Chris Schlesinger

The East Coast Grill

Appears in

Published 1996

About

Cambridge, Massachusetts

I traveled to diverse places—from Mexico to Thailand—and found that I really liked a lot of the aspects of the food. When I opened the East Coast Grill, I tried to come to an understanding of what things all these diverse foods had in common. When I look at my cooking, I think there are three major themes:

My love of live fire—wood-burning stuff. The dynamic of going into the kitchen every day and cooking with something that is as uncontrollable as fire, as opposed to just going in and turning the oven on to 350 or 375, is a constant challenge to me. Roasting whole pigs, grilling fish, or trying to keep something from sticking—that dynamic is so soulful and extends so much character into the food.
My other love as a cook that I developed while cooking with Jimmy Burke at the Harvest [in Cambridge, MA] is discovering and learning about new things all the time—getting a new food in and learning about it and reading about it.
The other aspect developed out of my travels is a desire for deeply-flavored food. What I started to work out was that, for a lot of different reasons, cuisines that are closer to the equator are more flavorful; they have deeper flavors or clearer flavors or use more spices.