Gene Morgan Stout Jr. Man with a meal plan

— Louisiana-born Morgan Stout wants you to believe he’s a plain, rice-and-beans kind of cook.

He’s unpretentious to the point of ridiculous, when in fact he’s a culinary genius with the respect of many high-end restaurateurs in the city.

Stout cut his cooking chops at the wellknown (now closed) Cassinelli 1700 contemporary Italian restaurant in North Little Rock, was sous chef at James at the Mill in Johnson and helped another big-name foodie, Suzie Stephens, launch her Cafe Nibbles fine dining restaurant in the late 1990s.

At 44, he now makes his living as director of operations for Chartwells, the University of Arkansas’ dining and food services provider.The UA account is one of Chartwells’ four largest in the country, furnishing about 8,500 meals a day in the university’s three residence dining halls and in fast food-type outlets on campus. Stout is second-in-command on a management team that rides herd over 400 associates at the peak of the school year.

Yet he downplays his responsibilities.

“I’m not big on titles,” he says.

Outside the cafeterias and student union, Chartwells also caters sporting events and parties, where the food is sure to leave a lasting impression. At home Razorbacks football games, Stout can be seen pacing the concrete concourse outside the skyboxes with his cell phone pressed to one ear and a two-way radiopressed to the other. Calls for more chili and cocktail sauce are constant, and it’s up to him to coordinate it all. It’s not uncommon for him to report for work at 3 or 4 a.m. for a game with an 11 a.m. kickoff.

“I’m a football widow in a whole new way,” says his wife, Sonya Stout, whom he met while working at James at the Mill.

Melissa Banks, director of special events at the UA, works with Stout to coordinate catering jobs.

“He works to make everything not so institutional. Chartwells, they think it’s just kind of like a factory that they make the food, then pop it back out,” Banks says. “We work closely and trade ideas all the time for menus. He gets the gist of what I’m wanting. He justSELF

PORTRAITDate and place of birth: Oct.

21, 1965, Baton Rouge My parents would describe me as [laughing] unpredictable. Like going into the restaurant business - they probably didn’t see that one coming.

What’s always in my pantry: rice and blackeyed peas, red beans or some other type of beans.

I collect cookbooks.

First job: mowing yards Worst job: I don’t know that I’ve had a bad job.

A skill everyone should have: customer service My perfect New Year’s Eve would include a good meal on my table with close friends.

Everyone but me has tried an iPhone.

I absolutely won’t eat organ meats.

A favorite food I thought I’d never like is lima beans.

Take anything in my kitchen, but don’t take my Shun chef’s knife.

One phrase to sum me up: I’m a rebel with a cause. I just haven’t figured out the cause yet.

kind of seemed to elevate everything.”

Earlier this month, Stout and his crew fed about 500 people at Mary Ann and Reed Greenwood’s annual Christmas open house, for which he works weeks to prepare. Guests noshing on the buffet - three extended tables full - went through 600-700 pieces of sushi, seven sides of smoked salmon, 3 pounds of pate and 30 pounds of boiled shrimp. Stout also caters a swanky sit-down dinner party that the Greenwoods host on the eve of the Business Forecast Luncheon every February.

“Campus dining is not what you think of as gourmet food, but it can be,” Mary Ann Greenwood says.

Lobster salad with champagne vinaigrette?

Stout delivers.

Sauteed frog legs, lamb tenderloin medallions or venison?

“He can and will do it,” Greenwood says.

He once created a satsuma orange sherbet and strawberry shortcake dessert from New Orleans’ Commander’s Palace recipes.

“That was right down his alley,” she says.

MORE THAN FOOD

Named loosely for Sir Winston Churchill’s family home, Chartwells is a subsidiary of the United Kingdom-based Compass Group, one of the top three largest food service companies in the world. Aramark and Sodexo are close competitors. One arm of Compass might feed inmates at a correctional facility or workers in a factory; another might tend to the fine dining needs of horse-racing fans atChurchill Downs or patrons of the Kennedy Center.

“Literally, there’s not an aspect of food service that they don’t operate in,” Stout says of Compass.

He started as Chartwells’ catering director in June 2001 and took a turn as director of retail operations along the way to his current position. He works elbow-to-elbow with Jack Ervin, executive chef and director of culinary services. In restaurant language, Stout would be referred to as “front of house,” and Ervin would be known as “back of house.”

While Chartwells is a food service company, Stout says, “there’s a lot of other things that go on besides just food.”

“We all laugh about the number of hats that we wear day in and day out. An account of this size, even though we have all the corporate support ... clearly any of us who are on the management team, we’recooks, we’re servers, we’re business analysts, we’re human resources professionals, we’re dietitians, nutritionists, sometimes counselors, sometimes security.”

Stout’s boss, Chartwells resident district manager Bill Zemke, describes Stout as a conscientious manager. “He cares about the job we do, he cares about the people who do it, and he cares about the customer,” Zemke says. He laughs when he says Stout’s only shortcoming is that he won’t work 24 hours a day.

“If you’re in this business, you understand very early on, or you don’t stay in it, that there are some days you just work until it’s done, and there are other days when you have to say ‘it’s enough.’”

At quitting time or shortly thereafter, Stout can be seenin the pick-up line at The New School, where his and Sonya’s 7-year-old daughter, Sophie, attends. The three of them live in a single-story house on Maple Street in Fayetteville’s Washington-Willow historic district, a very different environment from that of “Breezy Hill,” Stout’s maternal grandparents’ 2,000-acre farm where he spent time in southern Louisiana.

A LINE ON SOMETHING NEW

Some of Stout’s fondest memories are of shucking corn and hulling peas on his grandmother’s back porch with her cook and housekeeper, Annie Brown. Weekends and summers were spent on the farm near Clinton, La., located “in the toe of the boot of Louisiana,” Stout says. He recalls following his mother and grandmother around the kitchen, asking them questions and learning the basics, like how to make biscuits andfry chicken.

He was born and reared in Baton Rouge and graduated from Louisiana State University, although it took him a while to break out of his Tiger cage. He laughs when he says he actually enjoyed two college careers - “the early party years” and “the post let’s-get-serious-about-school years.” His departure with a degree in political science and minor in fine art/photography was delayed a semester because of a one-hour geology lab that he somehow missed his freshmen year.

He was eyeing a master’s degree in photography, but his parents, Gene and Liz Stout, smartly advised him to lay back some money first. He was working in management for Kinko’s when he graduated, then moved with thecompany to open stores in Houston and Little Rock.

“But it really wasn’t what I wanted to do ... I needed to do something creative.”

The Cassinellis were customers of Stout’s at Kinko’s, and that became his line into the restaurant. Owner Andrea Cassinelli of Little Rock remembers Stout as a capable kitchen hand.

“He turned out some really good food,” she says. He started out making soups and salads and worked his way up to sous chef. “If the chef said ‘Make a soffritto,’ he knew what to do,” Cassinelli says. (A soffritto is a basic mix for many sauces - onion and garlic, sometimes bell peppers and celery sauteed in a small amount of olive oil.)

On a trip to see friends in Fayetteville, he took in a meal at James at the Mill in Johnson “and was blown away.” He hounded owner Miles James every day for two weeks before James hired him.

At Cassinelli’s, he worked exclusively with family recipes. At the Mill, “we did everything,” Stout says. “There were no shortcuts. We made our stocks, made our own sauces, butchered our own meats, made our own bread. It was an incredible experience.”

“It was my proving ground. It made me realize I do have what it takes to be in this business.”

IN HIS BLOOD

Stout doesn’t consider himself a job-hopper - his father worked at Exxon for 33 years 1 - but after 3/2 years at James at the Mill, he was ready for another experience. By now, he was dating the former Sonya Hatfield, Suzie Stephens’ stepdaughter.

Stephens hired Stout to run her catering company, Nibbles Gourmet Catering, in 1998. He found it different from restaurant work.

“In the restaurant world, you’re right there, you’re in your kitchen, you control everything. You make the dish. It goes on the plate. It’s pretty. You hand it off and it’s set in front of the diner,” Stout says.

“In the catering business, nothing’s the same way twice. You’re packing up the restaurant in the back of a van and trying to set it up God knows where. It could be someone’s living room. It could be in the middle of a field.”

Stephens laughs when she recalls a catering job for a Wal-Mart vendor during the retailer’s annual shareholders’ meeting that required Stout to stuff cherry tomatoes with chicken salad. She and Stout got separated in the chaos, and when the tomatoescame, “they weren’t the size of a cherry tomatoes, they were the size of your little fingernail.”

“He stuffed every damn little itty-bitty tomato,” she says.

“When I saw them, I couldn’t stop laughing. It became our joke in the kitchen.

“The joke was that the boy would do anything. If you asked him to stuff tomatoes, he would make sure every damn tomato was stuffed.”

A year later, Stephens hired Stout as executive chef when she opened Cafe Nibbles.

“I had always been the guy next to the guy, so I was pretty nervous about it. But we got the restaurant opened and I was pretty proud of it,” Stout says.

The restaurant - in a building where Stephens nowoperates a cooking school - went under two years later.

“What he did at Cafe Nibbles was extraordinary. He put his heart and soul into it,” Stephens says. “One of my greatest regrets in the world [was that] I didn’t have enough money to keep it going.”

“We relished in the fact that we produced some of the finest food I’ve ever eaten in my life.” She says Stout ran a tight ship.

“Morgan had a real sense and sensibility about hiring kids and making them work beyond their potential. If they did anything wrong, he had that same sense and sensibility to knock them in to shape.”

He didn’t make as much when he started at Chartwells as he did as executive chef for Stephens, but the hours and benefits were better, he says.

Cassinelli, Stout’s first restaurant boss, is proud to hear Stout now works in administration. It’s every chef’s goal, she says.

“It’s good. He needs to do that now,” she says.

Stout calls himself a chef in recovery. When time allows or he’s just having a bad day, “I get to go in the kitchen and kind of push someone out of the way and say, ‘Let me do that for awhile.’”

One of his favorite quotes, from Becoming a Chef by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, is: “The restaurant business chooses you. You don’t choose it.”

“And it’s really true,” he says. “You either hang with it, or it chews you up and spits you out. The other kind of sick thing about it is once it gets in your blood, it’s pretty much there.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 37 on 12/20/2009

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