Interview w/ Rover’s Chef Thierry Rautureau

I sat down with Rover’s famous Chef in the Hat, Thierry Rautureau, to ask him about seasonal ingredients and the Seattle restaurant scene. Rautureau has poured his culinary knowledge acquired from his youth on French farm into Rover’s for 20 years. I’ve boiled down to his best answers, offering insight to what makes the Chef in the Hat such a perennial Seattle favorite. 

Seattle.net: What do you think of the current movement toward food source awareness, and how does it affect Seattle?

Thierry Rautureau: We’re making such a big deal out of a great carrot instead of killing the guy who is not making a good one. We should be working hard on getting the people who do wrong things out of business and the right people in. [Sustainable agriculture] is the way life should be. We glorify it because we have to because it’s so rare. I think, thankfully enough, we live in a part of the world where we have all the people who give a rat’s ass about it.  

What is your favorite locally grown or produced ingredient?

Right now it would be asparagus. I look at asparagus every year as a big gong. It’s like [in gong tones], “Spring! Spring!” We’ve been cooking all these root vegetables all winter long, over and over, trying to find different ways to use them—moving them around the menu. The asparagus has definitely come and it’s going to make a lot of difference. 

What is your favorite way to prepare asparagus?

Grilled…Just a little bit of olive oil, salt, fresh herb—like fresh chopped thyme—put down on the barbecue, light heat, make sure it doesn’t flame, turn off the gas when it’s actually cooking, or move the coal to the side. Crank it up, when the barbecue goes up to 400 degrees, move the coals away, put the asparagus flat on the grill, so every asparagus touches the grill, gets the mark, and within a couple minutes, you move them around, and when it’s about six minutes you’ve got wonderful asparagus.  

What is your favorite dish to make using all of the current local products?

Halibut, baked in the oven, asparagus, bacon, ramps and morels, in a wonderful little sauce. First you dice the bacon, render [it], use that fat to cook the morels, add chopped garlic, chopped shallots, put the ramps in there, sauté the whole thing up, deglaze with a little bit of white wine, cook it down, and you are done, you have the sauce. And then the halibut you go with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, just bake in the oven at about 375 degrees and about seven minutes in you cover with foil, so it doesn’t dry out, and finish cooking.
 
If you could have any item from anywhere in the world be made or grown locally, what would it be?

Well, I am a very hardy gardener, and there is one thing that I can never grow, and that is chervil. I have a beautiful garden, I love gardening, but that damn chervil…  

What else have you grown? Do you grow a lot for the restaurant?

Green shiso, purple shiso, nira—which is a kind of Thai garlic—chives, brown fennel, green fennel, lemon balm, bay leaf. We haven’t bought bay leaf in six or seven years. In my garden right now, we have rosemary up the yin-yang. I could furnish probably 15 restaurants in town with my rosemary. Lavender, sage, oregano, tons of chives, enough for the whole summer. In vegetables, we grow onions, shallots, and garlic. At the end of the season, I take the onions out and I make some tresses and we use that during the winter. Same with the potatoes, pears, apples—they go on boards so they stay dry. We don’t do too many squashes because they take up too much room—you don’t pick them one day, suddenly they are like giants. Zucchini you could kill somebody with, that sort of thing. 

What is your favorite aspect of the current Seattle dining scene? 

I like the camaraderie between the chefs. It is not cutthroat competition. We don’t see each other enough, and when we do it’s happy. We all try to do our own thing—we’re all into it, which I think is remarkable. Most people in this business here care. They are not in it for the money. Getting things from the farmers, doing things that would help people make a living out of selling a good product. It is extremely important that we support these people. Because if we don’t, they die, and if they die, the big guys will win, and if the big guys win, we go back twenty-five years. So we need to keep on moving forward. Good food is not inexpensive, that is a myth. People have to come to realize that, just like gasoline is not cheap. 

What changes do you think have occurred with Seattle diners since you opened the restaurant?

Well, I think they have finally become convinced that I might not be the most expensive restaurant in Seattle! I think that the movement of outsiders coming to Seattle has made everybody in this town wake up and actually go to different restaurants all the time. Twenty years ago, you had Asian restaurants. Now you have Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, you name it, and people are looking at Asia and realizing there are many different countries. They are separating the nations. It’s fascinating to see the growth that has happened in the last twenty years. And it is really cool. I’m glad to be a part of it, I can tell you that.