Posted on

Jay Powell Is A Serious Guy That Loves To Play With His Food

Chef Jay Powell of Twisted Fork in Cherry Valley, MA.

You don’t know quite what to expect when a chef cites his main influences as Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Justin Wilson (“Cookin’ Cajun”), Martin Yan (“Yan Can Cook”), and … Chief Jay Strongbow, one of the best-known professional wrestlers of the 1970s and 80s?

Actually, it makes perfect sense if that chef is Jay Powell of The Twisted Fork Bistro. Twisted Fork bills itself as “French, Italian, and American” – and it is that. And more. A mash up of influences, ideas, and imaginings, just like Jay.

Chef Jay Powell of Twisted Fork in Cherry Valley shown preparing a meal.“I’ve been cooking since I was four,” Jay says. “My father would be yelling at me to go outside and mow the lawn, and I’d tell him I was watching TV. I would flip the channels between Chief Jay Strongbow donning a headdress, going on the warpath, and doing the sleeper hold and Julia Child deboning a duck or Martin Yan dicing something impossibly fast without even looking as people applauded. You gotta think people were getting drunk, decided to do that, and whacked their fingers off.”

Jay has all of his fingers and gets plenty of applause for his food but knows he would surely get grief for political incorrectness (Strongbow was actually an Italian-American from Philly) if he decided to do an Indian war dance as he cooked. Not that you get the sense that he cares. After all, this is a guy whose Facebook page had the Abominable Snowman roasting the Elf on a Shelf on a spit and who refuses to put salt and pepper on the table during dinner service. (“I season everything. Can you please take a bite first?”)

But, still, it’s an open kitchen at Twisted Fork so no war dance, though you might think he was on one given how animated he is back there. Jay is as open and animated when it comes to his food. French, Italian, and American are really just some of the influences and he can go for high or low, which seems appropriate for a restaurant that serves most of its food in the mornings until 1 or 2pm and transforms itself into a real bistro for dinner on Fridays and Saturdays.

To emphasize this point, Jay offers me a taste of a sauce from a pan of Brussels sprouts. Sweet, tart, and warming, it is not what I expect from a master of elevated breakfast fare like portobello mushroom eggs benedict and chili omelets.

“I wasn’t going for shitty today,” Jay smiles as he sees my reaction. “I was going for good. It depends on what side of the bed I get up on. I can go for real shitty too.”

What Jay can’t go for, whether high or low cooking, is ingredients that lack a human connection. He prides himself on not just cooking from local ingredients – some of them from his own half-acre heirloom farm – but knowing the people who stand behind the food he buys regardless of where they come from: “I can tell you the person I get my food from, not just where. If I can’t source it from somebody I can talk to, I will not buy it.”

Chef Jay Powell is known for having a big personality.
Chef Jay Powell is known for having a big personality.

The dishes Jay puts in front of me as we talk exemplify this. Those Brussels sprouts come with cranberries from the Cape that Jay buys and freezes himself. He then braises them with apple cider and Auburn’s Pure BS Maple Shack maple syrup. They will pair with heirloom fingerling potatoes in brown butter and sage as sides for a 27-day dry-aged rib eye from Arista Beef Company in Southbridge (Jay does the aging himself). Next, a soup of tomato, mushroom, and bacon – like a pasta fajioli made from whole plum tomatoes Jay canned this fall and drizzled with his own hot sauce made from ghost chilies. He’s also making his own raviolis, today a mix of mushrooms and ricotta finished with sherry cream and homemade beef demi-glace. The marinara on that eggplant napoleon with slices of Somerville’s Fiore di Nonno mozzarella? It’s a massive hit that just joined the menu, made from scratch of course, the sauce thick, rich, and alive with fresh herbs.

Again, not what I expected when I walk into Twisted Fork. It has a familiarity and a comfort that belies its age (it opened in 2009). So does Jay’s relationship with his wife, Nancy, who does all the baking and is entrusted with prepping the restaurant’s beautiful baked beans, a secret recipe from Jay’s dad. Their easy rapport gives you the sense that they have been together decades, though they married in 2012. (She fell for him because of his signature hollandaise.)

Jay is totally good with these familiar feelings. That’s what makes him and Twisted Fork so approachable – he gives the people more than they ever thought they wanted and gets back what he wants from them.

“I want them to say, ‘Holy shit!’ when they get a plate from me,” Jay says, turning fairly Proustian. “When I cook for people, my goal is when you taste something it will evoke the memory and bring you back to your childhood, your grandparents, your aunt and uncle, your parents, or a particular situation or event. When they eat and take that first bite? That’s why I have an open window in my kitchen. I want to see their faces. I’m looking at facial reactions. I don’t just want to see if there are problems. I want to see people being blown away when they eat my food. I want them to feel like it is silly good – like they can’t figure out what is going on. I know at that point I have done my job and exactly what I was put on this earth to do.”

Jays-twisted-fork-stackedIt took Jay some time to get there though. He may have started cooking at four but after a half-century on this earth, this is his first restaurant. Sure, he had a catering business and still does, providing food for everything from movies filmed in Worcester to his and Nancy’s wedding in 2013 to – unknowingly – his own 50th birthday party. Sure, he cooked at Howard Johnson’s near Holy Cross and York Steakhouse in the Auburn Mall as a teenager, but his first career was as an engineer at Digital.

“My mother knew what I was supposed to do before I did. She wanted me to go to Johnson & Wales after high school, because I loved to cook, but it was hot and hard work and I thought I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. But my dad is a CPA, and I can swear to you I was not put on this earth to be a CPA. So, I went to engineering school and then to Digital and while I am working there I win a chili contest out of a 100 people.”

That chili was still a ways away from gracing our plates, however. After a decade at Digital, he also explored careers in car and mortgage sales before finally heading to Johnson & Wales and then opening his twisted restaurant.

The name comes from his best friend who told Jay, “You’re always twisted when you come up with these things.” Like his signature shrimp scampi omelet, which he first made following Easter Day brunch in 2010: “One of my servers asked what the special was going to be. I had all this shrimp left over. I was thinking about egg foo young which has a great mouth feel and said, ‘I’m going to do a shrimp scampi omelet.’ We sold nine that day. Then Phantom Gourmet tries it and the rest is history.”

That mouth feel and flavor profiling are the foundation of all Jay cooks, an inductee into Les Dames d’Escoffier in 2014. As approachable as the place and the food is, this is a serious guy loves to play with his food. He sous vides his eggs on weekends and is now evolving from the homemade flatbreads now on the menu to try and create a perfect Neapolitan pizza crust. He tries something new and instantly tries to make it his own. (Sriracha shrimp is the latest customer addiction and Jay is delighted it has caught on.) He’ll also go “out there” and pair things that live and grow together and his customers will usually follow – even if it is, say, a rabbit taco served with a sauce and slaw based on what that animal was eating.

“There isn’t anything I don’t like and won’t explore,” he says. “I try and embrace everything in the area that I can get. If I could get a squirrel or a raccoon locally and find a recipe that comes from the period of the Pilgrims when we ate that? I would do it. The best part about the people who come to this restaurant is they will friggin’ try it too. People say how can you stick to your roots having so many people come in? But I know the people. I know there’s an ass for every seat out there – a restaurant for everybody. I want people to come here because they are happy. I owe everything I do to them.”

And they in turn ask Nancy, “Is he always like this?”

“Chefs open up their lives,” he says. “You come in to my restaurant and this is my life – my bedroom, living room, dining room. And when you run a small family restaurant, customers are my extended family. Nancy asks me all the time, ‘Does everyone need to know all our business?’ But I don’t know any other way.”

Posted on

Farm To Table Is Central, Not Gimmick, for Chef Evangelous

Damien Evangelous prepares Thanksgiving dinners in the kitchen of Armsby Abbey on Thanksgiving.

If you’re going to stake out territory as the region’s best venue for craft beers, you’d better bring something more to the table. And it had better be delicious.

“When you focus on the quality of something so much — like the beer — it would be kind of silly if you just forgot about the food or made it a second thought,” says Armsby Abbey chef Damian Evangelous.

Rest assured. There’s no “second thought” to food at Armsby, which is nestled in a North Main Street building far flung from the city’s well-trod cuisine corridors. That food goes hand in hand with the more than 150 bottled craft beers, more than 20 on tap beers and creative selection of cocktails and wines (you’ll find pairing suggestions with each item on Armsby’s menu).

Damien Evangelous prepares Thanksgiving dinners in the kitchen of Armsby Abbey on Thanksgiving.But the food — remarkably local and often surprising in its presentation — that’s Evangelous’ passion. It’s a passion that began as a kid watching “Emeril Live” and took him to working in kitchens in the Hamptons, California and Spain before moving back to the area. He was worried coming back. He wasn’t sure he could find an appetite locally for the type of farm fresh cuisine he wanted to make. He found an unexpected ally in Armsby Abbey owners Alec Lopez and Sherri M. Sadowski.

“I looked around Worcester and found this place,” Evangelous recalls. “Alec was the chef at the time and I just really fell in love with the philosophy here.”

That philosophy, which began with seeking out the best hand-crafted beers available, extended to supporting local agriculture and bringing some of the region’s best agricultural products to the table — often in ways that defy stereotypes.

“I try not to overcomplicate anything,” Evangelous says. “I try not to show off with fancy techniques.”

That doesn’t mean the food is plain. Take the cauliflower. You’ll likely never look at it the same way again. Cooked in chicken fat and served with a potato puree, Kimchi, soft-cooked egg (local), almond bread crumbs, chives, espelette and lemon zest. It’s a hand-crafted dish. They all are.

The smoked chicken comes from a farm in Vermont and is served with heirloom beans and cabbage and sweet potatoes. There’s the monkfish stew (caught locally), the sweet dumpling flatbread with fresh sage, brown butter, parmesan and toasted hazelnuts.

The notion of “farm to table” is one Armsby takes to heart. It’s not just a few items on the menu. From the apple crisp with apples from Tougas Farm in Northborough to the grass-fed beef from Adams Farm in Athol. The food “feels” farm to table.

“Since I’ve come on we’ve worked pretty hard to find as many farms as we could,” Evangelous says. “We work very closely with Harms Family Farm in Brookfield. The produce they grow is just so incredibly delicious. Their tomatoes are insanely sweet and acidic and bright and they taste terrific. You really can taste the difference.”

The food and beers are carefully selected to complement each other. Farmstead cheeses are listed along with the farms they come from. This isn’t a pub.

“We’re really not that place,” Evangelous says. “We do a very specific thing here.”

But like many of the city’s top chefs, Evangelous says the biggest challenge is getting people to try new things. Sometimes the plate passing by you on the way from the kitchen is the best sell.

“People can be kind of stubborn and it’s hard for them to break away from what they’re used to,” Evangelous says. “You overcome that by making everything we offer extremely delicious.”

The local produce is abundant and delicious. And although much of it is seasonal, it doesn’t end with the close of summer. As the winter season begins to settle in, Evangelous says Armsby will move more toward more grains and meats.

“Finding local grains was one of the hardest things for me until this last year,” he said. “There’s a farm in Northfield and they grow all sorts of heirloom varieties of grains.”

The seasonal menus shift leans more hearty in the cold months.

“We’re in New England and that’s sort of the way I want to eat,” he says.

But with local greenhouses and root cellars it’s doable these days to keep the fresh, local produce coming year round.

The farm to table terminology gets thrown out a lot these days. It can be a gimmick at some places — buying a few local products to scatter onto the menu. But at Armsby, it’s really central to everything they do.

“It’s come a long way in the past five years; even in the past two years,” Evangelous says of Armsby’s mission to bring higher quality eating to the city. “But I think we still have a long way to go.”

Jerk Chicken Sandwich from Armsby Abbey on Main Street in Worcester, MA
Chef Evangelous is also known for his menu items featured each weekend during Brunch; including the Jerk Chicken Sandwich.