In this month’s Chef Talk column Franco’s Accessible Seasonality, I spoke with Franco’s new executive chef Chris Williams about what we can expect to see on his new menu, his time cooking in Ecuador and his decision to return to St. Louis. Now, in the second part of this interview, Williams shares what he learned working at a small one-Michelin-star restaurant in France and how he’s making French fare accessible for St. Louisans. You have an impressive résumé. What are the takeaways from some of your culinary experiences? The CIA teaches you the CIA way. It wasn’t bad or good, it was just another tool I could use later on. I was refining a lot of skills. Le Bernardin: The way they teach, train and run Le Bernardin is one of the most amazing things. In France, I went to a small, one-Michelin-star restaurant in the south of France working as a chef de partie and realizing that my high school Spanish did not prepare me at all for the French that I would need. It was just a different way of cooking – techniques I wasn’t as familiar with, equipment that I hadn’t used much: paco jets, doing a lot of emulsions and foams. The garnishment of plates was labor-intensive; there was complexity in plating. I spent 15 minutes before every service foraging for wild flowers for garnishments.
How do you make French fare accessible? We have some big French words on our menu, but part of it is how you say it. The chicken that we’re doing has basically a stuffing on it; it says “Corrèze-style stuffing.” It’s basically a walnut, roasted garlic crouton stuffing that’s rich with chicken stock. It’s very accessible to anybody that likes stuffing. Celery root galette: It’s a kind of gratin. The word “galette” might be a little bit scary. Some people haven’t had celery root before, but really it’s a celery root kind of cake, it’s a simple thing. What’s “confit”? These are things that our servers know. Please ask our servers!
Tell me about a new dish on the menu. The duck liver and sweetbread terrine. We are using that as a duo with the house country pâté.
This article appears in February 2011.