Chef Casey Thompson

Folktable, Sonoma

Let’s get it over with and say Chef Casey Thompson was on “Top Chef.” And she did damn well, making it to the finals of the popular TV show’s Season Three in Miami, and being voted fan favorite. And let’s follow up quickly to say that was 14 years ago—and a lot has happened since (including more appearances on “Top Chef “).

Casey is currently the consulting executive chef at Sonoma’s Folktable, and culinary director of Sonoma’s Best Hospitality Group, the owner of Folktable. “The restaurant is a really vibrant place to gather. We have beautiful, seasonal food, live music, pop-ups. People gather with their friends to share an incredible cheese board or a meal,” she excitedly said before my visit.

Over the past couple of years, Sonoma’s Best Hospitality Group has purchased several landmark Sonoma sites, including the General’s Daughter, for which they say they have big plans, and the Sonoma Cheese Factory, which recently re-opened. “Having a supportive team behind me is so important,” Casey said. “Not having the same core restaurant values as the owners has been the downfall of a few [of my] past projects, so I really appreciate where I am now.”

Casey has been in California for 13 years, but she will always remain a Texan. “I dropped my accent because I didn’t want to sound like a hick, but after a few drinks, my partner says, ‘Here comes Texas.’” Born and raised in Dallas, Casey says her paternal family is “straight Texas,” and her maternal side is French, I mean, Parisian. This cultural coupling, etched most sharply by her grandmothers, is a culinary origin story.

On one side is Casey’s Texan grandmother, kneading out biscuits for drop-in guests, and on the other, her French grandmother lecturing her on the proper way to make mayonnaise (and you had better use a wooden spoon).

After graduating from the University of North Texas with a degree in marketing, Casey took a job selling jet fuel at a private airport in Houston. “I got to wear a cute suit, do work I liked and go home at 5pm.” When she wasn’t working, though, she developed a habit of copying recipes by hand from cookbooks, newspapers and magazines. “I have boxes and boxes of them,” she says of her self-described Rain Man phase.

When Casey finally summoned the nerve to ask her mother for money to go to culinary school, “she said no,” recalls the chef. Having already paid for college, her mother suggested she work in “the bowels of a kitchen” and see if she really liked it before shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for cooking school.

A couple of Casey’s qualities come through as soon as you meet her. One is her charm. The other is her determination. Once she locked into the idea of getting a cooking gig, she moved to Dallas, put on her jet-fuel-selling suit and marched straight into the legendary Mansion on Turtle Creek. The human resources liaison looked over her restaurant-less resume and took her to the sous chef, who walked her straight to legendary chef Dean Fearing’s kitchen office.

“Cooks love to torture you. But I told him I could do it and he told me to come back Monday morning at 5am.” That was the start of five years at the Mansion, where she began as an anchor to her prep colleagues, and ended with the title of sous chef. “Nowadays it is harder to get a chance to be a burden in a kitchen and learn that way,” she said.

She was clearly a quick study, because Fearing tapped Casey to helm the new restaurant that his (now ex-) wife, Lynae Fearing and Chef Ken Rathbun’s wife, Tracy Rathbun, were opening. Today, Shinsei is still a popular spot in Dallas, and still serving some of Casey’s dishes (try her take on fried rice if you visit). “They wanted to create this cool pan-Asian restaurant with an open-concept sushi bar and they wanted me as the executive chef. That was my first … everything. Such big trust.”

The good press and reservations were immediate. From management, to making pastry, to tweaking the menu, Casey was hands-on and head-down. “I did everything.” And then the phone rang. And rang. And rang.

The “Top Chef “casting agents were “stalking pretty hard. But it felt like I couldn’t leave the restaurant.” After hearing that a local friend/rival was in the running, the prospect got more enticing and Casey agreed to a meeting. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

In the show’s early seasons, contestants had to completely sequester for months. “You just disappeared and then dropped out of the sky [on television] one day.”

“When I came back [to Shinsei], it was crazy. We were not prepared for what was coming. I was getting pulled in 17 different directions, companies were calling, wanting to promote us. I really wanted to focus on the restaurant. It was just getting impossible.”

It was getting hard for the restaurant, as well. “It was a real adult conversation. They were, like, ‘We need you here.’ And I was, like, ‘I can’t be here.’ And they were, like, ‘OK, then.’”

Casey moved on to explore the other opportunities created from her exposure on television. A gig for Clorox, which has food brands under its corporate umbrella, brought her to the Bay Area. “As a Texas girl, I wanted to get in a bigger pond and grow. And, also, there was a guy here that I was interested in. Still with that guy today.”

She moved to Yerba Buena Island, which “was nuts. I would wake up and my sheets were soaked because I left the window open. And then the ships would go through and blow their horns and knock me out of bed.” She spent a few years cooking for wineries. She opened anothwer restaurant in Texas, playing with upscale Southern classics.

Then she got her opening to swim in the San Francisco restaurant scene, at the Warwick Hotel. Named Aveline— the French version of her Southern grandmother’s name, Hazel—the restaurant was an homage to Casey’s culinary forebears. “I had some really, really amazing people on my team. And we did lots of tricked out food. I thought we were doing something cool in San Francisco.”