Michelin-Starred Chef Barclay Dodge: Why Every Service Is a Broadway Show

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk Bachmann: Hello, everyone. My name is Kirk Bachmann, and welcome back to the Ultimate Dish. I want to tell our listeners up front: I am a huge admirer of today’s guest and his restaurant. Please welcome the chef and owner of Bosq in Aspen, Colorado, Chef Barclay Dodge. Chef Dodge’s story is a true American journey. He arrived in Aspen at 14, an outsider from Alabama with a Southern accent, and he fell in love. Like a lot of kids in the mountain towns, his first summer jobs were pounding nails or washing dishes, and he chose the dish pit. His very first job was washing dishes at a spot called Calypso. From there, he worked his way through the storied kitchens of the 1980s Aspen, Andiamo, Mezzaluna, the Mine Company, the Paragon, and Bonnie’s. And by the time he was 20, he knew this was his calling. He eventually moved to San Francisco for culinary school, a city he says felt like one big culinary school itself. His journey took him all the way to the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants and to the legendary elBulli in Spain, where he learned from the masters of modern gastronomy. But it was always the wilderness of Aspen that called him home. Today, that homecoming is Bosq, a restaurant built on a forest-to-plate philosophy, where his team forages the valley three days a week, and roughly 85 percent of the menu comes from right there in the Rockies. Bosq hit its stride at the five-year mark, and two years later, it earned a Michelin star, making it the only Michelin starred restaurant in Aspen. Through it all, his motto has stayed the same: take care of the team. Chef Dodge, welcome to the Ultimate Dish.

Barclay Dodge: Thank you very much.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s it’s so so good to see you, and it’s so strange. You’re like five hours down the road.

Barclay Dodge: I know it’s cool. We’re in the same place.

Kirk Bachmann: Tell me before we dive right in. The is that the main dining room there?

Barclay Dodge: Yes, you’re looking at all of it. Yeah, small restaurant. The whole entire restaurant’s about 1050 square feet. Okay, kitchen and dining room.

Kirk Bachmann: So is there one seating in evening or two?

Barclay Dodge: We do two. It’s definitely spread out throughout the night, but for a small place like this, it’s an early seating and then like an 8o’clock seating.

Kirk Bachmann: I have to admit, I mentioned it before we got started. I’ve been a fan of Bosq and you for for a long, long time, and I told Noel and the whole team we’ve got to make this happen. He’s like the busiest chef in the world right now, but we’ve got to make this happen. There’s some similarities and just some some just really great stories. I moved from Chicago to the mountains of Colorado, Crested Butte, a little you you know further out than than Aspen, and and you kind of did the same. And it’s just it. I’m so appreciative that you have found some time to spend with us. And I’d like to start somewhere that’s a little unexpected. You’ve said that at 515 every day, 15 minutes before you open, that’s your favorite hour. That would be like the easy to walk out the back door time. I’ve seen people do it because that’s it. A dynamic time is everyone going to show? Are we ready to go, but what does 515 p.m. feel like inside of Bosq?

Barclay Dodge: It is well in any kitchen I’ve worked in. It’s always the most intense moment of the day. You’re scrambling to get set up. You’re trying to do line up with the front of the house, trying to grab staff meal, get the kitchen clean before service, and you’re just in the weeds. But you always know you’re going to get through it. We had this dishwasher back in San Francisco, and it was like 515, and it was getting intense. And he’s like, “Chef, I got to go feed the meter. He never came back. So I’ve seen it, like you said. Some people walk out the door, but for those of us who are in the thick of it and love it, it’s like just such an amazing moment because you know you’re going to get ready. We’re always set up for service, and then you roll into service, and service is like the easiest part of the day.

Kirk Bachmann: There’s still that anxiety at 515, isn’t there? That like, are there meters outside of the restaurant in Aspen,

Barclay Dodge: or nobody can afford the meters, so it doesn’t really matter.

Early Aspen & Learning the Craft

Kirk Bachmann: Oh my gosh! What do what do you remember from when you first rolled into Aspen? What were some of those restaurants that like stood out to you way back then? And oh man, I can’t even remember some of some of them.

Barclay Dodge: I was pretty young, and I wasn’t really into the restaurant scene back then, of course. I arrived like when I was 13, and I turned 14 shortly after. But my parents were going out a lot because they were enjoying Aspen. But there were all these classic restaurants, old school guards, Abetone, Andiamo, Ute, all these places that were so cool. And back. Finland Aspen had such a different vibe than it does now. It was more of a in the streets, free flowing party of a kind of vibe. Everybody in the ’80s was just having a ball. And what was

Kirk Bachmann: the food like back then? What what was it more steakhouse type stamp? It

Barclay Dodge: wasn’t really steakhousey. It was more like European fine dining.

Kirk Bachmann: It was okay. Yeah, yeah.

Barclay Dodge: It definitely was. So it was, and it was very old school too.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, nothing

Barclay Dodge: really too modern.

Kirk Bachmann: Was am I making this up? But was Piñons around when you were younger?

Barclay Dodge: Piñons wise, Piñons was it opened when I was like 15 or 16, as I recall. So it was around, and it was a big deal. It was kind of like the first restaurant that stepped into a more modern flair of dining, okay, or one of them, and they they did a they did well for a long time.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, you know it’s interesting. I was reading a little bit, and I think it was 2016 when you opened Bosq, and it was right around the Aspen Food and Wine Festival, and that was that was the one and only Aspen Food and Wine Festival I ever attended. Really, because the and I’m sure that it it well it got so expensive, right? And then yeah, so hard to get in. It’s

Barclay Dodge: expensive.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah,

Barclay Dodge: it’s a good experience. You know all the classes that they teach. I think that’s the the richest part of the whole event. The finds, the culinary and beverage minds that come together, hospitality minds that meet up in this town are amazing.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, I know Bobby Stuckey’s is is there a lot every year. He’s a good friend of the school here in Boulder with with Frasca Food and Wine. So I I live vicariously through him.

Barclay Dodge: Yeah, I just saw him the other day at the Michelin Awards.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, you did okay. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Congrats to both of you. Absolutely. Thank you.

Barclay Dodge: Appreciate that.

Kirk Bachmann: So let’s go back to the beginning a little bit, if you can, because your path is, in many ways, exactly the kind of story our students love to hear. You didn’t start really with a specific plan, a detailed plan, you started as a 14-year-old kid from Alabama, and you landed in Aspen. And you said that moving to Aspen at that age was the best move you ever made, and and the hardest. And what is it about that town, about Aspen, and eventually those kitchens that that turned, let’s say, a summer paycheck into you know the life you live today.

Barclay Dodge: Yeah. Well, the move here was definitely difficult. Coming from Alabama, I was I was kind of I was an outsider for sure. And in a town like this, it’s you know a lot of people come through this town, so they’re kind of guarded in the schools at that age, like they see kid, they see their friends come and go.

Barclay Dodge: Yeah, I took about a year to really get into it, and then I immediately fell in love with the place. It’s like, what’s there not to love? You know, I loved living in Alabama as well, and my roots were always there, but definitely my roots are here now.

Kirk Bachmann: I think you said your first job was washing dishes at Calypso. I do remember that restaurant. And do

Barclay Dodge: you know who owned Calypso? And I don’t think our our listeners are going to know this. Oh well, their generation, Three Dog Night.

Kirk Bachmann: No, the band way. Oh, yeah,

Barclay Dodge: drummer. The drummer of Three Dog Night was the owner.

Kirk Bachmann: Isn’t that something?

Barclay Dodge: Yeah, I mean, I tell my cooks in the kitchen. Have you heard this Led Zeppelin song? And half of them are like, “I’ve never even heard of Led Zeppelin. So,

Kirk Bachmann: which is really hard to believe, right?

Barclay Dodge: No, it blows me away. So, yeah, I don’t know if anybody’s gonna know Three Dog Night except you and me. But yeah, my parents went on a vacation. I was like 17, maybe 16. My parents went on vacation for like a week. I was probably one of the first times they like left us alone, and I got a job washing dishes at Calypso. I remember my parents rolled back into town after their trip, and she yanked my mom, yanked me out of that kitchen so fast. So you were not working in a downtown kitchen in Aspen, Colorado, in the ’80s with everything that’s going on back then in kitchens, which honestly is refreshing because it’s something that we don’t see in our kitchen today, like those old bad habits. Let’s say, yeah, those ices, those skeletons. We have a really clean kitchen today, which is which is great because we’re in this for the craft.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, yeah. We oh, I love study it. It’s the best word. The best word, craft. I I absolutely love that, and by the way, I’m going to have to thank you because Shambhala is going to be on my mind all day long today. That’s probably my favorite three dogs. Okay, so you know, as the story goes, you know, you you guys came back from vacation. She pulled you out of there. From that dish pit, you moved through many of these classic Aspen kitchens that we’ve talked about-are there any lessons or anything that has stuck with you from those early days, or have you just completely done a 360 on the stuff you saw back then?

Barclay Dodge: Thought about that because you mentioned that earlier, and I was thinking, like, what is the lesson from back then? And again, yes, it was. A long time ago, we’re talking 40 years ago almost. So I don’t remember exactly what my mindset was, but I do remember showing up to work on time was one of the biggest deals, and I think that was also instilled in me in my Dodge family heritage. My whole family’s military. I’m the first one who’s not military, so I was definitely raised in that kind of you know upbringing, and just precision in life. I think, and being on time is a big deal. So I learned that early on that then and there, that and a lot of respect comes from your employers, and you know they can count on you. Respect goes all kinds of different ways, and counting on an employee is one of them, so I wanted to be. You know, I always wanted to do a good job, and once I started cooking, even though I didn’t realize it how much I loved it at the time, but I got the bug in the restaurant business immediately, and it wasn’t first cooking. I was washing dishes, bussing tables, making my way through the restaurant, the front and the back, and then by the time I hit 20, I’d say I was cooking. So it was a couple of years of moving around, and then I realized really where I wanted to be. And to be honest with you, I’ve never had another job in my entire life, other than mowing lawns as like a kid. I never have had another professional job in my life. I’ve always been a cook. Yeah, it’s great, especially when you catch it early. Alain Passard said, “I knew I was going to be a chef, and that’s what became of me. So he knew early on, and so did I. And it’s amazing when you can find a job that you love so much that it’s not a job, and you can keep pursuing it for such a long period of time and work on the craft the whole time and get better and better and better, and then parlay that information to your your cooks and your front of the house. You know, I run the whole restaurant, not just the kitchen. It’s all under my wing, so I have to take care of everyone. And like you said, take care of the team. It goes even further, where it’s protect the team.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, we we

Barclay Dodge: believe really strongly in that because without the team, we would be nothing.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah. And I brought

Barclay Dodge: something up the other day to somebody. I was like, the team is first to me, and then the product is second, and then the customer is third. Because without getting those two things dialed in the beginning, the customer is not going to get the best of you.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s still a pretty good podium, I would say it’s a pretty strong podium. It’s funny that one some of the best advice I ever got. My father is a a master pastry chef, the German route, right? And his father was, and his father was as well. And they came over here. My dad and mom came over in the early ’60s, Chicago first, then you know the Gunnison Crested Butte area, and I can remember, you know, getting into they, you know, they sent me off to college and all that stuff, and and I came and worked in the family restaurant and the hotel and all of that, and I was so hung up on changing. Back in those days, we didn’t have computers, right? So you had to go to a print shop and redo the menu every time you wanted to redo the menu, and it got costly after time. They loved it when I walked in. Oh, he’s going to add a tea or a period, and we’re going to charge him again. But you know, my father told me at one point he pulled me aside and he said, “Hey, why don’t you just concentrate in this thick German accent? Just concentrate on being a good cook for life. Just be a good cook for life. I’ve had that kind of embroidered into certain jackets of mine, I try to instill it into my kids as well. Whatever the craft is, just try to be good at it for the rest of your life. So, I I love that. I love your story of how it’s all you’ve ever done. You may have mowed a few lawns, but you’ve been in the you’ve been in the restaurant, and it’s good that you differentiate too. That it’s all under your wing, so it’s not like you’re just behind the stove or behind the pass. It’s everything. It’s the front of the house, the back of the house, the purchasing everything. Probably the shingles on the roof too. I

Barclay Dodge: tell you, you know what I’ve learned. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned owning this restaurant, because you had to fix everything yourself, right?

Kirk Bachmann: Sure.

Barclay Dodge: I mean, you can call people in, but what I’ve learned is when to call someone in to fix it instead of you trying to fix

Kirk Bachmann: it.

Barclay Dodge: There’s been enough machinery I fixed in this restaurant that I’ve had to call the pros in after I got my hands on it. Yeah, I know my limitations there. Yeah, that’s when you always learn the iron machine functioning.

The Culinary Journey: San Francisco, Morocco & elBulli

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah. So, how would you, chef? You, I mean, you did something a lot of people don’t do or have the courage to do. You left. You went to San Francisco. You went to culinary school. You eventually made it all the way to Spain to work at elBulli, one of the most important, let’s say, restaurants in history. I’m fascinated by the San Francisco stop. How would you describe your time in San Francisco? And we talked about stars earlier. I’d love to talk more about that. What did cooking at that level along? Well, after San Francisco, and then you, and I’d love to understand that story a little bit more of how you got to elBulli, and and God, what was that like modern gastronomy? Which you were on the opening pages of, right? That was very, very new in our world, right? It

Barclay Dodge: was, especially when I was in San Fran. I was there in the early ’90s, and that’s when like Wolfgang Puck was just starting to explode in Los Angeles, and like you said, modern gastronomy was starting to come up, like California cuisine. I worked at a bunch of restaurants. I worked at a couple of restaurants in San Francisco, but the biggest part, or side by side, was the school, because you’re in this educational mindset in school. That’s what you’re you’re thinking. You’re like a sponge when you walk out of the front door, and when you walk out of the front door in that city, you’re in San Francisco, like one of the best food cities in America, and then right over the bridge, you’re in you’re in Napa Valley and the headlands and the farms, and this was also when French Laundry opened. So French Laundry had chicken roots yet back

Kirk Bachmann: then. That’s

Barclay Dodge: right. So going to going up to Napa was like kind of just going to the country, whereas today it’s it’s you know it’s expensive and it’s a big deal and there’s all this stuff going on. It was really nice. We would take field trips up there from school, but I learned so much during that time period because I was just soaking so much in. And I was going out to rest. I would just every penny I had, probably to my father’s dismay, because he was he was flipping the bill when I was in school. I was like, I would go to a restaurant. Zuni was one of my all-time favorites. Oh yes,

Kirk Bachmann: yes!

Barclay Dodge: Wow, rustic, amazing American cooking with European background. I loved it so, and that was only a few blocks from where I lived, and then like Postrio was taking off back then with the jam grasses that come. Yeah, so it was like really an explosive time, and not to mention, this was the time that the.com just exploded in San Fran. So everybody, like in their like young people, had these huge discretionary incomes, and they were out with no kids. They were out partying and going to restaurants. It was super dynamic. It was such a fun time. About a year after I left San Francisco, I left in ’95. the.com crash hit, and I didn’t get to see that happen. So I was-I think I’m pretty fortunate to be in San Francisco in such a gold rush period.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s when you went to Spain.

Barclay Dodge: No, so I spent San Francisco. Let’s see what was the background there. Oh no, I moved to. I met a woman my back then, and we moved to Morocco. Actually, we took a year off and just traveled around the world in my mid 20s. It was all Mediterranean travel. I landed in Greece, went to Turkey. The idea was I was going over there to go to a stage in Spain. That was the reason for this trip. But after I started traveling around, I got the travel bug really heavily, and I was like, I can’t just sit in one place. So we ended up spending like nine months in Morocco.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow, we’d

Barclay Dodge: go back and forth to Spain to like renew our visas every three months, and spending time in a culture of that nature because it was a very food-driven culture. The whole Mediterranean is all the different countries, and to spend that much quality time and get understanding the culture and the markets was a huge impact on my culinary career. After that, I don’t do North African food, but or really any food from any culture. But we pull flavors and techniques from these places heavily, always have. And the fact that Aspen, kind of like on a side note here, we’re closed four months a year in this town, two months in the spring, two months in the fall. So we travel, we get out. I take my team every fall. I take my team somewhere an R and D trip, which is more than R and D. It’s really like team building in anything for me. Sure. But we come back with great ideas. So after that, after that time and and traveling around the world for a while, I came back to Aspen and I worked for an amazing chef named Charles Dale at Renaissance Restaurant, and that’s where I really, really stepped into the the peak of my fine dining training at the time. And he was my biggest mentor throughout my culinary career. He had gone to elBulli and had lunch there. He came back. He’s like Barclay. You got to go to this place. This is you. You’re gonna love it. So he set me up on a stage during an off season, and I went to elBulli for a couple of weeks, and I came back and I was like, Charles, I want to go back. Like I want to go back and stay. So I spent about another year with him, and then I wrote a letter, elBulli, and I went back for the season in two. I think it was 99 or 2000. I think it was 2000. Came back from elBulli, and then I was like fired up, and I opened my first restaurant in Aspen called Mogadora.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow! What is that path? What does the season feel like at elBulli? The

Barclay Dodge: coolest thing about elBulli was I remember we would learn like 10 new things, like new things a day. Like where could you say you’re learning 10? Never seen it before. Concepts, ideas, ingredients, whatever. Way way you run a kitchen. Stages go beyond just the food that you’re cooking. Like how’s the dish pit up? Rate was what kind of blenders are they using? Like everything about it, especially in Europe because they’re using different equipment than we are. So you could learn a lot just by that. So working at elBulli was amazing. The chefs were awesome. They would really teach you. The first time they’d tell you, the second time they’d tell you, maybe the third time you get yelled at if you did it wrong, but you were deserving to be yelled at, but they wasn’t. It wasn’t like abusive or anything like that. It was just a really amazing kitchen. I mean, you worked your butt off. Showed up around. I think we showed up around 830, and we would work until basically midnight.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah,

Barclay Dodge: and then we’d all we were so jacked up. We’d all go out afterwards for like we were and tapas together, like the entire team.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah.

Barclay Dodge: So you’d get home around two, 230, 3o’clock in the morning, and wake up again at 730 and have coffee and back at it.

Kirk Bachmann: Were they open seven days a week? That and then

Barclay Dodge: it was five, and then it went to seven. Like early season was five, and then they went to a seven day week, and back then it was lunch and dinner, and then I went back to elBulli again about a year or two later for another stage, and then it was dinner only.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow! Yeah, how big is that kitchen at any given time? That that’s a job in itself, just managing all the different people that want to spend time there in the kitchen, right? So

Barclay Dodge: there was about 65 cooks in the kitchen, or something 55 to 65 cooks. A huge bulk of that was stages, and they had homes all peppered throughout Rosas, the little town nearby. And they had little they had homes around there, and all the cooks lived in there. You didn’t pay for your housing; you ate at the restaurant like staff meal. So it was pretty on the cheap. You didn’t need any very much money to get by. You’re just there to work, and have beers after work with your friends.

Kirk Bachmann: What an experience! It was, and you know, and and such a lesson too. I’m sitting here, you know, listening to you, chef, and it feels like a lesson on. I and I know that you talk about this a lot. You’ve said, and I quote: “Do not skip the steps on the path to making yourself a great chef. That taking a sous chef job before you’re ready is actually potentially detrimental to your development and your growth and stuff. Why is that message so important to you? And and how easy is it for young cooks to get that wrong?

Building Bosq: Philosophy, Identity & the Tasting Menu

Barclay Dodge: Well, I think young cooks get it wrong because one, they come they come out of school, they come out of their initial training thinking they’re ready to go. Yeah, did it. Yeah, I do the school, and now I’m ready. Well, that’s great, but the school really is doing service every night, 365, and knowing you know everything the ins and outs of how your recipes are working. How are they working in prep time? How are they working in service? How are they working on the fly? How are they working when you don’t have an ingredient that you need and you need to pivot? So going through the all the steps from prep cook, dishwasher, prep cook, every part of the the industry is so important because you need to know what’s around the corner. Like you’re dealing with stuff very quickly during service. You know, sense of urgency is such a huge like word in our industry, and unfortunately, like 40 years of sense of urgency, I I’m like always sense of urgency. Like I’ll go postal in the post office. It is the slowest institution, no demand. drives me crazy. It’s like nobody wants to wait for their steak, get it out, and to be able to go through all the different parts of the kitchen, it just makes you a better cook. Every step, and you take the next step, and you know what’s behind you is your training ground. So I can’t stress enough when cooks come into the kitchen and they want. I want to be a sous chef after being a cook for a year. Well, man, you’ve got so much to learn. And also, don’t forget, it’s like these are the best years. You know, funny. Last night, I was I cook on the line a couple of nights a week, and last night I was on the hotline cooking with the guys, and I had the best time. Like it was so much fun. If I could just go back and be a line cook and not have to worry about everything else I had to do, because after I was cooking last night, I had to like spend an hour and a half on admin. I had to do the schedule. I had to do the LB invoices. Before that, I was at a site visit for an offsite BO or doing you know all these things that you do as an owner, as an operator. Yeah, but just to go back and cook, like enjoy that that moment. And another thing too is like the money is not going to come for a while, so just take that off the table. If you really want to pursue this craft, then the money is not going to come for a while. But the business takes care of you. It feeds you, it supports you. Your peers in the business are your biggest support system. They’re your best friends. Like, I don’t have a lot of friends out of the kitchen. My friends are the restaurant and everybody who’s in it because I spend all my time here. Yeah. So yeah, like you said, like not skipping the rungs of the ladder is is so important. And then you get to this, you get to the point. Where you’re, I don’t know, top dog, whatever you want to call it, the executive chef, and you’re still learning.

Kirk Bachmann: Sure,

Barclay Dodge: it never, it never, ever, ever stops.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s interesting. It reminded me about the fact that your friends are in the kitchen. You know, it’s your family. I, I remember doing this radio interview. Remember when we used to do radio interview when there was no such thing as the internet, and it was around Thanksgiving, and and I think the the reporter said something like, “Do you miss being with your family and your friends because you’re open on the holiday? And I I remember vividly my answer was, “I am with my family and my friends here in the restaurant. Right?

Barclay Dodge: I don’t know. I’m. It also makes you kind of like socially inept, so be it. Go into parties and stuff. Sometimes I don’t know how to like deal with the situation.

Kirk Bachmann: At least you’re people that relate to you, though, right? So yeah, absolutely. You know, quick question about Bas and some of the connection to Spain and stuff. Is there any connection to sort of the the Spanish term for the forest, I think they pronounce it Bosco Bosque or Bosque. I mean,

Barclay Dodge: that’s where the name Bosque came from. The list of names for my restaurant is so long, like just keeps going. And then when we came, and it was years, like the list built for years. You think of a name, you write it down. You think of a name, you write it down. A little newest app on your phone, you write it down. So there are probably 100, 150 names that I came up with over years. Just anything that sounded good. But then, when Bosq hit, it was immediate. You knew. That’s it. I knew it immediately. And honestly, our logo happened the same way too. We we hired a waiter who does design work on the side. He came up with a logo. That was it. Boom, like immediate done. You know when you know. So we took it’s B O S Q. We dropped the U E off the word. We just call it Bosq because we kind of made it our own.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah.

Barclay Dodge: And to me, the Bosque just enveloped so much of who and what we are. I live in Aspen, Colorado. I live right in the Rocky Mountains. I live literally on Aspen Mountain. There’s a trail out my back door that I go hike in the mornings, and we’re in the woods in 32 seconds flat. So we wanted to. I started thinking about what we’re going to do with this restaurant. How is it going to be? And honestly, a big movement for us was the Scandinavian food movement. I mean, it was a it was a huge influence because so much of what they’re doing over there involves the natural world and the forest. So I started picking up on that and just reading those cookbooks, and then I figured, you know what? This is really what I want to do here, and I’m so tuned into my the woods and the environment around me that you know. Well, we opened up doing like a different kind of vibe. It definitely matured into what we’re doing today.

Barclay Dodge: Yeah, the beginning years were lunch, dinner, opera hour, service, like it was intense, and then over time we more and more refined what we were doing, and it’s funny because too that’s how dishes go. You have a dish, you come up with a dish. It’s not ready to go on the first plating.

Kirk Bachmann: No, no,

Barclay Dodge: it’s not ready to go on the 97th plating either. It keeps evolving and getting better and better and better, and so I felt like that’s what we were was happening with this restaurant. It just kept evolving and getting better and getting more refined, more tuned in. And the slogan that’s been coined so much in the last like 10 years, “Time and Place. Well, we’re in a place here where we can just show that off so easily. It’s very seasonal, very unique, and the ingredients that we’re out picking in the woods taste like where we are. Yeah, that’s what and that’s what we’re doing now. We’re not changing from that. We’ve we’ve found our stride, and my cooks love it. We’re super creative in that area. So time and place, Aspen, Colorado. That’s come and eat here.

Kirk Bachmann: I love it. I love it. Yeah. I, I, you reminded me of kind of a quick story. It’s a cute story. I was in Stockholm. You mentioned Scandinavia, and I was at a. It was a really unique indoor sort of farmers market. So tons of different vendors selling all kinds of different things, mostly products, vegetables, and I saw this one cook in this tiny little space. All he had was a stove. He had a big pot of hot water on the stove, and he was doing one thing. He was doing fresh cod, and he was sautéing it in in brown butter, lemon, and then he had these new potatoes that were just kind of bouncing in this hot water with dill. And quite honestly, I was young, chef, and I mean, I don’t think I had ever seen a fresh cod, other than the freezer right of the grocery store. Yeah, beautiful, gorgeous fish. He fileted right in front of me, and it’s like. We think about the ultimate dish. That’s my ultimate dish memory. It was the simplest. It was almost silly how simple it was. Just a small filet of cod sautéed in butter with lemon juice, and then the finishing touch. He put the potatoes on the plate, and he put little spoonful of lingonberries, of course, right on top. Nice. It it just sticks with me. You’re gonna put it on your menu tonight, but it’s gonna look completely different. So you know, you said you’ve said I’ve read that it took you know several years before Bosq really went into the black in those lean years, like a lot of people experience when the traction wasn’t quite there yet. What kept you? And this is a great message for students. What kept you on track with your vision? What kept you moving forward?

Barclay Dodge: Yeah, that’s that’s a good question. I think my age had a lot to do with it. I’m an older chef. I mean, I’m 57. I’m not older, but 57 years old. So I’ve been in the industry for a long time. I had my first restaurant that did not work out. I closed it, and I came. I’d left. I left Aspen a couple of times. This is a small town. I came back to Aspen. I was like, “This is where I want to stay, be raise my family, all that. I was like, “I have to make this restaurant work. Like, I don’t want to work for anybody else again. I did that. I like being my own boss, and I was like, “I have to make this work. And after my first restaurant, I mean, I guess you could call it a failure. And by the way, we fail as fast as we can every day at work.

Kirk Bachmann: Fail fast. Fail fast.

Barclay Dodge: Fail as fast as you can. That’s the best learning you’re ever gonna get. Yep, I agree. I agree. Restaurant Mogador closed for multiple reasons, and I was like, I don’t want that to happen again. You know, it’s like I just I’m gonna make it happen. I’ll never forget. It was like year two. I flew to St. Louis, where my wife is from. We were having my my baby baptized, and I when I landed, I got a notification from my bank that I had like $3,000 in my bank account, and I was like, “Oh my God, I have a $35,000 payroll coming up next week. I’ve got bills to pay. That was probably the worst early moment of Bosq for me. It was like it hit hard. It hit really hard, and I cannot lose what we have going on here. So, I mean, we pulled it out. I borrowed from friends and family, a little bit of money just to cover that nut. Paid it back as soon as I could, and when COVID hit, that’s when everything changed for us. Everybody wanted to leave the city, leave New York, leave LA. They wanted to come to the mountains, clean air, no COVID. So this place exploded during that period, but at the same time we were only a 12 seat restaurant. So because of the social distancing that we had to follow, so we went from a 30 seat restaurant to a 12 seat restaurant during COVID, and I knew we had to like I knew I had to make $155 out of every single person who rolled in the door that night because I knew we’re going to do 24 covers, 12 and 12, that would cover the nut, that would just pay the bills and pay the labor, but it ended up being the best thing for us. We always wanted to do so. We say, how are we going to do this? How are we going to do 155 out of everybody? Really, the only way is tasty menu. You’re mandating the price. Yeah. So we did tasty menu. We tried doing tasty menu in the past, like earlier while we were in a la carte restaurant, we prep up for the tasty menu. We sell like eight tasting menus a month. Like it just wasn’t going anywhere. Wow! Everybody wanted to do a la carte, so we did tasting menu for COVID. The winter, it went really well, and then summer season rolled around. It’s like okay, you know, they they lifted all the restrictions. Let’s go back to à la carte. And my team was like, “No, chef. Let’s keep it. And I was a little leery because I was thinking business the whole time, and we kept it. And it was the best thing that ever happened to us. Now we’re a tasty menu restaurant only. It’s kind of a cook’s dream to be a tasty menu restaurant, or chef’s dream as well. So, and then at that point in time is when we made it out of the red into the black, and it was like right at that five-year mark, because like you know they say it takes five years took five years, so that was that was an amazing time for us, and it definitely set who we are today.

Kirk Bachmann: And and I love the story. I if we can go a little further with that because there’s so much that I think students have questions about, and the shift that you make. Could you just talk at a very, very high level, like what has to change in the kitchen for you to go from an a la carte menu to a tasting menu, and and how long does like a given tasting menu stay in place. Is it a season? Is it a quarter? That kind of thing.

Barclay Dodge: So the first part, the biggest shift for us was labor. I was running a very small kitchen doing the a la carte, even though we were pumping out a ton of plates every night. But the food was much simpler. We definitely elevated the cuisine and followed into like my path. Of working in Michelin restaurants, so we basically doubled the amount of cooks in the kitchen. Wow! Which of course is a huge labor hit, but at the same, and we found ways to offset that, like special gratuities that go to the kitchen only, that I can help offset the fact that I can’t pay hourly rates of like $30 an hour and things like that, so it’s that’s just the business side of it. So we definitely did that, but it also really if labor went up, but food costs got more and more dialed in. There was so much more control on the products that we were using. Where we went from doing between lunch, dinner, operate all these different menus, doing like 25 different kinds of dishes to doing 15 only. That really honed in on the the size of the amount of product that was in the walk-in that we need a different product. And also at that point in time, we started building our own culinary pantry from the woods and from the farms. So we would go out and pick and preserve for the winter season in the summer, so we really started our. It came in twofold. The tasting menu came at a time where we started realizing who we were at Bosq, and it came at a time where COVID put us in that position. The second part was like the menu. How often does it change? It changes a lot. We change the menu. We so we have two seasons: winter, summer. We change massive change. I’d say 90% of the menu changes going into each season. We go through a huge R and D phase with my sous chefs. So every fall, I take my sous chef somewhere or my team somewhere to go explore food. We come back from that trip. We sit down in the dining room, the one you’re looking at right now, and we spend about a week at the table, talking about what we did, going over our notes. Menu starts to develop and form, and then we really buckle down on what dishes we want to hone in on. The next week, we go into the kitchen, we start executing everything we did, and there’s been years where almost nothing worked out, like massive failure. But it’s funny because that was a while ago, and now we’re getting better and better and better and better and better. So so much of what we come up with in our heads actually can make it to the plate in some capacity. So after that two week period, then we bring the cooks in. We start training them up on the new dishes. The winter menu doesn’t change a ton. It changes because we need to change as cooks. Like we can’t, we get stagnant, so we just change, regardless if the customer likes the dish or wants to stick around or not.

Kirk Bachmann: Change is good because, like I said,

Barclay Dodge: the number one person in the restaurant is us, so we do that, and then in the summertime. So we focus in the winter time. We focus on meat, dairy, cellared root vegetables, grains, things that you would be eating in the heart of winter. What your body wants too. Like I don’t want watermelon in December. Sure. Like I, you know, I want like red meat and fats and grains and things like that? Your body calls for it. Come summertime, we do the same thing again. Go back to the whole process of R and D, but in the summertime, we change a lot because we focus on the hyper seasonality of this valley, and it hyper seasonality changes week by week, and we deal with so many small little farms that maybe a farmer shows up at my back door with five pounds of I don’t know Jimmy Nardello chilies, and that’s all he’s got. So it lasts four days, and then we got to change the menu next, next, next, next. So the change is pretty intense for us. So I always say in the summertime the menu overhauls itself two or three times completely, and in the winter probably goes through two overhauls.

Kirk Bachmann: I was just going to ask, kind of where it all starts for you, and so sometimes it could just be a single ingredient. Is it ever driven by a technique that might interest you that you may have seen you when you’re visiting some other part of the world, or even a memory that came up that might drive a menu item.

Barclay Dodge: People ask me how’d you come up with this, and it’s really one of the hardest questions I have.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah,

Barclay Dodge: I’ve been doing this for so long now; it’s just in me. Sometimes a dish takes a couple of weeks to come to fruition. Maybe it doesn’t even come to fruition. Maybe it comes to fruition in a year or two. Like just the thought, and sometimes two or three dishes will roll out in a just in one morning. I guess it’s kind of like you know rock bands who come up who put out a whole album in one sitting. It’s just boom. They were just clicking and it was just happening. But I think one of the biggest things for what I’ve seen happen in the culinary world in my time in the culinary world is social media, and social media is one of my biggest inspirations now, because when I was starting off cooking, there was no internet.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah,

Barclay Dodge: we were just reading cookbooks, and they were expensive, by the way, too. Oh, sure. For a cook, I drop 100 bucks on a cook. Book, it was a lot back then.

Barclay Dodge: Yeah. So social media has gone so well because I can see something that a cook is doing in Bogota, and then DM. I’m like, how’d you do that, man? Like, what what’s going on there? That’s so cool. And the dialog starts. So the dialog has just spread worldwide for us as as cooks, and I’m sure all crafts as well. There’s so much out there, so we can really tap into that. And it’s also taking us where we can go do stages in faraway places. It’s not like just going like I send my cooks off to do stages now, and it’s not just in America or the restaurants that I’m familiar with because now we’re familiar with what’s happening in Bogota or in Copenhagen? So, and you just write a letter to the chef. Hey, I got a cook who wants to come. He’s really excited what what you’re doing. Nine times out of 10, they say yes because they all went through this system as well, the stagiaire system. Like we owe it to our cooks to take them in and be a part of that system. It’s all again back to the idea of the craft, but kind of going back to that question of how is it developed. It’s a tough one, man. It’s tough because it hits on all those factors you just said. Is it one ingredient? It could be. Is it an emotional thought you had, like something from my childhood days from my great grandmother in Alabama, is it a technique that you just want to explore, and maybe you you come up with it? You know, sometimes you see a dish and you just flat out recreate the dish so you can understand what’s going on in the dish, then you can go off into your own path. That was the biggest thing about elBulli for me. I came back from elBulli and I opened my first restaurant, and I kind of regurgitated elBulli that first year. Which is that fair to elBulli or to the craft? I was like, I don’t know. It’s just part of learning it. So you have to go through it and use it and do it. Then you find your own path and your own creative path, because you know they always say copying. You know, you hear that word a lot in our business, like you don’t want to copy and whatnot. But to learn something, you got to like do it,

Kirk Bachmann: sure. And then you

Barclay Dodge: understand the technique, or you understand how the flavor works, and then you can go into your own direction. And the older you get, the more experience you get, and going through all those rungs of the ladder just makes you better at that point to follow your own path instead of copying.

Kirk Bachmann: You know, I’m curious because you mentioned earlier about how the entire restaurant is important to you and under your wings. Does does the it’s crazy question. I’m looking at the tables. Does tableware or plates or any of the ambiance in the dining room, often factor into what you start thinking about for for a meal or a course or a specific ingredient.

Barclay Dodge: Well, you’re seeing my restaurant lit up right now a little bit, but it’s kind of a sultry, dark, sexy restaurant at night. Yeah, it has a huge impact, and we have black tabletops, all wood, so it has a huge impact on the food that we do, and the plateware that we choose to do with the food that we do. So yeah, and and we’re trying to you know it goes beyond the plate. Like the whole dining experience is more than the food. It’s the whole. It’s the experience of the entertainment. What’s happening when you’re in the room? Things that you can’t do at home, like how you can’t recreate this dish or this atmosphere that we’ve created. My wife loves the the act of the dinner party. She’s growing up with the dinner party. Her parents were big entertainers, so she loves to do that for people. And you know, even like what you see right now going on around us is like you. What you don’t see right now is the fact that my wife Molly writes about eight to 18 cards a night to our customers-a personal handwritten card. That’s part of the experience too. Welcome to our little world of Bosq. We hope you enjoy your anniversary or whatever it may be, and that goes so that goes farther. I think the memory of that could even probably supersede the food we’re putting on the plate. Yeah, because that’s the real personal touch.

The Michelin Star, Team Culture & The Ultimate Dish

Kirk Bachmann: That’s on unreasonable hospitality, right? You

Barclay Dodge: know what?

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah,

Barclay Dodge: what a great book.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s a great book. Yeah, I give it to every employee absolutely, and then I give it to them again.

Barclay Dodge: And it’s every guy from the garbage man to the lawyer, like everybody in between, can get something from that book.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, you’re right, Chef. Then on top of all of that, there’s the Michelin piece, the Michelin layer. When the star came, you said you’d never seen a year like the one that followed, and the numbers were out of control, of course, which is tremendous. But it also, you know, it helps stabilize your business when you know that you can count on on business. So once you have the that recognition and an expectation to maintain it, I imagine, does that slightly change the way you run the room? Or it was a big change for us. Yeah. Okay.

Barclay Dodge: Yeah, I started talking to a friend of mine who used to be a Broadway performer, and I was like, “How do you guys get juiced up for this show every night? Because you’re on stage, and you can’t like have a down moment. The customer’s not paying for that. They’re paying for the show. I feel the same way in the restaurant. So we took some of her advice on like the tricks that they use when she was doing Broadway for during intermission. So like during between seatings, before service, after service, and we go into every service like it’s the big show. I tell my staff, and this is not to be rude to my staff, but you know your issues, you know, leave them at the door. They’re going to be there when you leave tonight. I guarantee it. But during this time, when you’re at Bosq and you’re in the restaurant, you can just let go of everything that’s going on outside around you and focus on what we’re doing here and make it as great as you can, and it’s an escape. There’s nothing better than what we’re going through during service. It’s a total escape. And again, your upset boyfriend or girlfriend that’s still going to be there when you walk out the door. It’s not going to change at all. So you might as well just let it go while you’re here and focus on what you’re doing. And the team has really lived up to that. They’re so proud of the star and what they’ve accomplished from every from everybody, not just the culinary team, and that’s been the biggest I think improvement for the restaurant getting a star is the fact that we’re always on point now, and we want to be on point. So we want to do a good job. So for us, that’s been a big deal, and we bring it to light every day. You know, something that we do every day before service is we have this stretch session. So after a lineup, my pastry chef usually leads it. The entire team gets up from family meal, and we do. It’s not long. It’s like three minutes, basic stretches, a little breath work, a big clap of the hands. We all go back to work together. That was a huge change for us. It brought us all together. It resets your mind for a second. Even if you’re in the weeds in the kitchen and you’re not even making family meal, you still come out for the stretch.

Kirk Bachmann: Isn’t that

Barclay Dodge: something? Yeah, it’s been really cool, and I learned that talking to that woman about her time in Broadway.

Kirk Bachmann: By the way, Noel, who is our producer, and she’s listening in. She’s also an actress, and she pinged me. She loved the Broadway reference, so thank you for that. Yeah, the show must go on, right? And and you know

Barclay Dodge: what must go on.

Kirk Bachmann: You know what I love, Chef, is that your motto doesn’t change through all of it. You take care of the team. You’ve kept that same core team for most of the last decade. Mike, would you say? So

Barclay Dodge: we’re 10 years old now. We had our 10th year anniversary in June, and I’ve kept my core team anywhere between like seven and 10 years.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s amazing. That’s just amazing.

Barclay Dodge: With that, the other side, like people come and go, it’s just the nature of the business, and it’s the nature of a tourist town too.

Kirk Bachmann: You know, and we’re a we’re an industry that, fortunately or unfortunately, sort of gets a little bit more press on the burnout and the turnover and all of that. And but you’ve built a team that stays. I’m just curious. It’s probably a really unfair, tough question, but how does that stability show up in the food every single night? How does it manifest itself in front of your guests?

Barclay Dodge: I would say it’s a level of confidence. Yeah, that we built there, and the cooks know that. I mean, there’s going like I said earlier. There, you know you’re going to have to pivot on things. Stuff happens. Like you don’t get your watercress that day or whatever, but the team, especially a team that’s been together so long, like we’re just thinking with each other. We’re so in sync, and the creativity that we that we can like pull off together is like those R and D times sitting around the dining room table for a whole week, it’s like what happens during that week is magical, and we’re so in sync and we’re confident in what we’re thinking about and what we know that we can just people say, how do you do this in the dining room? It’s like, what do you do for a living? It’s like, oh, I’m gonna count it. Well, how do you do that? I mean, it’s kind of a crazy question to ask an accountant. It’s like I learned how to do it. It’s what I do. I’ve been doing it for 25 years, same,

Kirk Bachmann: same, yeah.

Barclay Dodge: And a lot of the stuff we put on the plate, we already know what it tastes like before it even goes out, before it even leaves the paper.

Kirk Bachmann: Sure, sure. We

Barclay Dodge: just know what we’re doing. It’s like,

Kirk Bachmann: yeah,

Barclay Dodge: come on. I mean, to put it mildly, like we’re pros at what we do. We’ve been doing it for a long time.

Kirk Bachmann: Well, that that right there probably will resonate with what we hope to teach at Escoffier. This this idea that leadership and hospitality start one, and how you treat your people, and everything you’re you’re talking about right now, chef. Long before the food ever reaches the guests. And so your pros, you already know what the reaction’s going to be. You know, you’re not taking any chances. You, you said it earlier today. That final dish goes through many renditions. It’s, it’s not brought up. You know, at 3o’clock and then served at five. Right. It takes a long time before it’s for a student or any of our students who, and I always have to premise this with, I always remind students that yeah, we had a great chat. We talked about the success of Bosq and and your career, but what they don’t always see is the years and the hours of work and hardship and how we’re going to make the payroll and all of that. So, as a disclaimer, I always want to point that out out of respect. But for a student who’s dreaming of running their own kitchen one day, is there one lesson, one mentality around leadership that they should start working on right now?

Barclay Dodge: I went through. I came out of old guard cooks, chefs. I was in screaming kitchens. I was never in abusive kitchens, but I was in screaming kitchens, and it’s stressful, especially as a young chef. When I had my first restaurant, I was screaming, just throwing pots and pans, that kind of behavior. I was stressed out. So you just get better and better, and you know it’s around the corner, so you know what to expect. But I think for leadership, the I think, man, I got. I think kindness is such a key part of it. You can be stern, you can be for you know forceful and have high expectations, but nobody wants to be degraded and belittled. It just doesn’t make you feel good. It didn’t make me feel good when it happened to me. I remember specific moments when shit when that happened with chefs to this day, 30 years ago it happened, and I’m still really not at peace with that moment with that chef because it was unnecessary. I don’t know, kind of the old saying. What does it catch more bees with honey than vinegar. Cindy Pawlcyn was is a chef in San Francisco. Sure, the Bay Area. Yeah, so she was my chef when I worked for a real restaurant in San Francisco. Oh wow, yeah, and I’ll never forget her telling me I was really young and our chef had just died, like we weren’t expecting it, and so everyone had to step up in the kitchen. I was like a lead line cook at the time, kind of going into like this sous chef training role. And she said to me, Barclay, it’s like everybody that you deal with on a on a personal level in the kitchen, which is everybody in the restaurant, is all we’re all people. It’s like you have to know how to get the most out of that person. What is it going to take to get the most out of Jane? What’s it going to take to get the most out of Bob? And it’s going to be a different route every time. And I tell this to my younger managers: is like everybody that you deal with, you’re going to have to deal with differently. You’re going to have to understand, learn, and understand how to deal with cook A, cook B, because you need to get the job done, you want to get as much out of them as you can. So maybe cook A, I just need to like be really compassionate with. Maybe cook B, I can be super stern with. Maybe cook A, if I’m super stern with, they get really hurt and they walk out the door. So you have to figure out how to get the most out of everybody. She actually used the word manipulation, which is kind of a bad word, English language. Like manipulate.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s like, how

Barclay Dodge: do you manipulate this person to get the most out of them, and in the most positive manner possible? And I’ll never forget that day. She was telling me a bistro roti, sitting right by the front door, like these like the the waiting room. And I think that’s such a key thing is like managing people. Like that’s what we’re dealing with the most. Yeah, you can pivot on not having your watercress, but you got to learn how to take care and treat and get the most productivity out of everybody that you’re working with. And how do you do that? It is hard, man. That’s the hardest part of all. Like that’s the psychology of people that can

Kirk Bachmann: sometimes they don’t come back from feeding the meter, right?

Barclay Dodge: Exactly. You know what’s so rewarding is like when you let somebody go, like they just weren’t doing a good job. It was like good reason you let them go. It wasn’t for anything else, and then maybe they don’t understand it at all, and they leave, and they’re upset. A year later, you get that letter, that email saying, “You know, chef, thank you so much for my time with you. I learned so much, and sorry I was such a stinker. Like while I was there, I’ve changed my ways, and my time with you has been very meaningful. I love those letters. They don’t, you know, it’s not like a lot, but they come every night on in. You get her, and you share an impact on that person. Maybe you didn’t have the impact that you needed at the time, because they ended up leaving, or you ended up getting rid of them. But to see that they still grew, that’s huge. You know, as life goes on beyond.

Kirk Bachmann: You know, just from a final thought perspective. To be cognizant of your time, Barclays, chef, you love Aspen, and you and you cooked with Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges and Ferran Adrià, and yet Bosq today, in many ways, is rooted more in Aspen than anything else you’ve done in the past. Yeah. At what point in your career would you say that you realized coming home, not going somewhere else, was where your most personal cooking was actually going to happen.

Barclay Dodge: I think that came once I amassed a massive amount of experience, and then I could come back and really do it my our way. It’s not about me all the time, so it’s you know our way and what we’ve created as a team. So, I really want food to be accessible. I wanted to look, you know, coming out of elBulli was a trip. Like we weren’t doing carrots, we were doing carrot air, and that’s like when you’re a customer and you see carrot air, you don’t know what it is. But so now we’re really focusing on all this technique, all these underlayering ingredients that you never see but you taste. The fermentation program that we do is such a huge part of our flavor building, but the carrot on the plate is the whole carrot, top on, root on, like you know what you’re eating, and to be able to take that carrot and like elevate it to such a huge level with all the experience that you have underneath you, that’s when I realized that what we have now here at Bosq in Aspen is our style of cuisine and something that we’ve created. With that

Kirk Bachmann: as a backdrop, the name of the show, chef, is the ultimate dish in your world today. Time and place. What is the ultimate dish?

Barclay Dodge: Okay, so I have I have two. Is that okay? I love it. I love it. A quick one. My ultimate dish, my favorite go-to. I’m going to eat it every single day. Is bread and butter. Like there’s nothing better than bread, good bread, good butter, and some crunchy salt. Okay, now

Kirk Bachmann: I love that the

Barclay Dodge: ultimate dish that I’ve had, and like I’ll always keep remembering, was that was in Copenhagen at Restaurant Kadeau, and it was scallop ice cream. It blew me away! Wow, I have been trying to figure out how they accomplish. You know how scallops have this milkiness that comes out.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah,

Barclay Dodge: like a sweet milkiness. That’s what the ice cream was. So yeah, that cream was it

Kirk Bachmann: was sweet.

Barclay Dodge: It was naturally yeah. It could have been a transition course from savory to sweet, but it was definitely sweet, and I’ll never forget that. And the recipe is not online, so yeah, I don’t even know who

Kirk Bachmann: would think of that, right? Oh, let’s make scallop ice cream today. Wow.

Barclay Dodge: I think it’s why there’s signatures because I I keep going back to that dish. But you know what? 40 years of cooking and eating, there’s a lot of ultimate dishes out there, but that one stands pretty high up there. I’ll never forget it.

Kirk Bachmann: Thank you for listening to the Ultimate Dish podcast, brought to you by Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Visit escoffier.edu/podcast to find any materials mentioned during the podcast, including notes, links, and other resources. And if you can, please leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify and subscribe to support our show. This helps us reach more aspiring individuals ready to take the next step toward their dream careers. Thanks for listening.