Menu Talk

Brad Wise, founder of Trust Restaurant Group, has built a meaty empire that stretches from its home base in San Diego to Washington state and Las Vegas. The flagship is Rare Society, a modern steakhouse, but the 15-restaurant collection also includes The Wise Ox, a combination butcher shop and fast casual specializing in overstuffed sandwiches.

Chef Wise is a master of meat, meticulous about everything from sourcing the best quality, to dry-aging beef, choosing wood for live-fire cooking, and developing signature menu items. The newest Wise Ox, which just opened in Las Vegas, is located off the Strip and out of the hotel zone in a mixed-use development called UnCommons that has become known as a culinary hub. Here, customers can purchase steaks and dry-aged ground beef to cook at home, or order up chef-created sandwiches like Smoked Bologna, Roast Beef with Havarti cheese and horseradish cream, and Peppered Turkey with Chipotle aioli.

Trust Restaurant Group has developed close relationships with meat suppliers and buys in volume, passing value on to customers. Listen as Chef Wise talks about his restaurant journey, how he is differentiating the menus at Rare Society and The Wise Ox, and what expansion plans he has in store for Trust Restaurant Group.

Kelly Whitaker had no intention of going back to Oklahoma. He was born in Tulsa and had spent time in Oklahoma City growing up, and he didn’t love it.  

He didn’t hate it, but as far as the restaurant scene went, he didn’t see it going anywhere. 

“I said, ‘It’s not gonna turn a corner and all of a sudden someone’s going to think of Oklahoma City as like a Portland or an Austin or something,’” he said.  

But he now says he was wrong.  

“I'll say it out loud again: I think it's one of the most interesting growth cities in America, by far,” he said. 

That’s two years into owning Nonesuch, an award-winning 18-seat fine-dining chef’s-counter restaurant in OKC’s Midtown neighborhood that Whitaker bought in 2024. He had been following the restaurant since 2018, when Bon Appétit magazine named it America’s Best New Restaurant.  

Whitaker is the head of Id Est Hospitality, based in Boulder, Colorado, which operates a number of highly acclaimed restaurants and bars in that area, including Basta, the Wolf’s Tailor, and Brutø. He has a very strong sustainability ethos. Wolf’s Tailor in Denver was one of the first restaurants in the country to focus on fermentation, and through Dry Storage, Id Est’s Boulder-based artisan bakery and commercial grain milling facility, Whitaker has worked with 13 farmers to cultivate around 1,000 acres of regeneratively-grown heritage grains in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, including Antero Wheat and Ryman Rye. 

“That was not happening ten years ago,” he said. 

Nonesuch executive chef Garrett Hare has a similar approach, and to Whitaker’s surprise so does much of Oklahoma City.  

“Oklahoma’s mostly oil and gas, but wheat grows really well there,” said Whitaker, who has also contacted local tribes to discuss more usages for heritage corn.  

“There are lots of opportunities, but you need to create demand,” he said. “You need restaurants to buy it for them to grow it.”  

With all the growth in Oklahoma City, including professional sports and some of the 2028 Olympics games being played there, “and the art, the chefs, the neighborhoods, there’s just an absolute collective — it’s almost like a magic formula,” he said.  

“I’m also encouraged by the conversations I’ve had with some of the folks who are building new infrastructure … They’re having meetings with us, so Nonesuch can help inform what’s going on. We’re excited to be a part of that conversation for the city.” 

Listen to the full podcast in which Whitaker shares his vision for Nonesuch, including a reworked bar called Somesuch, and his further plans for Oklahoma City. 

“We’re in for the long haul,” he said. 

Steven Clarke, VP of marketing for Golden Krust, has worked his way up the family-run Jamaican fast-casual restaurant group. The first location opened in Bronx, N.Y. in 1989 by his uncle, Lowell Hawthorne, and Clarke continues to follow his uncle’s mission to bring a taste of Jamaica to the world. Golden Krust now numbers 100 units and has introduced generations of Americans to foods like braised oxtail, jerk chicken, curried goat, and Jamaican beef patties.

Every patty that Golden Krust serves has a piece of Jamaica in it — the Scotch bonnet peppers and thyme are grown on the island. When Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica last year, many of the farms that grow those crops suffered severe damage. Clarke and the Golden Krust team have traveled down there to help those farmers replant and offer monetary support to rebuild school cafeterias and more.

Recently, the chain has gone through a major brand evolution under Clarke’s leadership, launching a new website, initiating online ordering and a loyalty program, updating digital menu boards, refreshing uniforms and packaging, and expanding into third-party delivery. Clarke’s goal is to make it more convenient for people to get their hands on the food by increasing points of accessibility, he said. Several of the items are now frozen and available nationwide at retail, including in 2,000 Walmart stores.

Listen now to find out about Golden Krust’s hurricane recovery efforts, how Clarke is continuing to evolve the brand, and what’s coming next for restaurant and retail growth and the menu.

We Got Company is a subtly music-themed bar in the trend-forward neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York.

The founders, Jify Shah, Ian Everall, and Paul Ramirez met when working at the Cameo Gallery, a beloved music venue in Williamsburg owned by Shah that closed in 2015. They opened We Got Company four years later, and Ramirez, who had tended bar at Cameo and elsewhere, ended up as the head bartender.

The cocktails are almost all named after a song, but not necessarily a well-known or popular one. Instead, they’re often inspired by the songs of bands that the owners or friends of theirs played in.

There are other unusual aspects to the bar. It’s a seated-only venue — no standing around and jostling for the bartender’s attention — and the cocktails are generally made without heating any of the elements. Instead, Ramirez stirs them a lot, sometimes for hours during shifts. The result, however, is distinctive-tasting drinks that can’t be had elsewhere.

Listen as Ramirez discusses We Got Company and his approach to cocktail making.

Menu Talk: The executive chef followed his passion, pivoting from a teaching career to the restaurant world, and is making waves with his inspiring seafood menu.

Josh Hunt, executive chef at Cordelia Fishbar in Washington, D.C., started out as a high school Spanish teacher. After several years on the job, he realized his true passion was cooking — a passion he developed from a foundational memory of mom and grandma in the kitchen.

Although he had no formal culinary training, he landed a job at Hog & Hominy in Memphis, Tennessee, a lucky break since the restaurant’s head chefs had just been named to Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs list. Hunt was fortunate enough to work at Hog & Hominy for nine years and his career took off from there.

When the pandemic threw a wrench into the industry, he moved to D.C., bounced around at different restaurants and hotels, and landed at Cordelia Fishbar, one of the concepts in the well-known Clyde’s Restaurant Group.

Cordelia specializes in open-fire grilling and cooking in charcoal ovens, both of which infuse seafood with unique flavor. Hunt tries to source local species as much as possible, including rockfish, striped bass, crab, and oysters, gravitating toward simpler, more approachable preparations. He also dry ages salmon, turbot, and other seafood to deepen the flavor and enhance the texture.

Listen as he explains what differentiates the menu at Cordelia Fishbar, how he’s balancing the menu to offer value, and the innovative dishes he’s cooking up for fall and the holiday season.

Ryan Poli opened the first restaurant where he was the boss just three years ago. Before that, he’d spent decades running other people’s restaurants in Chicago — Butter, Perennial, Tavernita — as well as Catbird Seat in Nashville, but Iggy’s, an Italian restaurant in the Nashville neighborhood of Wedgewood-Houston, is the first one that he fully owns, with his brother Matthew Poli. Ryan’s the chef, and Matthew, a certified sommelier and cicerone, runs the front of the house.

Ryan Poli is highly credentialed, having trained at The French Laundry in the Napa Valley under Thomas Keller as well as at Le Français in the Chicago suburbs under Jean Banchet. He also worked overseas in Europe, Asia, and Australia, and gained further acclaim at Catbird Seat in Nashville.

Next came a somewhat tumultuous period in his life when he traveled the world to recenter himself. He staged with other chefs, including Dan Barber and Marc Vetri, worked overseas, and spent several months working with Will Goldfarb on the Indonesian island of Bali before returning home at the onset of the pandemic.

He and his brother opened in Iggy’s in 2023 under a business model that allowed everyone to get paid well while also turning a profit, and he has similar plans for Claymore, which the Polis plan to open a few blocks away in the first half of next year.

Listen as Poli discusses his journey, his management philosophy, and his plans for Claymore.

JoJo Hernandez worked as a chef at country clubs and fine-dining kitchens, but his culinary heart was always with his family’s Filipino cooking. He began introducing those cherished dishes to the Jacksonville, Florida, community through pop-ups at events, eventually operating a food truck while still helming the stove at his day job. But his lifelong dream was to have a brick-and-mortar restaurant with a menu highlighting Filipino recipes. 

That dream became a reality in 2023, when, with his wife’s support, he took the plunge and opened Abstrakt Filipino Essence. It’s one of several Filipino restaurants in Jacksonville, which has the largest Filipino population in the state. In fact, Hernandez is co-founder of Jax Filipino Chefs, and every April, the city hosts a Filipino Food Month Trail, guiding residents and visitors to these culinary destinations.

He and his wife developed Abstrakt Filipino Essence with the goal of familiarizing diners with the cooking from his family’s culture, but he says it’s 80% authentic Filipino and 20% his own twist, garnered from years of experience working as a chef. Menu items like lumpia, chicken pancit, adobo chicken wings, and pork belly sisig embody his signature style. 

Listen as chef-owner Hernandez describes how he blends Filipino cuisine with contemporary touches, how his dream restaurant continues to evolve, and why he relishes his role as an ambassador of Filipino culture. 

Eric Leveillee is the culinary director of The DeBruce, a 12-roomboutique hotel in the Catskills community of Livingston Manor, N.Y., where he has worked since 2020, offering a seasonal tasting menu as well as regular à la carte service.

He spent his formative culinary years in Philadelphia aftergraduating from Temple University with a degree in economics. He started at a Mexican restaurant called El Camino Real, where he fell in love with his waitress and got a job in the kitchen to try to get to know her better. It worked — they’re still married — and Leveillee went on to pursue a cooking career, working at Vernick Food & Drink under Greg Vernick and then heading up the kitchen at Marigold.

His next stop was Lacroix at The Rittenhouse Hotel, wherehe worked during the runup to the pandemic and then ended up at The DeBruce.

He recently shared his perspective on highlighting theingredients that he sources from the area, buying most of his produce from a farmer within walking distance of the property, as well as the occasional import, such as the Mexican herb epazote that he said goes well with trout.

Christian Nuñez, owner of Buena Vista Restaurant & Barin New York City, was raised in a restaurant family, but he swore he wouldnever get into the business himself. All that changed when he was recruited ata Penn State college career fair by Chipotle Mexican Grill to become a managerin training.

He took his Chipotle experience home to his father’srestaurant, helping to turn it around into a profitable enterprise. He changedthe name, introduced a Latino happy hour, and upgraded the venue.

But in 2018, Nuñez wanted a place of his own with a moreupscale Euro-Latin menu and sophisticated cocktails. That was the debut of thefirst Buena Vista Restaurant & Bar in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood ofManhattan. This year, he opened two more locations within a few months of eachother — one in the East Village and the other in Murray Hill. A gutsy move tobe sure, but Nuñez has the ambition to grow Buena Vista into a larger restaurantbrand. Each location shares his vision but is slightly different, geared to itsparticular neighborhood through its design, ambiance, and menu mix.

Listen as Nuñez shares how he differentiates the menu withinnovative takes on Spanish and Latin cuisine, how he elevates his restaurantswith artistic touches, and hints at his future plans for Buena Vista.

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Justin Devillier has been running the award-winning New Orleans restaurant La Petite Grocery for around two decades, and he’s about to branch out for the first time.

Although born into a Navy family in California, his family has been in Louisiana for generations and he moved to New Orleans in the early 2000s, before every city in the country had an interesting culinary scene, to pursue his career as a chef.

He eventually landed at La Petite, as he calls it, and worked his way up through the kitchen and, eventually, bought a majority stake in the restaurant and has been running it with his wife, Mia Devillier, ever since.

He won the 2016 James Beard Restaurant and Chefs Award for best chef in the South, but the restaurant was an institution long before that, and it remains one.

Now the Devilliers are getting ready to open Daughters Neighborhood Italian about eight blocks away from La Petite Grocery in the space formerly occupied by Upperline Restaurant. It will be an Italian-American place, obviously with a bit of a Creole accent.

Devillier recently discussed his approach to running restaurants and his plans for the new restaurant, possibly including a limited daily run of New Orleans’ signature Italian-American food, the Muffuletta sandwich.

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Menu Talk is a collaboration between Restaurant Business Senior Menu Editor Pat Cobe and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News. You can subscribe to it wherever you listen to podcasts.