John Griffiths is adaptable. As a consulting chef, he’s worked on a number of high-profile projects around town, each one distinct from the next. Skybox serves Southern-urban comfort food. When he was at An American Place, it was farm-to-table fine dining. Lumen is a private-event space that allows him to create global cuisine tailored for each client. And his latest effort, El Borracho Mexican Cantina, offers traditional and “gringo” Mexican fare. Griffiths brings his fine-dining background and training to bear each time he helps to launch a new restaurant with a focus on quality and creativity.
Outline for me how you do your work. I work behind the scenes at restaurants that want to bring me in to help with staff and labor. I do a lot of management contracts; like here, I manage the labor, the food cost, write menus, attend meetings, that kind of thing. And then I have a full staff on site to handle the day-to-day.
So you’re fully independent. Tell me how the relationship works. We discuss the whole proposal, what [the owners] envision, what they have as a budget. Depending on how well thought out the project is, that’s how I determine whether or not I get involved and to what extent.
Once you determine the project is feasible, how do you guide the client? Each one is so different. I work pretty discriminately in that regard. … If I don’t see myself being able to sustain my interest in the long term, then I don’t want to get involved in the short term. So I look at it, if it’s feasible, a great concept, it’s going to work where it’s at, the ownership understands what [it’s] trying to do, they see the risks, they see the goals, then I’m 100 percent on board. I’ve turned down clients. Said, listen, I just don’t think you’re doing this the right way. I don’t think you have enough money. I don’t think you understand the restaurant business enough. Rethink this a while. Don’t give me the money. Some have gone ahead and some have not.
When you’re concepting a menu, do the owners let you run with it? Do you come up with a bunch of ideas and just whittle down? I don’t think that anybody would just take a menu, do exactly what they want and go from there. There may be some that do that, but those are the ones that don’t make it. As a chef, it’s your job to understand that you feed and please others. You may have been trained in a certain manner and tasted a million dishes, but other people haven’t. You’ve got to get them to the point of understanding what you’re doing. If they can’t get it, there’s no point in trying ’cause you’re not going to stay in business. A lot of chefs have trouble accepting that.
So, for example, here at El Borracho, how did you research the food? Well, I’ve been in fine-dining restaurants my entire career. I started washing dishes when I was 14; I’ve never had a job outside of the kitchen. Any kitchen you walk into, you’re going to find a Hispanic cook or two. The higher up you get in the fine-dining realm, the more Hispanic cooks there are, the better trained they are, and you find that so many staff meals are made by the Hispanic cooks and dishwashers. So that’s where a lot of my love of Mexican food came from.
Did you pick their brains? Absolutely. It comes from years of that. Watching them make the posole. Watching them make menudo. Make mole. When we decided to concept El Borracho, we wanted to pick the things that … were at a level that could be introduced to a wide stream of St. Louisans and they would accept it. It probably wasn’t going to be mole. It probably wasn’t going to be chilaquiles. But the tacos, some of the meats that people aren’t familiar with, we really felt that those were the flavors and ideas that we could get into a concept like this. Give them some of the safety-net items that they’re used to, they can come in and get a gringo taco – a hard-shelled taco with ground beef and cheese and tomato – they can get that, but if it’s good enough, the next time, on a recommendation of a server, they might try that chorizo taco. And they might move from there to something else. Sooner or later they might try the lingua.
And you use super-high-quality ingredients. Everybody involved in the project was on board with that. The idea was, “How can we get this down to the point that it’s inexpensive enough to make it appealing?” The meats are, at the worst, Amish chicken. At the best, natural, organic, humanely raised beef. Our pork is organic Berkshire.
That’s surprising with the price point. We’re not using center cuts. We’re using beef shoulder. We’re using techniques and methods that allow for a lot of utilization of product. There’s not a lot of garnish in this format. Here it’s all about flavor. It’s all about simple, right on, traditional Mexican flavor. There’s some gringo stuff in there. We have nachos. But we make our beans traditionally. They’re not out of a can. So that burrito was made with rice and fresh beans and fresh meat and it’s rolled to order.
I can tell how excited you are about this place – what is it that you love about this business? It’s the way that food can change people’s mindset. A great meal can lift you up out of a bad day. If you can go to a restaurant – and this one in particular … when you come from fine dining, people come in and they enjoy the meal. They enjoy it on a cerebral level. But I wanted a place where people aren’t afraid to just enjoy the entire experience. The food’s great. Shout about it. Have a great time. We wanted to have an environment where it’s about the product, things that people really like.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2009.