texasmesquite

08/15/2008

Karen Hoffmann arrived in St. Louis about a year ago as part of the crew to open a new hotel, Four Seasons St. Louis. She had to recruit and train chefs, sous chefs and staff, create the menu for Cielo (Italian for "sky"), the hotel's premium restaurant.

She oversees 28 chefs and five sous chefs.

Hoffmann has made an effort to serve locally grown meat and poultry, vegetables, fruit and berries. We spoke in her tiny office off the kitchen. It's stocked with cookbooks, a computer and a tray she keeps under her desk with some of the tools of her trade: favorite knives, a sharpening steel and vegetable peeler. She has nothing fancy, by the way. A high-end cooking store would go broke selling Hoffmann kitchen gadgets.

Why are you a chef?
It's all about bringing people together. I'm from lots of big family. People were very happy around food. The more you start interacting with all this, the more people just love you. Give them a plate of food and they're like, "You are it."

When you cook a meal for guests, would you rather be in the kitchen or where everyone's eating? When I was kid, I would make all this food. I just wanted to watch people eating everything, their facial expressions. I loved it.

What's the best single cookbook?

Thomas Keller's "Bouchon." Next to my bed at home there is usually a stack of cookbooks I like to flip through. With us, it's always a kind of learning experience. Even though you've seen that book a million times or you've looked at that recipe a million times, there's going to be that one time you look at it and all of a sudden you get what they're trying to say. It's just like the cooks in the kitchen. You can tell them a hundred times and every once in a while, you see a light bulb go off in their eyes and they got it.

You don't follow a recipe slavishly?

No. I believe everything that comes through the door is unique every day. You could have a tomato that is really sweet one day and the next time it comes in it's not. That's the finesse of being a chef and being a culinarian. It's being able to manipulate that ingredient, not only to be consistent for the diner every day, but also to challenge yourself

Is making a better dish constantly on your mind?

Yes.

Do you write down your recipes?

I jot ideas down. I have my little notepad I keep in my pocket. If I see an employee doing something that's really good. … When you have a staff of 30 people, you can't be one-on-one with them every single moment.

Is morale important?

Absolutely. It pulls the whole team together.

If someone's in a bad mood or ruins a dish, can that throw everything off?

It can, but it depends on how strong morale is. Teamwork will pull it together.

How long did it take to mold the new chefs and sous chefs into a team?

It's still becoming a team.

How close are you to what you want?

Very close. There's always an ebb and flow in this business.

Is that turnover?

Sure. People work at a place and figure they have learned everything they want. So they want to go over to Niche and work with Gerard Craft.

That doesn't bother you?

No. We do have to hire and train and get them up and going.

How do you find the right foods and ingredients?

It started with the menus we developed when I got here.

Did you base your menus on local foods?

On what I thought would work in St. Louis. Everyone says the Midwest is a steak-and-potato place. I don't believe that's true. The ­palettes here want to explore and try different foods.

What do people like?

I brought in some Italian buratta cheese just to try it. It's a fresh milk mozzarella made with cream. It's a very, very soft cheese. I knew of a small vendor in California. I got in 12 pounds of it. Over two days, gone. We put it in with some grilled romaine and heirloom tomatoes.

What else do people like?

They love seafood. Monkfish was a bit of a tough sell in San Francisco, but I blow through it like crazy. I brought in Hawaiian blue prawns. We serve them with the head on. We clean them, but we trim the feet and the feelers so they don't look like monsters on your plate.

How do you find vendors?

Word of mouth. When I first got here, some people came to the door. I read "Sauce" magazine to find out what was going on and who was doing what.

Were these vendors guys in pickup trucks?

Some. Some farmers are a little leery to deal with the hotel because they think, "Hotel, huge volume." I don't want this restaurant to be a restaurant in a hotel. I treat it like a free-standing restaurant. So when I go up to a farmer or a purveyor, I go up to them as a chef at a restaurant.

Were you influenced by ­Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.?

Very much so. If I could throw a garden right here and farm from it, on one of the decks, I'd do it.

How do you see what's being produced?

I drive around a lot on my day off. I go out to the Kirkwood Market a few times. I love that little market. I drove to some lady who was doing free-range chickens 75 miles away.

You have to build this all up, don't you?

It takes a while. People have to trust you. They don't extend credit. They want corporate credit cards, or they want cash.

How far along are we in providing what a chef like you wants in fresh ingredients?

It's in its baby stage. It's got to be driven by the people, especially in these economic times and here in the Midwest. It's got to be affordable for everyone.

There's an irony here, isn't there? Here we are in the Breadbasket, and it's hard to find locally produced fresh food.

One of my biggest challenges when I came here was to get fresh meat and fresh chicken. Every time I placed an order, it came in frozen. I was just like, "No, no. You don't understand." So I sent it back and it came back defrosted.

You want it never to have been frozen?

Right.