Dana Holland
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Katherine Bish
Dana Holland has helped open, revamp, reposition and restaff so many restaurants over the past few years—menus at Mirasol, the Pepper Lounge and Jazz at the Bistro are just a few that bear his mark—that you’ll have to forgive him if he forgets a couple of them. “Oh yeah,” he says with a laugh when asked whether he’s the same Dana Holland who helped rewrite the menu at Aqua Vin earlier this year. “I was wondering what I did all spring.”
It’s been a hectic couple of months for the self-described “restaurant relief pitcher” and former owner of the CWE’s seminal Caribbean joint, Babalu’s. This summer he dreamed up the menu for the high-minded pub Alandale Brewing Co., and this fall he’ll help Space owner Tim Nesbit launch Koko, a pan-Latin–meets–Cajun joint in Maplewood. He wanted to talk about sancocho and asopao, but we wanted the dish on hishired-gun gig.
How does one become a restaurant relief pitcher? I was just trying to explain this to my family the other day. I have a friend who has this nice little niche restaurant-bookkeeping business. Someone would call her to set up the books at their new restaurant, she’d hear them talking about needing to hire a chef and I’d get called—and, being an avid reader and an anal guy that researches a lot of stuff, I have a pretty good working knowledge of different cuisines and the way that different operations run.
How do you start fresh at a new place? What I essentially do is shake out my mind. I’ll come up with a blueprint, and then I’ll turn to my library of books—I have about 500—to learn about the history and cultures. In the case of Koko, I did a fair amount of research on pan-Latin food, and then I revisited Cajun history—how these people were kicked out of Canada and moved all the way to Louisiana—to understand it. Then I thought about the dishes that fit.
That’s a lot of thought to put into a menu. I wouldn’t say I overthink it, but I try to immerse myself in it. In Louisiana, there are a lot of great chefs who are playing with the cuisine, but they grew up there. It’s like music: You have to pay your dues to get to improvise.
Which local restaurant would you like to fix? It’s not a restaurant that I want to fix, but I’d love to get my hands on Sofia Bistro. It used to be La Piazza. The guy who owned La Piazza did a phenomenal job of putting it together. I think he had the right idea: a little trattoria, a little neighborhood restaurant that has the feel of Italy with great wine and simple food.
