It all started with a lamb shank… 

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Back in the day…

Jason was born in Cambridge, MA, but did the bulk of his growing up on the South Side of Chicago. Throughout high school, he was a typical awkward teenager, who ate teenaged things like Giordano’s stuffed pizza, Al’s Italian beef, and Harold’s fried chicken and thought that he would be a writer when he grew up. He didn’t know anything about food or fine dining. In fact, he had never cooked a single thing in his life at that point.

That changed during the spring break vacation of his senior year of high school, when he and his friends Howie and Erik headed to Walt Disney World for the week. The expensive sit down restaurants there had always intrigied him. “What’s so special about those places that it’s so expensive?” he would think to himself. “Why would anyone spend that much on dinner?” So, one day on that vacations, the three of them pooled all of their food allowances for the day and headed to The California Grill at the top of Disney’s Contemporary Resort, just across the lake from The Magic Kingdom.

Even with the money saved for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the three of them for the day, they still didn’t have enough to buy three entrees. So Jason and Erik decided to pool their money and split one of the more expensive menu items. It was a braised lamb shank on polenta with some grilled vegetables.

The event was life changing. Jason had never had lamb before. In fact, the closest that he had ever come to encountering a piece of meat that big was on holidays when, on occasion, he would have a nice cut of prime rib. The meat fell from the bone with ease. It was savory and covered with a pan sauce. The polenta was creamy and sweet. It was truly an awakening moment for Jason. This is why people paid so much. This is what food can be.

Jason never grew up thinking that he would be a chef. He pursued an English and East Asian Studies bachelor’s degree at Colby College in Waterville, ME. He thought that he would be a writer, just like everyone else who didn’t just “end up” with an English degree, and live to become a great novelist, which everyone with an English degree inevtiably becomes. However, he realized quickly that being in central Maine meant that there wasn’t a whole lot of ethnic food around. There were no places to get some of the home style dishes that he grew up with. All of the Chinese food centered around pork fried rice and chicken lo mein. While there was nothing inherently wrong with that, there really wasn’t any true taste of home there.

In an effort to have some of the flavors that he missed from childhood, he started getting basic recipes from his mother and from his grandparents. It began with a few things being steamed on top of the rice in his rice cooker in his dorm room, which surely irked some of the other people in the residence. Then it expanded to acquiring Chinese groceries during school breaks in Boston, bringing them back up to Waterville, and then cooking in the common kitchen at the multicultural center on campus. And then, by the time he was to graduate, Jason would gather friends, take their meal credits, exchange them for raw ingredients at the dining hall, and cook large meals for them every once in a while.

Following college, Jason moved back to Cambridge and ended up taking a job as a mutual fund accountant… with an English degree. Obviously, it was not a job he wanted, but somehow, it was the one he could get. So he continued to work as an accountant for five years, hating his life every day. To numb some of that hate, Jason would take all of his expendable income, and some of his non-expendable income, and would frequently go out to eat and drink. He was always trying something he had never tried before, going somewhere he had never been. That’s when he had his first taste of foie gras, and was exposed to the idea of French fine dining.

At that time, The Food Network was in its heyday . Tyler Florence, Emerill LaGasse, and Ina Garten ruled the network, as did a snarky, aging, punk rock chef named Anthony Bourdain. Jason watched The Food Network religiously while looking over the pages of any cookbooks that he could get his hands on. On his train rides to and from work, he would read books like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Bill Buford’s Heat.

This all evolved into long weekends where Jason would invite ten or so friends over, and would cook five or ten courses, telling them, “You pay for the groceries, I’ll cook the food.” One time, he fit thirteen people into the living room of his five hundred and five square foot, one bedroom apartment, and fed them all.

After five years in the mutual fund industry, countless meals cooked for friends, and a mountain of debt from college, eating, and drinking, Jason finally got fed up with his life, personally and professionally. It was then that two of his best friends made him a proposal. Let go of the apartment that cost too much, move in with them into a basement room with no windows, pay almost nothing in rent, dig out of debt, and change career paths. They had both been to many dinners big and small at his apartment, and knew just how much he enjoyed the prepping, the cooking, the feeding, and the people. So, they urged him to take a shot at cooking.

Initially, Jason said, “No way. I have so much debt. I’ll never make enough money as a cook. I’ve never even worked in a professional kitchen.” But they kept on urging him, and as his world fell apart from being so unhappy with his life, he finally gave in and moved in with his two friends.

A couple of months after moving in, Jason finally got the nerve to write to five restaurants in the Boston and Cambridge area. Rialto, Les Zygomates, Troquet, Craigie Street Bistro, and Chez Henri. Unfortunately and fortunately, only one restaurant got back to him, Chez Henri. Even after hearing from them, he was never able to connect with Chef Paul O’Connell. Instead, he talked with Chef Bob Cina, the chef de cuisine at the time. After a short talk, Chef Bob broke it down to him.

“I’m sorry. I can’t offer you a job,” he said. “We’re fully staffed right now.”

Jason thought for a second.

“With all due respect,” Jason said. “I’ve never worked in a professional kitchen. I just want to see if it’s cool.”

Chef Bob paused, “Well, if you want… you can hang out a couple of nights a week.”

And that’s where it began. Jason started staging two nights a week at Chez Henri in the winter of 2005 while keeping his day job in mutual funds.

When he started, Jason thought he would be relegated to peeling potatoes and garlic. That wasn’t the case. He was immediately put on the garde manager station making all of the cold appetizers and bar food. After a single service, he was hooked. He loved the pace of the line. He loved hearing the orders being called to the line, and he loved working with his hands, which, in that first year got burnt and cut more than he ever thought they would. He learned how to hold a knife, how to work with a sense of urgency, and the phrase, “make it nice.” It was there that he found a family that, to this day, he still keeps in touch with and thinks fondly of on a weekly basis.

After a couple of months of staging Monday and Tuesday nights, the cook who rode shotgun with him on the garde manger station said to him, “Hey, man. In two weeks, I’m going to give my two week notice, so if you want to move in to work full time, this is your chance.”

Jason knew that he couldn’t do it. He was too far in debt and knew that he had to keep the day job. So, Chef Bob thought about it for a bit and pulled him aside and said, “Is there any way you can work Saturday and Sunday for us? We’ll pay you!”

Jason sprung at it and said, “Sure! But, hey, unless you’re going to kick me out of the kitchen, I’ll still give you Monday and Tuesday for free.” So it was done. Jason was finally being paid to cook.

This continued for a few weeks before Chef Paul O’Connell ran into Jason in the dry storage room and asked him what he was doing there since he wasn’t on the schedule. Jason explained the deal that he had made with Chef Bob, to which Chef Paul said, “Nah, we gotta start paying you for all your hours.”

From then on, Jason worked anywhere from four to seven nights a week, all the while keeping his day job. It was nine to five at the day job and five thirty to sometimes half past midnight at Chez Henri. He came into work when people called in sick and when heroin addict didn’t show up, all the while keeping his eyes on the other cooks, trying to figure out what they were doing and how they were doing it so fast. With all of that work, Jason had no time to spend money, which made paying off all of his debt that much easier. In about a year, he had cleared all of his debt and a good chunk of his college loans.

At one point, line cooks got sous chef positions at other restaurants. Again, Chef Bob struggled to figure out what he would do, and again he turned to Jason and asked him if there was any way he could work full time with full shifts, which would begin at two o’clock in the afternoon instead of when he got out of work at five thirty. Coincidentally, at that very time, his day job was beginning to suck more and more. The reason he stayed so long, besides the salary, was for the opportunity to potentially transfer abroad, and that option had all but dried up, so there was no reason for him to really stay. So, Jason made the leap. He quit the comfort of a brainless cubicle dwelling job and threw himself head first into the world of cooking.

One day, he even asked Chef Bob, and his sous chef, Mark, if he should go to culinary school. The resounding answer was, “Absolutely not.” They insisted that Jason could be taught everything on the job and that if he worked with the right people, they would teach him everything that he needed to know, and would get paid to learn it. They were right. Jason never went to culinary school. He learned what he needed to know or how to figure out what he needed to know on the job by watching his fellow cooks, asking questions, reading, and, most importantly, tasting.

Just before Jason left his day job, he decided to burn all his paid vacation days and embarked on his first backpacking trip, which was a month traveling and eating around Europe. His itinerary took him from Amsterdam to Prague, Vienna, Strasbourg, Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Cinque Terre, Lake Como, Florence, and Milan. Again, his life was changed. He was exposed to all sorts of foods that he had never tried before, ate both street food and Michelin starred meals, met amazing friends from all over the world that he still keeps in touch with. He learned how to live with his life on his back, that vinstubes in Strasbourg are dark, dank, corners of heaven, and that you can’t order boulibaisse for one in Marseille.

In 2008, Jason took a job working for Chef Michael LaScola down on Nantucket, a seasonal job that afforded him the luxury for more long term travel. During the summers, he would work six days a week. On his one day off, he would wake up late in the morning, bike to the farm to pick up lunch and a plethora of beverages, bike to the beach, where he would sit for the entire day plugged into his iPod and reading books until the sun went down, and then would bike to the ice skating rink, where there was legitimate Thai food cooked by Thai people on an island where most people would fly in their take out Chinese food from the mainland. He saved every penny he had, and in the off-season, he would disappear for two months at a time.

His first off-season trip was to southeast Asia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Hong Kong. It was that first trip that Jason really discovered the amazing place that southeast Asia was. It was there that he fell in love with street food. He saw stalls lining the street or packed into big yards, where the cooks were only producing one or two things, and they did those things well. The produce was fresh and clean. The flavors popped with acid, salt, sweetness, and funk. There was no pretense emoted from the lady mixing his som tam salad, or the guy grilling the freshwater prawns. There were no chef whites or striped aprons, though occasionally, you would see a woman with a frilly pink apron.

Growing up eating Cantonese style Chinese food, where it is said that the Cantonese people eat everything with four legs except for the table and anything with two legs except for people, southeast Asian food was a revelation. The produce, the herbs, the layering of flavors, and the colors of the dishes were all new, all bright, and all amazing to him, from the bowls of noodles, to the curries, to the salads, and even the desserts. From the light and fresh, to the rich and funky, it was all delicious to him, with the exception of durian. He still doesn’t quite have a taste for that.

After that first trip to southeast Asia in the winter of 2009, the continent, the people, the food, the weather, and the culture kept calling to Jason. He has returned a number of times, whether it be back to Thailand for a month, a week in Nepal, or a two month expedition across China. Wherever he goes, he eats voraciously and does his best to befriend street vendors in the hopes of learning from the true masters.

Over the past ten years, has brought his time abroad into every kitchen he has worked in, whether it be teaching classes, or helming his own kitchen at Night Market. Regardless of where he is, Jason strives to create fun, inclusive, welcoming environments, free of pretense, and stocked with fat kid snacks and fresh bold flavors.

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