In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn

Alex Curley is chief operating officer of Palacios Murphy, a Houston-based restaurant company that got its start with Armandos, a 43-year-old restaurant that occupies the unique niche of serving Tex-Mex food in a fine-dining setting. Apart from opening a couple of restaurants in the village of Round Top, Texas, midway between Houston and Austin, Armandos’ owners basically stuck to the business of running that local culinary institution.

But in the aftermath of the pandemic, they started to explore new possibilities. Now they operate Hotel Lulu in Round Top as well as Italian concept Lulu’s, casual Tex-Mex restaurant Mandito’s, and Popi Burger which serving burgers and sandwiches.

Heading up operations is Alex Curley, who joined the group after a career of working in multiconcept groups including Southern Proper Hospitality and Richard Sandoval Restaurants.

Curley recently discussed the evolution of Palacios Murphy, which now centers a lot of its activity around Round Top, and how to run successful businesses 365 days a year in a town that really only comes to life during festivals.

Gayle Pirie is the chef and partner, with John Clark, of Foreign Cinema, a dining institution in San Francisco’s Mission District that has been nourishing its guests with Mediterranean-inspired California cuisine, as well as with movies projected on the restaurant’s wall, for the past 25 years.

She grew up in San Francisco and funded her ambitions as an oil painting artist by cooking. From 1985 to 1993 she worked with her mentor, Judy Rogers, at Zuni Café, and then went on to launch a restaurant consulting practice. That was followed by work with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., as her personal assistant. She joined Clark at Foreign Cinema in 2001.

Pirie takes her role as a “restaurateur” seriously. The word is French for “someone who restores,” and she does that by fostering the success of her employees, local producers, and her community as well her guests.

She is also a pioneer in sustainability practices, including her recent adoption of oil from Spotlight Foods, headquartered not far away in Alameda, Calif., that is derived from algae.

Pirie recently discussed this new oil as well as her approach to running her restaurant and her plans for the future.

Julia Zhu is the managing partner for the United States of Grandma’s Home, a chain with more than 200 locations in 60 cities in China, and with its first U.S. location opening soon in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood.

Zhu is the daughter of one of the founder’s of the chain and she’s heading up the opening.

She was born in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province in China and a city whose cuisine hasn’t been seen much in the United States. Zhu moved to the U.S. at the age of 15 and said she’s looking forward to showcasing the food that she grew up eating and that is hard to find here.

Neither Hangzhou nor its cuisine are well known in the United States, but it is an ancient and beloved city, known for its scenic West Lake and general beauty. In fact, there’s a Chinese saying: “The sky has heaven, the earth has Suzhou and Hangzhou,” Suzhou being another ancient city known for its gardens the next province up in Jiangsu.

Marco Polo reportedly said that Hangzhou was the finest city in the world.

Zhu discussed the cuisine of her hometown and her plans for the New York City restaurant.

Ameneh Marhaba is doing her part to spread the love of West African food in Detroit.

Born in the West African country of Liberia, she grew up in that country, where her mother is form, as well as Lebanon, her father’s home country, before she, her dad, and siblings moved to Detroit when she was around 15.

Having always loved the food she grew up on, she wanted to share it with others in her new home. She thought of launching a food truck but soon learned that she was priced out of such a venture, so instead she started going to bars, offering to cook and sell items like jollof rice, fried plantains, and spiced meat skewers.

It turns out that the bars were receptive to the idea.

“Most of them were really nice about it,” she said.

So in 2016 she started doing pop-ups at those bars under the name Little Liberia. Over time, her efforts grew into catering gigs and one-off seated dinners.

Now, with the help of Hatch Detroit by TechTown, which awarded her $100,000 in a competition with some 350 other small business, Marhaba is getting ready to open Little Liberia as a brick-and-mortar restaurant.

She recently discussed her journey and her plans for the restaurant.

Johnny Spero has been cooking for pretty much his whole life, and he has been running his own restaurants since he opened Reverie in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown in 2018. The intimate fine-dining restaurant took its lumps over the course of the pandemic, but it was done in by a fire in August of 2022, from which nothing but memories was salvaged.

Spero already had established himself as a big-name chef: When he was executive chef of José Andrés’s Minibar in D.C., Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema had given the restaurant a four-star review and the local eater.com declared him “Chef of the Year.” He also competed in the Netflix show, The Final Table.

Before the fire, Reverie had been granted a Michelin star.

He also had another restaurant, the more casual Bar Spero inspired by the time he spent in Spain’s Basque country, including a stage at the much lauded Mugaritz. But as he tried to pick up the pieces from the fire, and planned to reopen Reverie, Spero took the time to travel the world, doing collaborative pop-ups and continuing to learn how operators from around the world ran their own restaurants, sourced their food, and worked to make their own corners of globe a better place.

Reverie is about to reopen — its debut is slated for late February — and Spero recently discussed what he has learned since the fire, and what his plans are for the future.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected] 

Lane Li is the chef and owner of Noodle Lane, which opened earlier this year in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Park Slope. Li was born in China but her family immigrated to New York City, where they already had relatives, when she was a child. She worked in finance for many years before her love for food led her to set up a stand at the weekly open-air food festival Smorgasburg. Her dan dan noodles in particular were a big success, and she decided to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant near her home.

It will be a surprise to no one in the industry that opening Noodle Lane was a lot harder than Li expected, but she persevered and is now serving dumplings (including soup dumplings because they’re her son’s favorite), noodles, stir-fried dishes, stews and more for lunch and dinner, with brunch coming soon.

Li recently shared her experience of opening her first restaurant, the challenges she faced, and advice for other new restaurateurs.

Carl Sobocinski has been spending the past 25 years or so creating popular restaurants in Greenville, S.C., and in the process revitalizing the center of that city and enabling his employees to develop great careers.

In fact, he has helped a number of his team members to stop working for him and work for themselves instead. Sobocinski has been spinning off his restaurants to employees in a number of deals involving both sweat equity and financial investment, creating a new set of entrepreneurs for this city that’s about midway between Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta.

One of those entrepreneurs is Michael Minelli, a New Jersey native who fell in love with Greenville, started working for Sobocinski and is now the owner of Passerelle.

Sobocinski is also a northerner, born in Boston and raised in New Hampshire. He moved to South Carolina to study architecture at Clemson University, worked in restaurants and bars while studying and, as many people do, fell in love with the hospitality industry.

Sobocinski and Minelli recently discussed their respective careers and their plans for the future.

Paramjeet Bombra is the head chef of Gulaabo, a new restaurant in New York City focusing on the cuisine of Punjab in northwestern India and eastern Pakistan.

Bombra is a native of Punjab and had cooked all over India before arriving in New York and working at modern Indian gastropub Baar Baar, whose owners opened Gulaabo as a vehicle for the chef to highlight the cuisine of his native state.

Since opening the restaurant this summer, Bombra has been thrilling guests with items such as Amritsari Kulcha — a long and dramatically presented flatbread — goat curry made using his grandmother’s recipe, and a traditional dessert of cottage cheese balls that he tops with saffron ice cream.

Among other aspects of Punjabi culture that Gulaabo celebrates is its hunting tradition, which is reflected in the menu’s fried quail kebab and its rabbit curry.

Bombra discussed his strategy for developing the menu and his plans for the future.

Sarah Stegner has been the chef and co-owner of Prairie Grass Cafe in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Ill., since she opened it in 2004. From there she has overseen a community of team members, local suppliers, and customers that she says are essential to the success of the restaurant as well as of those around her.

She’s a founding member of a number of area organizations that foster sustainable food production, including Green City Market, of which she’s also past president, and The Abundance Setting, which supports working women and mothers in foodservice. More recently, she was a co-founder of Chicago Chefs Cook, which has raised more than $1 million since its founding in 2022 through culinary events, some of which has been donated to José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen.

She’s also an advisor to chef Sebastian White of The Evolved Network, which supports farming and culinary education for underprivileged kids in the area.

Stegner was already an industry veteran when she opened her own restaurant, having been chef of The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Chicago, for 21 years.

Stegner recently discussed the importance of community in her work, and how she continues to nurture those around her, including the growing number of people who are sensorily sensitive.

Billy Dec is a longtime restaurateur and entrepreneur, mostly in Chicago, where his Rockit Ranch Productions operated a number of concepts, but now he is expanding to new markets and focusing, as much as Dec ever focuses, on Sunda New Asian, a festive restaurant that celebrates his Filipino heritage.

He also has a nightclub called The Underground, an advertising agency called COACT, and the human resources firm HR Pro.

Dec is actually a lawyer by training, something he says certainly doesn’t hurt when it comes to running restaurants, and he has long been involved in raising the profile of Asian Americans. He was on President Obama’s White House Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, as well as the White House Bullying Prevention Task Force.

He also is an on-camera personality, having been a frequent guest on morning shows and appearing in a variety of films and television programs, and he just released a documentary, Food Roots, that debuted in September at the Nashville Film Festival.

Dec recently discussed that film, his heritage, his adjustments during the pandemic, his new Sunda location in Tampa, and his plans for the future.