Meet the Chef: Andrew Adams
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Title: Chef de cuisine, The Brushmark Restaurant at Overton Park
Age: 30
Who or what was your first cooking influence? Cooking with my grandfather -- probably at 6, 7 years old on the counter -- helped me decide that was gonna be a career as well.
What was the first thing you ever cooked or baked? I can tell you two early memories. One was just buttermilk biscuits with my grandfather. The other was competing in fifth grade in the French fair at school and making crepe suzettes and winning.
What made you decide to become a chef and when was that? My father has a recording asking me what I wanted to be when I was older. I believe I was 7 or 8 and I said I wanted to be a chef or a fireman. When I entered that first kitchen (KC's restaurant in Cleveland, Miss.) it worked for me immediately. I fit in.
What was something important that a fellow chef taught you? The importance of the potato. He (Craig Shelton from the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse, N.J.) told me anybody can boil a potato but learning how to cook a potato correctly takes decades. If it was overcooked it would be like a sandbag. If it was undercooked it'd be gritty. If it was cooked perfectly it would be so smooth, just the best thing you ever put in your mouth.
What is the Andrew Adams style? I try and know the cutting edge, but I don't always cook the cutting edge. I kind of know it, but I don't want to cook it.
Describe one of your original dishes. I'm a believer that everything's been done before. So much of what I do is pulling classics and using the modern techniques or ingredients that weren't available. It's hard to say that anything that I have done is original.
What do you cook or bake at home, if anything? Lots of bread. That's my hobby -- bread baking.
What's your least favorite ingredient?I hate salmon roe. Especially that low-grade stuff. The ones that are on a bad diet, the ones that are farm raised and fed some pink pellet or something (where) their flesh turns pink instead of brown, those eggs have this dirty oily taste. Like a bad salmon. I can't stand low-end salmon.
-- Michael Donahue: 529-2797
The Brushmark Restaurant at Overton Park is in Memphis Brooks Museum of Art at 1934 Poplar; 544-6225.
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