Three years later, Siegel-Gardner reemerged in Houston -- his hometown -- after staging at Fat Duck under Heston Blumenthal with a progressive idea of his own: a pop-up restaurant serving multiple courses, each aggressively modern and each featuring as much local food as possible. Courses included fireworks displays of dishes such as poached Gulf shrimp with braised pearl onions, sunflowers and ash yogurt or goat braised in whey served with black garlic jam.
The resulting Just August project sold out its dining room every single night, and Siegel-Gardner began to formulate a plan. Although Gallivan had to return home to New York City, Siegel-Gardner was able to convince him and his wife to ultimately abandon the Big Apple -- arguably the nation's culinary mecca -- and return to Houston based on the success of the Just August project and what he sees as a strong future in our city.
Gallivan and Annalea packed up their belongings and moved to a city they barely knew. Annalea had only been here once, and that was to help out at a Just August service. And Gallivan only really knew Siegel-Gardner and Hannah. The foursome became roommates, the Siegel-Gardners welcoming the Gallivans into their home until they can find a place of their own.
"We wouldn't be in this room right now if we didn't think this could work 100 percent," Siegel-Gardner said, eliciting nods and smiles from the other three.
Nor would they be here if they didn't see Houston as the next great dining frontier for themselves and for the young chefs they hope to groom and mentor one day.
"I think there's so much talent in Houston - the only thing that concerns me now is where people are going to go to learn," Siegel-Gardner says.
"I'm very confident that great things are already happening here and that things are just going to keep going up," says Gallivan. Seated next to him, Siegel-Gardner nods his agreement.
"The next six months in Houston is going to be a game changer as far as the way people eat," Siegel-Gardner claims. "Both with the big splash stuff that's going to happen and even with stuff that's going on behind the scenes." He talks about his excitement over Underbelly and Hay Merchant -- two restaurants sharing one kitchen, presided over by chef Chris Shepherd, known to many as the godfather of charcuterie -- and Triniti from Ryan Hildebrand, formerly of Textile. All will have equal emphasis on spirits, wine and beer as well as the food itself.
"Bartenders, baristas, cooks, sommeliers...the amount of people that are working with one another and the amount of people that are patronizing these places," Siegel-Gardner says, are growing and maturing by the day.
"Even the coffee scene in Houston has gone crazy," he smiles. The cappuccino he sat in front of me earlier -- "I'm still working on my latte art," he deadpanned -- was even a byproduct of this massive amount of inter-industry collaboration.
"David Buehrer [of Greenway Coffee] loaned him one of his machines," Hannah tells me. "So he's been practicing on it every day."
Talk about game changers: Chefs like Gallivan are now purposely moving to Houston from places like New York to work in our city and amongst our community, looking to cultivate and expand our dining scene. No longer are we facing an exodus of talent but an accretion instead. It's a subtle shift that could signal a groundswell of incoming talent.
It's a type of collaboration that, Gallivan says, "is really exciting and that's something you don't see in a lot of cities. New York is great but very cutthroat."
"I think the food community is very open," Siegel-Gardner says, picking up Gallivan's thread. "But not just open to the chefs. It's open to the guests, too, here and there's this interaction that people have with the chefs that most people don't get in major cities."
More to the point, there is ample room for growth in Houston, plenty of room for young chefs to spread their wings.
"We have the most amazing, diverse food community as far as ethnic food," says Siegel-Gardner, "But we don't have super fine dining restaurants." The Per Ses and Fat Ducks of the world simply don't have an audience in Houston. Yet.
Gallivan and Siegel-Gardner see that changing very quickly. Increasing numbers of people are exposed each day to high-end, sumptuously modern cooking on food shows and in magazines, inspiring them to seek these things out for themselves at home.
"When you want to go somewhere and have something super creative," Gallivan says, there are only a handful of restaurants to seek out in Houston. "That's why there's such a high demand," he says, speaking not only of his sold out Pilot Light dinners but of the clamoring around new places like Underbelly and Uchiko. And that's where he sees himself and Siegel-Gardner succeeding.
"We're not trying to make it so that everyone eats there," he says, speaking of their once and future restaurant. "We're just trying to make it busy each night." He laughs. "We don't want to feel like we're cooking the food that we don't want to cook or making a plate that we don't want to serve."
Most importantly, Gallivan and Siegel-Gardner see Houston as a place where their never-ending quest for additional knowledge -- learning new techniques, experimenting with new ingredients -- will be nurtured and supported. Think of a modern Paris of the 1920s, embracing young talents like Hemingway, Gershwin, Yeats or Picasso.
"Every chef would say one of the best parts about being a cook is that it never ends," Gallivan says. "You never stop learning."
And although Houston is their happy terminus for now, Gallivan smiles: "With cooking, there is no finish line."
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