Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Winslow's Home has a new executive chef.
Cassy Vires will begin at the University City farm-to-table eatery either later this week or next week—more than three months after the restaurant announced Josh Charles would run its kitchen. Charles will return to private cooking and consulting.
Vires most recently served as the executive chef and manager at Companion's Teaching Kitchen in West County. But the lauded chef might be most known for her now-closed Maplewood restaurant Home Wine Kitchen, which she ran with her husband, Josh Renbarger, who is now general manager at Winslow's Home. The duo also ran the short-lived Table, a critically acclaimed restaurant with mostly communal seating.
"We're excited to work together again," Vires says, adding: "I wanted to take some time and have a more reliable schedule, something that wasn't quite as chaotic as the kitchen life, and spend time with my kids and my husband," she says. "Recently I started looking to get back into it. It was all about timing—with me saying it's time to go back and Josh leaving."
Vires, who has also been nominated for a James Beard Award in the Cooking, Recipes or Instruction category, says she's most looking forward to using Winslow's Home's farm.
"I've talked to [farm manager] Kasey [Peters] about ways we can work together," Vires says. "I'm excited to use ingredients that got pulled from the dirt that same day and really feature what's going on out in Augusta."
Don't expect too drastic of changes to the menu from Vires. "Winslow's has been around for 10 years," she says. "Nothing needs to be done to change the concept or framework. But I've definitely got ideas to make the menu my own and keep true to what we do."
