Whole Foods Transformed by Will

Chris sat at the window bar in jeans and a navy t-shirt eating baked chicken, meatloaf, and macaroni salad from a compostable container. He looked out at South Street through his faux-wood-framed glasses, taking a sip of OJ. Chris eats lunch at his neighborhood Whole Foods often on Mondays or Tuesdays, his days off.

“Hey Chris!” A jovial, graying man nodded as he pulled out a stool and set down his salad a few seats away. He and Chris are business neighbors; his 35-year-old clothing shop is down the street from the restaurant Chris opened four years ago, Will BYOB.

“I live upstairs,” Chris said, “I come down at 9:00 to check on everything, start cooking around 11:00.” He’ll work on prep through the afternoon, generally forgoing a sit-down lunch. “We don’t really have ‘breaks’ in the industry,” he said. He’ll taste, snack, maybe have a protein shake while he cooks, but he finds he often doesn’t eat enough – “About 1000 calories a day.” He keeps track using MyFitnessPal. “You can put your food in, or scan the barcode,” he said, holding his phone to his bottle of Uncle Matt’s orange juice to show me. To ensure he eats more full meals, he tries to cook for the whole week on Monday or Tuesday. “Chicken or fish, vegetables, quinoa, sweet potatoes,” he said, “Kind of boring, but it works.”

The food on the menu at his restaurant is anything but boring. ‘Chef,’ as he’s known at Will, plays with contrasting textures, colors, and flavors – no less than six components making up each dish. Sweet Potato and Apple Soup, for example, is garnished with pumpernickel granola (toasted breadcrumbs, puffed wild and pearled rice), verjus (sour grape juice) jelly, black pepper jam, apple cider foam, and chamomile micro-greens.

Chris invited me to spend a shift in the kitchen, so I saw the execution first hand. Around 7:45 on Friday night, the tickets line up on the board, covering quotes like, “There are no mistakes, only carelessness” and “Shitbag chefs breed more shitty chefs.” There are three chefs – Chris, Sydney, and Mike – in the kitchen smaller than an average hotel room.

“Two soups! One Monk! Two pastas! One chicken!” I hear it three times as each chef repeats the order. Then a flurry as Mike counts out his 26 noodles of fresh pasta, Sydney warms the napa cabbage-wrapped Monkfish, and Chris paints the plates with bright stripes of beet purée (and I fumble with the immersion blender to conjure up fresh apple cider foam for the soup). Each plate is assembled with stunningly seamless collaboration. The chefs anticipate each others’ next move – one pulling plates out of the oven just as another is poised with a dab of parsnip sauce; one plating the branzino as another plucks pumpkin rounds from pickling brine with kitchen tweezers. Six hands play a part in each dish that leaves the kitchen.

“Chef?” Jennifer, the hostess, appears in the doorway, “Can we send out a bouche to table 31?” Chef nods and pulls out the container of curry-seasoned, dehydrated beef tendon, which he will fry, creating a highly glorified pork rind. An amuse-bouche, Sydney tells me, is French for ‘mouth amuser,’ or ‘present for the mouth.’ It’s a treat sent out to family and friends of the chef or especially good patrons. Adorned with dabs of coconut purée and viola blossoms, the crispy beef tendon is whisked away.

If I would have had the enchanting experience of being in the Will kitchen before chatting with Chris at Whole Foods, I might have been less surprised about the menu items Chris highlighted: The Rohan duck (a cross between a Heritage Mallard and a Pekin) and the short rib they cook for two days. I also might have understood why he tastes constantly, but rarely pauses for a full meal, why he occasionally binges on something unhealthy at midnight; he’s in the kitchen most hours of the day, most days of the week.

If he does happen to make it out for lunch, he’ll go to Terakawa Ramen for miso ramen – “At 3:00 or 4:oo, not 12:00 because it’s too busy,” – or Circles on 2nd for Thai. Or he’ll stick with Whole Foods, the old standby, where he’ll pursue the hot bar for a simple meal cooked by someone else.