The three chefs

The assignment was daunting. It was late 2010 and noted Arkansas historian Tom Dillard, who headed the Special Collections Department for the University of Arkansas libraries at the time, asked me to meet with him in Fayetteville. I showed up expecting to talk history. Instead, we talked food.

Tom wanted to publish an Arkansas food journal that would be called Arkansauce. He asked me to be guest editor for the inaugural issue. That wasn’t the daunting part. The hard part was writing an article in which I would attempt to define Arkansas cuisine. Back when Bill Clinton was running for president the first time in 1992 and I was this newspaper’s political editor, I often was asked to explain Arkansas to out-of-state reporters. I tried to make clear that we’re a mixed bag-a state that’s mostly Southern but also a bit Midwestern and a tad Southwestern.

That same regional mix applies to our cuisine. Here was my best shot at a short definition for Arkansas cuisine: “Traditional country cooking done simply and done well, using the freshest, locally sourced ingredients possible.”

Most young Arkansans will never experience early morning outings to gather eggs and vegetables or late-afternoon trips to pick berries in the wild. Fortunately, there’s a new breed of Arkansas chefs who are, in a sense, taking us back to our culinary roots. Last Friday, I was with three of them-Lee Richardson of Little Rock, Matt McClure of Bentonville and Matt Bell of Little Rock. Libby Smith, this newspaper’s travel editor, had invited me and the three chefs to the Little Rock Marriott to address a national convention of travel writers. The four of us did our best to explain Arkansas cuisine in the hope that some of these writers will extol its virtues in print.

Though he’s a Louisiana native, Richardson has been the foremost advocate in recent years of the bounty of Arkansas fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy products. Financier Warren Stephens gave our state a gift when he brought Richardson to Arkansas from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Stephens closed the already acclaimed Capital Hotel and embarked on a two-year renovation project that would take it to an even higher level of prestige after it reopened in 2007. Richardson moved to Little Rock almost 18 months before the hotel reopened. That gave him time to get to know small, artisanal food producers statewide.

Richardson left the Capital Hotel in June of last year but continues to call Little Rock home. My hope is that he’ll come to an agreement with investors and open a restaurant. He admits that he has a concept ready to roll out. McClure, meanwhile, is now the chef at The Hive, the restaurant in the 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Bentonville, built to take advantage of the high-dollar visitors now pouring into town to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Bell, the third chef on the panel, is within weeks of opening a restaurant on South Main Street in downtown Little Rock called South on Main. The restaurant will be operated in conjunction with the Oxford American, the nationally recognized literary quarterly that calls Arkansas home.

Richardson, a quiet man who lets his cooking do the talking, wound up at the University of Colorado as a psychology major. He would carry gumbo back to college after visits home, and friends would beg for a taste. “The gumbo was a social crutch for me,” Richardson says. “I could always hide behind my pot of gumbo. When I would eat that gumbo, I would think about how I felt when my grandmother would cook my birthday dinner.”

It was then that he began to think more deeply about the importance of food to the American culture and its ability not only to fill our stomachs but also feed our souls. He said the old Creole restaurants that catered to tourists in the French Quarter were “on autopilot” by then but that new chefs were making a name for themselves. He was a prep cook for Emeril Lagasse at the French Quarter restaurant NOLA and later worked with Anne Kearney at Peristyle and John Besh at Restaurant August.

McClure and Bell both worked at the Capital Hotel. Bell, a music education major from Montana, was a dishwasher and later a waiter at a restaurant in Missoula. His wife is a North Little Rock native. After Bell attended the Texas Culinary Academy in Austin, he wound up in North Little Rock working at Capeo, the fine Italian restaurant on Main Street. He later worked at the Capital Hotel with Richardson.

McClure, a Little Rock native, attended the University of Arkansas with the goal of becoming an engineer. After three semesters, he decided engineering wasn’t for him. He obtained loans and moved to Vermont to study at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier. McClure later moved to Boston and worked at restaurants such as No. 9 Park, Troquet and Harvest. That was followed by the return to Arkansas to work for Richardson.

Using local products ranging from black walnuts to smoked hams to Arkansas peaches and tomatoes, these chefs are ensuring we meet the definition I came up with for Arkansas cuisine: Cooking done simply and done well, using the freshest, locally sourced ingredients possible. All three are treasures.

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.