In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn

Alex Curley is chief operating officer of Palacios Murphy, a Houston-based restaurant company that got its start with Armandos, a 43-year-old restaurant that occupies the unique niche of serving Tex-Mex food in a fine-dining setting. Apart from opening a couple of restaurants in the village of Round Top, Texas, midway between Houston and Austin, Armandos’ owners basically stuck to the business of...

Gayle Pirie is the chef and partner, with John Clark, of Foreign Cinema, a dining institution in San Francisco’s Mission District that has been nourishing its guests with Mediterranean-inspired California cuisine, as well as with movies projected on the restaurant’s wall, for the past 25 years. She grew up in San Francisco and funded her ambitions as an oil painting artist by cooking. From 1985 to...

Julia Zhu is the managing partner for the United States of Grandma’s Home, a chain with more than 200 locations in 60 cities in China, and with its first U.S. location opening soon in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood. Zhu is the daughter of one of the founder’s of the chain and she’s heading up the opening. She was born in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province in China and a city whose cuisi...

Ameneh Marhaba is doing her part to spread the love of West African food in Detroit. Born in the West African country of Liberia, she grew up in that country, where her mother is form, as well as Lebanon, her father’s home country, before she, her dad, and siblings moved to Detroit when she was around 15. Having always loved the food she grew up on, she wanted to share it with others in her new ho...

Johnny Spero has been cooking for pretty much his whole life, and he has been running his own restaurants since he opened Reverie in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown in 2018. The intimate fine-dining restaurant took its lumps over the course of the pandemic, but it was done in by a fire in August of 2022, from which nothing but memories was salvaged. Spero already had established h...

Lane Li is the chef and owner of Noodle Lane, which opened earlier this year in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Park Slope. Li was born in China but her family immigrated to New York City, where they already had relatives, when she was a child. She worked in finance for many years before her love for food led her to set up a stand at the weekly open-air food festival Smorgasburg. Her dan dan n...

Carl Sobocinski has been spending the past 25 years or so creating popular restaurants in Greenville, S.C., and in the process revitalizing the center of that city and enabling his employees to develop great careers. In fact, he has helped a number of his team members to stop working for him and work for themselves instead. Sobocinski has been spinning off his restaurants to employees in a number...

Paramjeet Bombra is the head chef of Gulaabo, a new restaurant in New York City focusing on the cuisine of Punjab in northwestern India and eastern Pakistan. Bombra is a native of Punjab and had cooked all over India before arriving in New York and working at modern Indian gastropub Baar Baar, whose owners opened Gulaabo as a vehicle for the chef to highlight the cuisine of his native state. Since...

Sarah Stegner has been the chef and co-owner of Prairie Grass Cafe in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Ill., since she opened it in 2004. From there she has overseen a community of team members, local suppliers, and customers that she says are essential to the success of the restaurant as well as of those around her. She’s a founding member of a number of area organizations that foster sustainabl...

Billy Dec is a longtime restaurateur and entrepreneur, mostly in Chicago, where his Rockit Ranch Productions operated a number of concepts, but now he is expanding to new markets and focusing, as much as Dec ever focuses, on Sunda New Asian, a festive restaurant that celebrates his Filipino heritage. He also has a nightclub called The Underground, an advertising agency called COACT, and the human...

Richard Sandoval has spent the past couple of decades running restaurants and educating the world about Mexican cuisine, and more recently about other Latin American cuisines as well. He was born in Mexico and comes from a family of restaurateurs. Upon his arrival in the United States he found the food that was billed as Mexican didn’t resemble what he grew up on at all, and he resolved to change...

Sam Fore recently opened her first restaurant, but she has been on the professional food scene for years. Of Sri Lankan heritage but born and raised in Lexington, Ky., Fore got her start doing pop-ups at festivals in 2016. The food was a mashup of the spice palette of Sri Lanka with the foods of the South. Her ribs drew the locals, then her fried chicken started to attract crowds, and her tomato p...

Michael Schlow started working in restaurants at age 14 and never looked back. Yes, he went to college and culinary school, and sometimes worked in non-foodservice jobs for extra money, but the native of Brooklyn, N.Y., has been in kitchens of many different types for decades. He gained fame and awards with his fine-dining restaurant Radius in Boston, which closed in 2013, and since has been worki...

Maya-Camille Broussard is the chef and owner of Justice of the Pies, a bakery concept specializing in sweet and savory pies that she started operating out of satellite kitchens in Chicago in 2014. It’s an LC3, or a low-profit limited liability company, which has a primary mission of providing social benefits, but unlike non-profit organizations, is allowed to distribute profits. Broussard’s m...

Philippe Massoud, the chef and owner of Ilili restaurant, with one location in New York City celebrating its 15th year and a newer one in Washington, D.C., that opened in 2021. He comes from a family of restaurateurs in Lebanon, who sent him to the United States to stay with relatives. Then the political situation deteriorated at home and he found himself an unwitting immigrant, enrolled in high s...

Sam Bakhshandehpour is the president and CEO of the José Andrés Group, formerly ThinkFoodGroup, based in Washington, D.C. He joined the company in early 2020 from The Silverstone Companies, a hospitality group that opened Andrés’ first restaurant outside of D.C., Bazaar by José Andrés. Prior to that he was president and CEO of another hotel company, SBE Entertainment, and before that he worked in...

Shawn McClain has been running restaurants for decades, having got his start in Chicago, where he lived for 20 years, first studying at Kendall College and then building a name for himself as a talented and innovative chef. He ran the kitchen of Trio in Evanston, Ill., before Grant Achatz took that over and began his own rise to fame. Then McClain opened Spring to critical acclaim in 2001, followe...

Rob Rubba is the chef of Oyster Oyster in Washington, D.C., which, despite the name, is a mostly vegan restaurant. One of the ‘oyster’s in the name stands for oyster mushrooms, and the other is for the actual sea creatures, which apart from being delicious are regenerative animals that help shore up the coastlines and riverbanks where they grow while also helping to purify the water. The single oy...

David Burke has been wowing his customers and fellow chefs for decades. He was already executive chef of the legendary River Café in Brooklyn, N.Y. at the age of 26, and while he was there got a three-star review in The New York Times . He went on to head up the kitchens of the Smith & Wollensky restaurant group, including Park Avenue Café, Maloney & Porcelli, Cité, the Post House, and oth...

Ria Montes has been chef de cuisine of Estuary at the Conrad Washington, D.C., hotel for a little over a year now, and in celebration of Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, this Filipina American celebrated with her guests by laying out a traditional kamayan feast. Literally meaning “by hand,” this smörgåsbord is a customary celebration among family and friends. Montes was raised in...

Bin Lu has been the executive chef of The Restaurant at Blue Rock in Washington, Va., about a two-hour drive from Washington, D.C., in the bucolic Virginia countryside, since it opened in October of 2021. A year-and-a-half in he continues to delight guests with a constantly evolving prix-fixe menu. Lu was born in Shanghai, China, but immigrated to the United States when he was 2 or 3 years old. He...

Chef and restaurateur Michael Mina has long made education of his staff a priority. Born in Cairo, Egypt, and raised in Ellensburg, Wash., Mina studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., while staging under Charlie Palmer at Aureole in New York City. He then partnered with chef George Morrone to open Aqua restaurant in San Francisco in 1991, where he personally trained the ki...

Chris Morgan has spent most of his career in fine-dining restaurants, including in San Francisco at Zuni Café under the late Judy Rodgers and under Charles Phan at the Slanted Door. But as grateful as he is for the training that he got at high-end restaurants, he feels more at home preparing food that most people would like to eat every day, and he eventually returned home to the Washington, D.C.,...

Nick Livanos is the head of the Livanos Restaurant Group, a multi-generational family business that operates Oceana and Molyvos restaurants in New York City, as well as Moderne Barn and City Limits, in the suburbs of Armonk and White Plains, N.Y., respectively. The restaurant group was started in 1960 by his father John Livanos, who had immigrated from Greece three years earlier and started washin...

Aaron Taylor is the corporate chef of Atlas Restaurant Group, a Baltimore-based company with 27 restaurants, mostly in its hometown but also in Washington, D.C., and Houston. It’s also about to enter Philadelphia with its fourth location of Loch Bar, which Taylor calls a “seafood parlor” with a focus on whiskey and oysters. It's an 11-year-old company that brothers Alex and Eric Smith started with...