with cooking. I thought this is definitely what I could see myself doing. The long days didn’t push me away as a young guy.
Laura: Which chefs have had the biggest influence on your career?
Chef Ryan: My high school instructor, Pierre Dubrulle was definitely a big influence on me and played a major role in getting me into the industry. After Germany, he got me into cooking competitions. I did well in my first competitions and that inspired me to keep going and do more of them. After that, I did my apprenticeship when I was nineteen years old at a restaurant called The Pear Tree with Chef Scott Jaeger. It was a small kitchen. It was just Scott and the three of us who were on the line. We did everything from the dishes to working the cappuccino machine. Doing everything in that tiny kitchen under Scott’s supervision really taught me attention to detail. Chef Morgan Wilson also had a huge impact on my career. I went as his apprentice to the Bocuse d’Or competition in 2005.
Laura: Tell me more about the Bocuse d’Or.
Chef Ryan: It’s a competition held in Lyon, France every two years, and it’s one of the world’s premiere cooking competitions. After several rounds, it’s narrowed down to twenty-four countries, who get to send a chef and apprentice to represent their country. Before I competed in 2005 as an apprentice and in 2011 as the lead chef, I first went to watch the Bocuse d’Or in 2003 and it was incredible. I remember walking through the doors of the convention hall and I could hear this loud cheering like there was a soccer match going. From the back of the grand stands, I could see these people stomping and holding up signs and these horns were going off. The Swiss team had fans in the audience who would ring these cowbells. It’s just nuts. It was like NFL Sunday. It was exciting for me at that stage of my career to see that kind of passion and love for food and cooking.
Laura: That sounds amazing.
Chef Ryan: It was, I never knew something like this existed. You know how you’ll hear people say, “send my compliments to the chef,” when you’re at restaurant, but you never see people standing on their feet screaming and yelling for food, so that was really amazing.
Laura: What was it like competing in front of thousands of people at the Bocuse d’Or in 2005 and 2011? How did you prepare?
Chef Ryan: The competition itself is five hours long, so we did a lot of practices. You start off practicing the individual components of the food you’re going to do and then you start doing your timed practices. On the day of the event you’re really trying to recreate one of your practice runs, except you’re doing it in front of three-thousand screaming fans. We actually did some practices where we had people come in to make distractions for us. At one of our last practices we had the press come in, and we asked them to bang on the counters and scream and yell at us. They gave us the full treatment.
Laura: What’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten?
Chef Ryan: One of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had was at the first three Michelin Star restaurant I ever dined at. Before attending the Bocuse d’Or in 2003, I had read Swiss Chef Frédy Girardet’s cookbook and it was incredible. I knew I had to go to his restaurant while I was in Europe. Unfortunately he was retired, however I found out his restaurant had been passed down to his apprentice, Philippe Rochat, so I made a reservation at his Restaurant de L’Hôtel de Ville in Crissier, Switzerland.
Laura: What did you order there?
Chef Ryan: I ordered the nine-course tasting menu, since I knew I may only be there once. It was an incredible experience. Our first course was a cardoon vegetable dish with hazelnut cream and white truffle. They presented it in this little lidded bowl and two servers came over to our table and pulled the lids off the bowls at exactly the same time and wafted it towards us, so we could enjoy the scent of fresh truffles and hazelnut. But I’ll never forget watching them bring out the cardoon dish to a large table of about 10 people seated across the dining room. All of the sudden out of nowhere these ten servers came out like a team of perfectly synchronized swimmers and they all lifted the lids off of the little bowls at exactly the same time, when the lead server gave everyone the nod. Getting to witness that level of service and attention to detail was incredible.
Laura: What was it like collaborating with Earls Chef Collective?
Chef Ryan: Getting to work with our team of chefs has been unreal. I don’t know anywhere else in the world where you could go and have this collective of super talented and accomplished chefs all working together under one roof, who have the kind of collaboration and candor that we do. It’s really incredible and we have this great dynamic, where we can bounce ideas off of each other. We also work with another team on the logistics side of things, who help us make our crazy ideas trainable and executable in Earls Kitchen.
Laura: Earls menu has a lot of global influences. Has your team done any traveling together?
Chef Ryan: We have. In February we went to London together for six days and it was sort of this whirlwind tour of eating. Everyday we had two lunches, two dinners and then we’d check out the bar & craft cocktail scene. We tried many different types of cuisines to identify global trends and get ahead of them and stay ahead of them. We already want to be good at them by the time these trends make their way to North America.
Laura: What are some other places your team has found inspiration?
Chef Ryan: One night on our London trip, we were all coming out of a club at three in the morning and we came across this early morning delivery truck. The doors were open and we could kind of see into it and we all ran over to it and discovered that it was full of all these specialty vegetables and fresh herbs. The driver even went through all the ingredients with us and told us which restaurants were using which ingredients.
Laura: Tell me about one of the dishes you developed for Earls menu.
Chef Ryan: When I first interviewed with Earls they asked each of us to develop a few dishes that represented us as chefs and few dishes that would be a good fit for Earls. So I decided to present a warm winter kale salad for them. I used Tuscan black kale, roasted brussel sprouts and potatoes with cranberries and toasted almonds all tossed in a brown butter vinaigrette. I presented it and it’s now being served at our flagship locations this winter.
Laura: What have you enjoyed most about working with the other chefs on Earls Chef Collective?
Chef Ryan: The privilege of getting to work with the other chefs and the culture of working with Earls is one that allows us to check our egos at the door and be candid with each other. I look forward to coming to work everyday. Earls is also big on growing and developing their people. Helping to mentor and develop young cooks is a passion of mine. Working at the test kitchen I’ve had the opportunity to mentor a few of the guys who are going through their practical. I’ve worked with them on their dishes and coached them a bit, which has been a lot of fun.
Earls Kitchen and Bar is located in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood at 1538 N. Clybourn Ave.