Q&A with Chef José Salazar: Cincinnati is the Place for Him

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Editor’s Note: Award-winning Chef José Salazar was born in Colombia and raised in Queens, New York. His culinary journey includes working with Chef Jean George Vongerichten, Chef Thomas Keller and other luminaries. In 2008 he and his family moved to Cincinnati, where he now runs four establishments: Salazar (moving soon to a new location), Safi Wine Bar, Mita’s and Daylily. He recently spoke with el Restaurante publisher Ed Avis.

Avis: How did you end up in Cincinnati in 2008?

Salazar: Well, basically my son, who is now 16, had just been born and my wife and I were both working. I was working probably 75, 80 hours a week, which is pretty typical in New York, at least in the restaurant industry. And then she was working a 40-hour work week, and having to shuttle our baby from the point of six weeks old to a daycare. I really didn't see them much until it was Sunday. And then by Sunday I was exhausted.

     I just woke up one day and thought, why don't we look to move somewhere else? It had never occurred to either one of us. My wife looked at me like I had four heads. But eventually after some discussion, she said, all right, well, I guess let's think about it now. This is the height of the recession in 2008.

     So we put out some resumes. Eventually, a headhunter got ahold of my resume and was calling me about this job in Cincinnati. I didn't know anything about Cincinnati and it just geographically didn't seem to make sense, but he persisted and persisted, and eventually convinced me to go out and do a tasting. I honestly just treated it like a vacation more than a job interview. I came to Cincinnati, did the tasting, everything went well, and they offered me the job and at first I turned it down. But I liked the city and I enjoyed the time that I had spent here, and I thought, well, this maybe wouldn’t be so bad for a few years. So we decided to try it, and here we are almost 16 years later.

Who hired you?

       The restaurant was called The Palace. It was a very longstanding fine dining restaurant within the Cincinnatian Hotel. It had sort of lost its allure a little, and I was brought in to help reinvigorate it. It was one of those holdovers from the eighties and nineties that was your traditional French kind of classic cooking. And I brought something a little bit more modern to the table.

And how long did you stay there?

      I was there for four years. At that point my wife and I said, okay, what's next? And I think we both looked at each other and said, we got a pretty decent life here already. Our son has made a lot of friends. He's going to a good school, and the pace is what we were looking for, right? It's quieter, it's easier, it's not quite as hectic.

     At this point, I've kind of started to make a name for myself in the city. And so we had someone approach us about opening a restaurant. And if we're going to build a restaurant, then obviously we're not going to move anywhere. We're going to have to dig our heels in and really dedicate ourselves to being here for the long term. And that's what happened. So we started building our first restaurant. It was called Salazar, and that was 2013.

What pros and cons have you discovered of working in that city compared to New York?

     The schools are phenomenal, and so my son has gotten a wonderful education. He doesn't have to contend with growing up in the city and taking trains and all the challenges that come with living in the big city.

     The cost of living, of course, is another big, big thing. I always joke that you want your city to be cool, but you just want it to be just cool enough because if it gets too cool, then everybody wants to move to your city and you become the next Portland or Nashville and you get priced out of your own city.

What about the restaurant scene? Do you find that the people in Cincinnati appreciate the work you're doing as much as they did in New York?

     I do. I really think that Cincinnati is very cognizant of what they have, and they are very appreciative. And Cincinnati has a history of phenomenal restaurants and great chefs in the city, so I think they're educated and well versed on what a good restaurant is.

     But the scene has just exploded over the last 10 years or so. It's kind of amazing. We've got so many talented chefs and operators and bartenders and just people who are just pushing the boundaries of what I think was great historically. So it was a lot of very classic stuff for many, many years. Not a ton of diversity. They were great restaurants, but a lot of them of similar style. And today, that scene is much different. It's a really nice mix of different styles, different cultures, cuisines and price points, and it's just a much more diverse, fun scene.

What elements of Colombian techniques or ingredients do you incorporate in your cooking?

     We play around with the flavors of Coombia quite a bit at our restaurants. We have a couple dishes that are very traditional, particularly the empañadas. They're the traditional corn crusted beef empañadas that I think are ubiquitous, and you see all over Colombia.

     And then we take some of the traditional dishes and we kind of play around with some of those flavors and techniques. We did a bandeja at one point -- it's also called the “mountain plate,” and it's a mix of all these different proteins and starches. It's called the mountain plate because people would eat this huge meal at lunchtime so they could get through all their work working out on the mountains and the farms.

     We took that dish and refined it a little bit. We lightened it in some ways. We made our own sausage, we made the chicharron. It was just a fun thing to experiment with taking this very rustic dish and refining it and making it not fine dining, but a little bit more elevated.

Was this a dish that you were familiar with from your own family?

     Yes, it was very traditional to have that in my home growing up. My grandmother was a really great cook. We named the restaurant after her, Mita’s. She was a phenomenal cook, but there was a lot of us. So the food was pretty simple and pretty rustic. But bandeja was a meal that you would see on the dinner table a couple times a week. Or different variations of it. You can kind of swap out this protein for that protein, or maybe today the avocados are really good, so you got an avocado on your plate and maybe tomorrow they weren't ripe or whatever, but it's something that she cooked a lot because it is peasant food at its nature.

I read that you are approaching six years of sobriety and that sobriety has helped reinvigorate your passion for the culinary arts. Tell me about that – how has sobriety helped you?

     Well, for one thing, I am just more rested. Clarity comes with that and alcohol does sort of cloud you a little bit. It inhibits your brain the way that you just can't really focus. And so really, I think what it boils down to is my rest and my focus are so much better and it's really helped me to settle down, to calm down. I was quite irritable at times when I was drinking and I had a very short temper in the kitchen in particular. But since I stopped drinking, I realized that I can just work calmer and be more compassionate and understanding, and it's just really helped me to be more settled, more grounded.

Did you achieve sobriety just on your own, or did you use a 12-step program or something?

     Initially I set out just to quit for a short period of time, for a few months. And the reason I did that is because I was opening a new restaurant and I knew that the time commitment, the amount of work that I needed to do was going to be a lot. So I wanted to have more energy to be able to withstand the 15, 16 hour days. And so I did that for two months and then suddenly I realized I felt great, and I said, well, I'm going to maybe do it for another little bit, another month or two. And then that four months turned into five and six. And in the meantime I was going to some 12-step meetings, AA, but they didn't exactly resonate with me. I didn't necessarily feel like it was the right fit. And I can appreciate AA, I have nothing negative to say whatsoever about AA. It works phenomenally for a lot of people, but it's just really never been my thing.

     So I do it on my own, essentially. I do have other people that I speak to, and so I have a support system. I have peers who are in the industry and who are also sober that I can talk to and people who aren't in the industry that I can talk to.

What's next for you?

     We are going to be reopening a restaurant in the spring. Our original restaurant, which was Salazar, we're going to be reopening it in a much larger location across the street from Mita's, our other restaurant. And so we're really excited about that. That's next on the horizon.

And is the menu changing?

     It is changing. It’s going to be pretty much all new. It's going to be American, and you will see a lot of Latin American flavors make their way into that. I still have to stick with my core. I have to inject some of my ethnicity and background into that menu as well. So you'll always see Latin flavors on any menu that I have.

Well it's been a pleasure speaking with you, Jose. Thank you so much for your time.

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