Photograph by Katherine Bish
How many people in the restaurant business actually enjoy what they do? I'd say precious few. For some it's a necessary part-time gig; others are lost souls who wandered into the industry and never left. Most unfortunate are the restaurant owners who get strapped financially and simply can't get out. Kirk Warner is one of the lucky ones, a restaurant anomaly who's been able to combine two of his passions — cooking and travel — and turn them into a viable business. Before returning to the road with Kirk's Traveling Kitchen, which he started in June 2005, he stopped long enough to tell SLM about it.
For my money, you're the guy who put King Louie's on the map. How did that all begin? I was in film school in L.A. I took a semester off and came here ostensibly to write screenplays and work for my cousin Matt McGuire [then owner of King Louie's], who wanted to do something more refined.
So did you ever write any screen-plays? I did. I have a lot of unfinished ones.
Kirk's Traveling Kitchen hits a niche market. How'd you come up with the idea? When I started, I did not even know the niche ... The approach was to do everything for everybody.
Not exactly a niche. It started with private chefing, wine dinners, catering and cooking classes. Then I became involved with a worldwide corporate education company that was looking for ways to animate conferences on-site. The meal period was lost in those venues, and they needed to recapture that time. That's when the real traveling began.
Was traveling the big draw? The variety was the draw. For me, the hardest part of the restaurant business was the repetition ... It was like a theater where the run never ends. Now each event is a finite experience.
Were you a private chef here? No. I met a family from San Francisco through the James Beard Foundation and became their private chef for a summer at their home in Saugatuck, Michigan, close to where I grew up. It was the perfect summer job.
Was that a hard transition? My mother knew me as an executive chef who would swear at people in 3 languages. She said she was a little concerned with me in that new environment.
Did it work out? Heck, now you only had to swear in one language. It was a totally different experience, a breath of fresh air. The pace was less frenetic, the kitchen wasn't 150 degrees and the 16 hour days were gone. At that point I discovered there may be something else I want to do, something a little less defined.
Do you cook still cook for that family? I do. It's the only private cheffing that I still do. They are more like family.
Are there kitchens in the other venues? My next event is in Athens, called Sushi Factory, and has to be done in a ballroom, near a kitchen. But many of the events I do in Europe are wine focused and require little kitchen.
Do you have a background in wine? My family owns a winery in Michigan ... Warner Vineyards in Paw Paw. It was the largest winery in Michigan for many years.
Are your clients more corporate or more private? It's about 50-50. Most of the private is here, and most of the corporate is out of town or in Europe, but that may change. I'm focusing on the corporations based here. It's crazy — I'll be out of town all week doing a corporate event and come back on Friday to do a private event that weekend.
Impressive. I don't know of any other local chef who can make that claim. Your wife's ok with all this back and forth? It certainly beats restaurant hours. Sometimes she joins me and calls it a vacation.
Do you take staff with you? If it's close enough, definitely. Otherwise I rely on corporate helpers, who luckily are educated and knowledgeable. But I had to transform my dialogue.
How's that? I've gone from Spanglish to using terms like "dynamic" and "animate."
Any advice for someone looking toward culinary school? Get your undergrad degree first, then go. If it's not what you thought, you've got that degree. The lifestyle of a chef most often is not a sustainable one. It's a harsh lifestyle ... for the chef and his family.
Did you go to culinary school? I never went. I have a liberal arts background and fell into cooking ... it's what I'd done since I was 12 or 13, in my mother's restaurant in Michigan.
With the trend toward "small plates" and smaller portions, are stomach-stretching multi-course dinners becoming more or less popular? With me, less popular. I still do the traditional appetizer, salad, entrée and dessert for most parties. I keep it on the whimsical side of traditional ... but I don't do Grant Achatz/Alinea-style foams and jellies.
There is another trend here, using prix fixe as a survival tactic. What's your opinion? When I started cooking here, all people told me was "don't do prix fixe. People here want their choices and lots of 'em." I'm not sure that was true, but I didn't do well with it. In my favorite places, the chef tells you what to eat ... there's a place called Arun's, on N. Kedzie in Chicago. He serves you ten to twelve of the most exquisite Royal Thai courses imaginable, matched perfectly with Riesling and Alsatian wines to complement them.
Do you use prepared foods in participative classes to save time? No and I've even gotten further away from those foods. I'm now even making the breads for my dinners. In a restaurant, there are concessions you have to make, serving several hundred in a night. That's one reason I'm doing this ... to get away from that.
Do you travel with your All-Clad pans, or can you cook with Cheapoware? Clients often get insecure about whether their kitchen equipment will measure up. To make it easy, I travel with everything ... everything but the stove.
Does KTK specialize? My focus is market cuisine. Western Michigan, where I grew up, is a huge agricultural area. My mom, at her restaurant, would tell the farmers, "Just leave me some of what you have." We'd arrive in the morning, and there'd be 6 bushels of asparagus at the door.
Your mom was an early locavore. We all were. Everything came from people who were 5 to 10 miles away. Once you've had beans right off the pole, it's just hard to go to presnapped beans in a bag. To this day, we make fun of restaurants with those huge delivery trucks parked outside.
Do you miss the day-to-day — both the joys and the challenges — of owning a restaurant? I miss the camaraderie. It's what got me going at 7 in the morning and kept me going until midnight. If I miss it, I can always go back. But there are a lot more things to do outside the standard independent restaurant. That's what I want to explore.
