On the day I meet Chef Steven Snook, he’s trying to manage a serious crisis in the kitchen.
The refrigerator, undoubtedly one of the most vital tools in a restaurant, “decided to stop working,” according to Snook, who is settling in across the table from me, wiping away tiny beads of sweat as he gracefully transitions from imperious kitchen captain to somber spokesperson.
“It’s all in a day’s work,” he calmly explains, brushing the matter off with an easy wave of his hand.
I doubt that the problem is so easily resolved, but this is, after all, the nature of the beast. Every day in a kitchen is a high stakes gambit of chaos and creation, and the most effective way to handle it is to gracefully pretend like each disaster is just a fun distraction from the day’s work.
I came here on a quest, seeking to learn about the man behind the food at one of the Central Coast’s best restaurants, First and Oak in Solvang. It is here that Snook has become renowned for serving inspired dishes that have foodies up and down the coast intrigued.
Mentored by some of the greatest chefs in the world, including celebrity chef and reality show star Gordon Ramsay, Snook has come up through some of the toughest and most demanding kitchens in London and New York. Now, as the executive chef at First and Oak, he’s on a mission to push himself beyond the boundaries of traditional fine dining cuisine, fusing high art with extraordinary dishes known for their flair and flavor, and creating a name for himself that could rival his mentors.
Across the pond
The very first thing you learn about Chef Steven Snook is that he is a hugger.
He will quickly tell you as much when he greets you. His chaotic energy radiates with bursts of comical jovialness and spurts of intensity, especially when he talks about food or cooking. He never seems to get nervous or intimidated; I detect the faint aura of a chef’s cockiness in his confidence, but something about it feels dulled. Perhaps it’s the three young children and suburban life that have softened his brashness, or perhaps it’s the British accent that’s instantly disarming. In short, if you go into a meeting with Snook expecting a Gordon Ramsay clone, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
His story doesn’t start in the kitchen of a famous chef filming segments for a television show. It begins in the English town of Kent, where he was born and raised in a large family surrounded by trees and the kind of English gardens Americans envision out of Jane Austen novels. It was in one of those gardens where he first learned to source food, picking vegetables for his grandmother’s weekly Sunday family dinners.
“I would sit in the kitchen with my grandmother and just watch her, chopping, stirring, measuring,” he said. “All this hard work would be done and everyone would just sit down to this amazing meal. I think it was that that caught me. I loved watching how you can take an act as simple as that and create this huge enjoyment.”
That fascination turned into a stint in a local kitchen washing dishes where he again employed his observational skills. Dishwashing turned into prep work and eventually he was a line cook. But the young chef had stars in his eyes— Michelin stars, the prestigious honor many chefs spend their entire careers working to earn.
The stars are awarded by anonymous reviewers to a select few restaurants around the world and published in the annual Red Guide. The awarding or dreaded stripping of a star can make or break a restaurant and all but ruin a chef. (It is said that Ramsay burst into tears when one of his New York restaurants lost its star.)
To Snook, working at a Michelin star restaurant presented a new challenge to learn more and push himself to a higher performance level.
“I was trying to see what I really wanted to be,” he said. “There were a few cooking shows that had started to air in England. It was the very beginning of the ‘celebrity chef,’ and watching those shows was really interesting. I decided I wanted to keep moving forward.”
But Snook wasn’t prepared for what he was about to get himself into.
Hard lessons
Read’s Restaurant in Faversham is a short trip from Snook’s childhood home. Situated on several acres of lush land, the restaurant looks like something straight out of Downton Abbey, with its unassuming brick-faced Georgian manor quietly nestled in a rich field of green grass.
Inside is the culinary home of chef David Pitchford, who held a Michelin star for 20 years. Pitchford was a highly acclaimed chef, respected in the highest echelons of British cooking circles and renowned for his hyper-seasonal dishes sourced right from the grounds of Read’s.
But the ambitious young Snook didn’t know anything about the man who would become his boss and mentor.
“I just knew that he had a Michelin star on his front door,” Snook said. “And that’s where I wanted to be.”
The venue operated its own husbandry program for animals and a garden often tended by the chefs themselves. Local hunters would show up with game pheasant, offering them in exchange for lunch. Mostly, everything had to meet Pitchford’s rigid benchmarks.
“He just was so meticulous with what he did,” Snook said. “He knew everything. There was no wastage or spoilage.”
The lesson about waste was one Snook learned the hard way. During his first week, he was busy chopping vegetables when Pitchford walked by and suddenly stopped, curiously inspecting the work. Pitchford then retrieved a blue tarp and spread it out in the parking lot. He grabbed the waste bin Snook was using, dumped it onto the tarp and began to sort through the produce.
Pitchford showed him the pile and asked Snook if he thought he was doing a good job at the restaurant. Snook said he believed he had been.
“He said ‘that pile over there, that’s your pig food,’” Snook said. “‘That’s your celery peelings, celery trimmings. That’s not trash, that’s food. That’s money. That pile there is $27.’ He pointed to another pile and said ‘That is recyclable. We recycle. We’re responsible.’”
Another pile was produce that was perfectly good food where Snook had simply cut too much off or gotten careless in his prep work. The costs mounted. It was $52 for the wasted food, $27 for the food for the animals. It added up to more than $100. Snook was earning a meager salary, just starting out. Pitchford gave him two choices: pay the money out of his paycheck or work it off.
He would spend the next four-and-half years under Pitchford’s tutelage, soaking up as much knowledge about cooking and food as he could from his mentor. The harsh lessons about waste served as a powerful gut check.
“I thought I was real hot stuff back then,” he said, shaking his head and laughing. “I learned that day I wasn’t anything yet.”
The real Hell’s Kitchen
After those few years, Pitchford sensed his young protege was getting restless, having learned all he could. One day, Pitchford handed him a slip of paper and told him to go to the address on a Monday morning. After a long train ride, Snook walked up to the door of a building and glanced at the sign.
“It said ‘Gordon Ramsay at Claridges,’” Snook said. “At the time, I didn’t really know who he was.”
For those immersed in the world of celebrity chefs, Ramsay is a king in the castle. The Scotland-born chef has opened more than 40 restaurants globally during his career, earning 16 Michelin stars over the course of two decades. But it’s his thriving television career, where he is known for his fiery temper and unchecked bluntness, that has made him a household name. He’s hired and mentored dozens of now-successful chefs, many of whom revere him for his no-nonsense ways and passionate devotion to good food.
Snook, thinking he was just there for an interview, showed up at the backdoor of the acclaimed venue in a suit and tie. A grumpy chef who met him ordered him to change into his chef whites and get to work.
“I just jumped onto this station with another person and started working,” Snook said. “About halfway into the day, I see [Ramsay]. He comes in and does his loop like he always did. He said hi to the person next to me and walked right past me.”
A few minutes later, Snook felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. Ramsay greeted the young chef in typical Ramsay fashion.
“‘So you’re David’s boy,’ he asked me,” Snook said. “I said, ‘Yes, I’m Steven.’ He said, ‘I don’t give a shit what your name is. David says you’re OK, so keep working.’”
Snook obeyed and at the end of the night, Ramsay took him aside again and asked him if he liked the experience. The young chef, blown away by what he had witnessed in the bustling kitchen at Claridges, expressed sincere enthusiasm. Then, Ramsay shocked him.
“He told me, ‘Don’t be late tomorrow,’” Snook said.
Snook had planned to return home to Kent that day. But despite having no clothes, no toiletries, barely a few hundred dollars to his name, and no actual place to live in London, Snook, 19 years old at the time, eagerly accepted the assignment. He stayed with another one of Ramsay’s chefs that night and began work the next day in the famed London eatery.
At the time, Ramsay owned Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, a three-star restaurant that was considered one of the best in England. Ramsay spent a good portion of his time between the two restaurants, where he demanded nothing but absolute adherence to his exacting standards.
“In the most impure way, he was a perfectionist,” Snook explained. “The guy was just perfect. He had an eye for everything. Consistency was the biggest thing. If he showed you how to do something, you did it that way. It was so precise and constant.”
Through the ranks
As Ramsay’s notoriety around Europe and the rest of the world skyrocketed, so did Snook’s career and relationship with Ramsay. He quickly worked his way through as prep chef, junior chef, mid-level chef, chef de partie, demi chef de partie, chef de cuisine, and so on.
“Because of my training through [Pitchford], I moved up the ranks pretty quickly,” Snook said. “It was very hierarchical there. You probably had to go through at least 10 layers before you actually made it toward the top.”
By 2007, Snook was a thriving junior sous chef enjoying the spoils of working in one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the world. Snook describes his time in the company as a “military-style operation,” which demanded rigorous work from 6 a.m. to midnight, six days a week. During that time, Snook also started working on some of Ramsay’s television shows, which were rapidly growing in popularity, including The F Word and the original British version of Hell’s Kitchen. Ramsay would develop the recipes and hand things off to Snook, who’d source the products, set up the kitchens, do all the mise-en-place (food preparation), and more.
Eventually Snook, who had moved up to senior sous chef at Claridge’s, was offered the role of sous chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. For the first time, the chef found himself in one of the top positions at a prestigious three-star Michelin restaurant.
“It was all about focus,” he said. “It was all about being meticulous. It was about never accepting anything less than perfection. That was intense, but I loved it.”
The work at a three-star restaurant is even more painstaking than one would expect. One of the dishes Restaurant Gordon Ramsay was known for was intricate pork terrine, which contained layers of braised pork skin, blood sausage, thinly cut apples, and more, which had to be measured and inspected by senior chefs before they were even put in an oven.
In 2009, Ramsay offered Snook a position in New York, where he had opened two restaurants: Maze, a steakhouse, and Gordon Ramsay at the London, a fine dining establishment which went on to earn two Michelin stars before shuttering in 2014. When Ramsay’s holding company decided to pull out of the New York venture, Snook was left with a simple choice: go back home and work at another Ramsay venture or stay in the U.S. and strike out on his own.
By this time, Snook had married and was beginning to raise a family. He was looking for something that reminded him of home. He opted for a change and eventually moved from New York to California.
“I was back in the countryside,” he said. “I knew the farms and knew the people the food was coming from. It was great to operate like that.”
Matters of taste
First and Oak, located in the Mirabelle Inn hotel in Solvang, was bought by father and son team Bernard and Jonathan Rosenson in 2015. The duo own the Coquelicot Estate Vineyard and were looking to create a venue that specializes in products sourced from Santa Barbara. To complete their vision, they hired Snook, fresh off a stint as executive chef at Salish Lodge & Spa outside Seattle.
There is something truly refreshing about the food at First and Oak. It demands your attention, but not in an aggressive way. Bold brilliant colors wind their way into expertly prepared meats and decadent sauces. Intricate ideas that show a solid follow through from conception to creation. Flavors linger with pinpoint precision and drive one to contemplate what exactly is going on on the plate.
“We’ve gone through our weird stages,” Snook explained. “There’s probably at least one weird dish on every menu. I do it on purpose. I like to have at least one dish that can be a little adventurous. But we cook in such a way that’s respectful to the ingredient. We try not to over manipulate things. I don’t like the idea of my carrot tasting like an orange or my potato looking like bone marrow. It doesn’t interest me.”
But Snook doesn’t just plate like a painter or come up with creative innovations for flavor combinations. To put it more simply, as my mother would say, the boy is good.
There are hints of Ramsay around the edges—punctilious plating and vibrant color schemes anchor dishes that feel like comfort food. Pitchford lingers in the attention to microscopic details and fastidious adherence to local sourcing. And there in the center is his English grandmother, lovingly serving food from her own garden for her family.
“We try and utilize techniques that I’ve learned over the last 20 years of cooking that most people around here have never seen,” Snook said. “That’s where we elevate what we do. It can be perceived as extremely fancy, but it’s approachable.”
One of the best examples of the kind of dish he’s famous for is the roasted cauliflower that appeared on the winter menu. The dish garnered rave reviews and stood out for its subtle balance of texture and flavor. Every dish he comes up with almost always has three key elements: Something smooth, something creamy, and something crunchy.
“It’s not carved in stone, but it’s a good place to start,” he said. “We were originally just going to do a roasted cauliflower puree, but it was too heavy and too dense. So we took heavy cream and cauliflower and whipped them together and made a light mousse. Now we needed texture. We need crunch because otherwise it’s just cream and it’s boring.”
He started by roasting the cauliflower and then added truffle vinaigrette for richness. Next, he took quinoa and boiled it, drained it, dried it, and fried it. The quinoa puffs up and becomes nutty and crunchy. Then, to contrast the earthiness of the dish, he added rehydrated raisins to add some sweetness.
The balance is nothing short of perfection.
“It’s hard to say where it all comes from,” he said. “I just try and take elements and flavor profiles that I know work.”
Perhaps here, away from television cameras, celebrity chefs, and the scalding intensity of criticism in the New York/London restaurant world, Snook has found something in the relative peace of California that has allowed him to blossom. In those quiet spaces away from virulent reviews and loud foodie arguments, he seems to have focused his talents in an exuberant way.
What drives the best food writing is not the need to critique or complain (Yelpers nitpicking slow servers and lukewarm meals have deftly filled that void). It’s about a need to peel back the layers, to disassemble and then reassemble through a broader understanding of the food that inspires you. That’s where I find myself when I eat at First and Oak—on the edge of curiosity and exaltation.
Contact Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 22-29, 2018.