Escoffier Questionnaire: Chef Garrison Price

“I think people are still figuring out that we are open.” Executive Chef Garrison Price and his team of 76 cooks opened Bear and three other dining experiences at Stanly Ranch earlier this year. The 700-acre destination is the third Auberge property in the Napa Valley.

Beyond the hub of food, wine and spa, the land includes a culinary garden, luxe cottages, vines on rolling hills and plenty of open space. It is a Wine Country dream. Perhaps for Chef Price, as much as anyone else.

“[My now fiancée] and I went on a trip to Santa Barbara, to our friend Chad Melville’s winery, and we were joking about moving to California [from New York]—and the next week I got the call about this.”

We start our conversation, fittingly, where many meals begin— in the garden. Stanly Ranch’s Farm Director Nick Runkle shares that the long table that sits amidst the ’tween-seasons-but-still-fecund raised-bed garden boxes has become the “venue of choice” for events at Stanly Ranch. “We talk a lot about soil nutrition and that’s one of the things I’m most interested in. Because I already know my vegetables pretty well,” adds Chef Price. “It kind of blew my mind that the DNA of the seeds from last season’s plants is already more well adapted to this place. Selfishly, the work that Nick is doing is part of why I’m so excited to be here.”

Through many Covid-caused delays to opening, the kitchen had a lot of garden produce to play with. They experimented with another process that animates Chef Price: fermentation. “We’ve got some weird garums going. We love fish sauce. We’re making miso with split peas and sourdough bread.” With dried and brined blossoms, pickled coriander berries and fermented chiles, the kitchen’s designated fermentation facility is in constant conversation with the seasons.

Running an operation of this size oftentimes means being more leader than cook. “I think Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten was probably the biggest influence on me, as far as leadership,” says Price. “It’s all about communication. Give everyone the information before something happens. I get to be a creative driving force behind it because of the team that I have.”

He continues, “I always loved to cook, but growing up in Rockford, Illinois, I didn’t try sushi until I was 18.” Late to work at his job as a busboy one day, the owner “punished him” by putting him in the kitchen to prep. When they asked him to make a mirepoix, he jumped right in. “I could hear them whispering, like ‘Whoa, this kid knows his stuff.’” Maybe it was the years of watching PBS cooking shows after school.

“After high school, I wanted to get as far away from Rockford as possible, but where they still spoke English. So I went to Australia for a bit. When I came back to Rockford, I needed a job. A friend of mine worked at a French and Italian restaurant. I cut myself, like, five times in the first day. But I got good at not making the same mistake twice. Chef Philippe there was from Montpellier, France, and he had worked on the Orient Express and all these other amazing places. He married a woman from Rockford and that’s where they decided to set up shop, so the level of cuisine that I was learning was actually very world-class.”

“Then my older brother sent my resume around Chicago, to get me out of Rockford. In 2001, I was working through Charlie Trotter’s and Tru, arguably the best restaurants in the world at that time. It was really intense. Then Peninsula Chicago was opening and I went with Chef Graham Elliot Bowles to open that rare occurrence of a really high-caliber restaurant in a hotel.

“That’s where my mind was just blown, coming from this classical French background to learning about regional Chinese dim sum. And then being able to eventually go on task force to Hong Kong and spend some time cooking there. To be fully immersed in these different styles of cooking and kitchen culture. And also finding the similarities.”

From there, Chef Price moved to Portland, Oregon, for his first experience opening a new place himself. At The Nines, a luxury hotel, he “fell in love with working with farms and the wine community. I am always up for an adventure,” he says.

“After [doing] a lot of events at the hotel, I knew that I needed to get back into the restaurant. So I got really lucky with a chef de cuisine position in Kauai. And then I got to do a tasting for Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] in New York City. I did it just to do it. At Bear, I prepared a 10-course tasting menu [before being hired]. For Jean-Georges, it was only three dishes: one of your own dishes; one of his recipes (the most elaborate, which is, like, a three-page halibut recipe. Everything’s to the gram.); and then a ‘black box.’ You have, like, a three- by two-foot corner of a table to work in a busy kitchen and it’s just you and a lot of opinions around. I brought some tuna that my friend had caught in a cooler all the way from Kauai for my dish. I think the tuna Jean-Georges [already] had in the kitchen was better than mine, but the story sold it.”

“Apparently I did something right, and they invited me to move to New York City. I was a culinary trainer. We opened about nine restaurants in three years. I got to go to Abu Dhabi, Doha, London, all over. It was so inspiring cooking with young people that are excited to learn.” But traveling 200 days a year is not easy and not conducive to relationships.

So he moved on to a stint with José Andres at China Poblano in Vegas. “It’s one of my favorite restaurants of all time. It’s not fusion, but really traditional dim sum and then Mexican cooking, which I knew nothing about. I got to spend some time in the Yucatan learning.”

“I was hankering to get back into fine dining and I sat down with Donna Leonard from NoHo’s [the New York City neighborhood] Il Buco, now an institution, and once the New York vanguard of regional Italian cooking. And I think I was also interviewing for global culinary director for Whole Foods at the same time. It was a crossroads. I went to Il Buco. Working for her [Leonard] was the best thing I could have done.

“At Il Buco, I got to cook for Alice Waters. We got into the idea of having the ‘best’ salt or the ‘best’ olive oil. We went to Sicily and the food literally made me cry. And no one made fun of me. The adjacency of Italian cooking and California cuisine taught me about following the seasons and paying tribute to the raw ingredient.”

After opening the “only in New York” Il Fiorista, a floral design shop/botanics-inspired restaurant, Covid-19 hit and the New York restaurant scene was placed on hold. Chef Price says the move west was a welcome new start.

“You could say I was part of the ‘great resignation.’ Even more so for the cooks. It’s been so painful being out of the game and then getting back into the game. It’s not easy. What we’re building here at Stanly Ranch is pretty flexible, because we have enough people between the [several] restaurants. We’re very lucky to have that. Ultimately, this is about being able to serve a community.”