Different Tastes

Comparatively, it’s a simple dish: A pork leg paté — a gray-pink brick of ground pig leg, topped with mushrooms, hazelnuts and pickled cherry.

But to trained tongues, it’s genius. And it was enough for Kevin Gillespie to edge out his competitors for the sixth time in eight episodes of Top Chef. Gillespie’s a maestro of any meat, but he’s truly a swine savant. Hell, there’s a pig tattooed on his forearm.

“This was a pork battle — and giving Kevin pork is like trying to fight Popeye in the middle of a spinach cannery,” one Internet fan raves. Fans compete to describe his jolly appearance. He’s Yukon Cornelius. Young Santa Claus. Gimli. (His beard has a fan page on Facebook.)
His Top Chef persona is simple: confident, but humble. Professional. Damn good cook.

His bacon jam was so delicious, it sent head judge Tom Colicchio, for the first time in Top Chef history, scurrying to imitate a recipe. Vegas odds-maker Johnny Avello gives Gillespie a one-in-two chance of winning the entire thing.

There’s no dish he can’t master, no place where he can’t succeed.

Except, it turns out, Spokane, Washington.

The Spokane Quickfire Challenge

You won’t find Spokane mentioned on Gillespie’s Facebook resume or his Top Chef bio. But from September to December of 2007, Gillespie was the executive chef at Spokane’s Luna.

Marking Luna’s 15th anniversary, owner Marcia Bond went in search of a new chef. She tasted the talents of seven different cooks. One stood out: Gillespie. He had unmatched abilities, Bond says, and unmatched passion. “Kevin is a person who has phenomenal ideas and abilities that match,” Bond says.

Gillespie was hired and given carte blanche to sculpt Luna into his culinary vision. But his dream — more grits, more fat and, naturally, more pork — was different from what Luna customers had come to expect.

“Some of the longtime dishes that had become signature dishes, he felt like it would be fun to change them and delete them,” Bond says.

The famed coconut curry prawns suddenly vanished from the menu. And customers began to revolt. “People have expectations of a restaurant,” Bond says. “Too much change too fast is shocking.”

Jeremy Hansen, now the co-owner and head chef of Santé, quit Luna after working as Gillespie’s sous chef for three months. He liked Gillespie, he thought he was talented — everyone did — but their vision for Luna clashed. Hansen preferred local, low-fat food; Gillespie used a whole lot of rendered pig fat.

In December, Gillespie packed his knives and left. After a short stint at 98 Twenty Bistro, he headed to Woodfire Grill in Atlanta, where he was nominated for the 2008 Rising Star James Beard award. (Gillespie, traveling this week, was not available for interviews.)

“We weren’t all quite ready for all of his talent,” Bond says. It was just timing, she says.

So is it the fault of Spokane? Is our palate too unsophisticated? Was the future Top Chef chased away by a bunch of rubes, unable to appreciate the genius of a true culinary master?

“The Spokane market… is very conservative on the food front,” says Dan Bower, head chef at Stix Bar and Grill. “I don’t think it’s the most adventurous dining clientele around. All of us chefs talk about it.”

For Luna, with 15 years of built-up customer expectations, radical reinventions are dangerous.

At the Woodfire Grill in Atlanta, Gillespie can change the menu every day; that’s not really possible in Spokane, Bond says. Instead, the culinary experimentation has to come through the daily specials and fresh eats.

Latah Bistro’s David Blaine cautions against drawing conclusions about Spokane from Gillespie’s struggles.

“It was probably a bad idea on his part to come here,” says Blaine. Even if Gillespie started his own restaurant in Spokane, Blaine doubts he would have succeeded. Each market comes with its own idiosyncrasies — you can’t just parachute in and crank up the oven. You watch, and learn, how the city eats.

Top Chef — Spokane?

“[Kevin] may have not been a Top Chef guy if he had been here for two years,” Blaine says.

Local food fans and chefs praise the local talents: Ian Wingate at Moxie, Jeremy Hansen at Santé, Jason Rex at Scratch, Anna Vogel at Luna and David Blaine at Latah Bistro. If only the world would notice.

“It’s not that Spokane doesn’t have great chefs,” Bower says. “It’s under the radar. It’s not the sexy city that the food and wine journalist writes about.”

Spokane is a tourist destination, sure, but for big sporting events, not for food.

Some chefs, like former Fugazzi’s head chef Chester Gerl, flee Spokane precisely to become nationally known. Today, Gerl’s a chef at Seattle’s Matt’s in the Market and recently cooked for the James Beard Foundation.

“I want to win a James Beard award, and that’s not going to happen in Spokane,” Gerl says. “It seems like all the good chefs leave.”

Gerl thinks Spokane largely ignores its advantages — like its farmers markets. He likes Luna, but scoffs at the menus of Moxie, Scratch and Mizuna.

“I see the same things on people’s menu that are 10 years old,” Gerl says. “I don’t think Spokane has very good food.”

Blaine, however, sees progress. In the ’90s, he says, everyone wanted their restaurant to emulate national chains. But today, carefully crafted, unique local food is celebrated. There is a food scene, an ever-growing core of foodies, people who care about taste.

“If anything has helped that along, it’s shows like Top Chef, that have given our career a certain amount of respectability,” Blaine says.

Catch Kevin Gillespie on Bravo’s Top Chef  10 pm on Wednesdays.