When you’re one of the area’s most popular chefs, everyone wants a word with you. We yanked Ed Heath out of the Cleveland-Heath kitchen for 1 minute to pepper him with questions about his pasture-to-plate restaurant in Edwardsville, then let him get back to making more slinger-like lomo saltado and Japanese pancakes.
What dish on the Cleveland-Heath menu are you most excited about?
The duck breast with the German potato salad. English peas, bacon … oh my God, it’s so good.
What menu items surprise you with their popularity?
For the breakfast menu, the lomo (saltado). It’s even more popular than our biscuits and gravy. For the starter menu, the okonomiyaki. We get more comments about that than anything else on our menu. The popularity is almost shocking.
What dish can you not take off the menu?
The BLT.
Are you working with any new farmers or food producers?
Jenna Pohl. She owns Midwest Lamb. She’s all-natural in her feed, but these lambs are huge. They dress out at 90 to 100 pounds. We wonder if we should call them mutton. They are massive, and they are delicious.
What’s the biggest thing you learned since opening Cleveland-Heath in 2011?
Staffing – learning how to be an appropriate manager of people, and keep them happy and wanting to come back every day, and hungry so they want to keep learning on their own. We have a killer staff, but it’s been the most challenging thing.
What music do you listen to in the kitchen?
I hate really heavy metal, so we stick with contemporary rock ‘n’ roll, Willie Nelson, good old country, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, some old-school rap, a ton of old blues. It’s really who gets a hold of the radio.
What are your typical hours at the restaurant?
I am there Tuesday through Saturday, 15-plus hours each day.
How do you keep up your energy?
After work, I either jog or go to a 24-hour gym. If I didn’t exercise six or seven days a week for a minimum of an hour, I couldn’t keep up with it.
This article appears in Readers’ Choice 2014.