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Volume 32 Issue 5 • August 2014www.middleburglife.net

PRSRT STDECRWSS

U.S. POSTAGEPAID

BURKE, VAPERMIT NO. 44

Postal Customer

PHOTO BY JONATHAN TIMMES

in this issue:

BOBBY BURKE remembers the

Warrenton Horse Show

prepares for the first anniversary celebration of Salamander Resort & Spa

ChefChris Edwards

Festivities, culinary and otherwise, planned for gala Labor Day Weekend

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Chris Edwards can look back now and see that he had some-thing of a penchant for pots and pans and the ingredients that went into them as far back as his pre-school days growing

up in Woodbridge. “My first recipe was for Winnie The Pooh peanut butter balls,” Edwards recalled the other day. Asked to provide that recipe, he laughed and said “I can’t remember. But definitely peanut butter.” There’s not much Jif or Skippy on the exten-sive menus he now oversees and the delicious dishes he plans and prepares as the Chef De Cuisine for Salamander Resort & Spa’s various restaurants and other dining options, including 24-hour room service. At the moment, he’s still working on the culi-nary game plan for the one-year anniversary of Salamander’s opening, to be celebrated at the resort on the Labor Day Weekend starting Friday, August 29. His efforts will culminate with an “Epicurience Brunch Spectacular” from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, August 31. “It’ll probably include some of the things people have really liked over the last year,” he said of the weekend food choices for all the

resort’s dining options. “I just know it’s going to be a very special weekend.” Edwards has had a very special place in his heart for the kitchen ever since his childhood days when he visited his nearby grandmother. They often watched the Food Network together. “I was always interested in cooking,” said Edwards, who had high school part-time kitchen jobs at Chucky Cheese and Red Robin franchises and several Prince William County pizza places. He was initially torn between pursuing architecture or a cooking career, until whisks and cutting boards became far easier to handle than calculus. Edwards attended Johnson and Wales Uni-versity in Charleston, S.C., a school noted for its culinary arts programs, and it soon became apparent he’d made the right decision. He also continued to work in several local restaurants, mostly smaller mom and pop operations, until he landed a job at McCrady’s, a world-famous Charleston eatery. “I started at the bottom, the cold side, mostly salads, and kept working my way up,” he said. “It was modern, California-style cooking. They didn’t want to do the usual low country food. This was modern American and very well-received.” Edwards moved up the McCrady’s kitchen depth chart to sous chef, but also knew he

Chef Chris Edwards in the culinary garden at Salamander Resort & Spa

By Leonard ShapiroFor Middleburg Life

Salamander Chef Chris Edwardsis a master o his Culinary Universe

Continued on Next Page

Cantonese Sesame Prawn Toast by Chef Chris Edwards

My first recipe was for Winnie The Pooh peanut butter balls.“ ”—Chef Chris Edwards

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Labor Day Weekend

Birthday BashJoin salamander resort & spa as

they celebrate the first year with an

event filled Birthday Bash this Labor

Day Weekend. On Friday, august 29, Salamander will feature an evening of Bubbles Under the Stars from 6:30-9:30 p.m. – a night filled with bottomless sparkling wine and birthday sweets to celebrate the resort’s first year. Tickets are $30 per person. the following day, saturday, august 30, there will be resort activities all day including Carriage Rides, an Ice Cream Social, and a Middleburg Scavenger Hunt and will feature a special birthday price of $123 per tour on the new, Tree Top Zip Tour by Empower. The evening winds down with a Family Movie on the Grand Lawn beginning at 8:30 p.m. the birthday weekend culminates on sunday, august 31 with the Epicu-rience Brunch Spectacular from 10:30 a.m. – 3 p.m. set amid the resort’s surroundings. Guests will enjoy a myriad of culinary selections, including bounti-ful breakfast choices, carving stations, a crawfish boil and decadent desserts. Listen to live music while drinking bot-tomless mimosas, tasting Virginia wines, chatting with local vintners, and playing classic family games like giant Jenga and many more. Tickets are $75 per adult and $18 per child. in anticipation for the one year anni-versary, salamander resort & spa is also giving away a Grand Birth-day Getaway to one lucky winner valued at $11,111. Everyone in its email database as of Sunday, August 31 will automatically be entered to win the ultimate birthday getaway for two that includes a two-night stay in the Owner’s Suite, a three-hour private session with Food Network Winner and Pastry Chef Jason Reaves, a horse-drawn carriage ride around the 340-acre property, an 80-minute spa and rasul treatment, a 10-course, delicious tasting menu, a Tree Top Zip Tour and a private Equi-Spective experience. throughout the weekend, there will be additional birthday specials in our spa, restaurants and equestrian center – all of which are open to the public year round. to make arrangements and inquire about guestroom availability and reser-vations, please call 866.938.7370 or email reservations@salamanderresort.com.

We’re not just cooks. We’re also mediators, motivators

and sometimes magicians.“ ”—Chef Chris Edwards

needed to enhance his repertoire. And so, he followed the same path of so many budding young chefs, heading to Europe for what is known as a stage (pronounced stodge). That involved finding a top-notch restaurant and serving an unpaid internship from six months to a year. Because he spoke Spanish, Edwards thought Spain would be a fine fit, and set his sights on working for world-renowned Chef Ferran Adria at the El Bulli restaurant in Cala Montjoi, 90 minutes from Barcelona. The restaurant, on hiatus since 2011 but soon expected to re-open, annually received about 5,000 applications for 28 stage openings. Edwards designed his own application press kit, written in Spanish, and sent it out three differ-ent times. He also applied three more times on-line. One day, an e-mail came telling him he’d been rejected. The very next day, a real letter arrived at his home informing him he’d actually gotten the job. “I took the letter and headed to Spain,” he said. “I was the only American. The restaurant served about 50 people a night, and between the 28 stages and their regular staff, there were about 45 cooks. The food was so creative. He would take a classic dish and turn it upside down. He would make a gazpacho, a cold tomato soup, and turn it into a jell. The textures and the temperatures were all flipped. You’d look at that gazpacho and say ‘no way,’ then put it in your mouth and say ‘Wow!’ He would use liquid nitrogen; they call it molecular gas-tronomy, and it was incredible.” So, apparently, was Chef Adria, who Edwards described as “eccentric in some of his habits. If there was a drop of water on the floor, he’d lose his mind. You’d hear people screaming ‘moppa, moppa.’ If you’ve ever seen the sport of curling, that’s what it looked like, everyone with a mop trying to get rid of the water.” There was plenty of other grunt work—shucking oysters, taking fur off rabbits, de-feathering birds—and no particular formal training. “You’re thrown into it,” he said. “Just show up and see what happens. They’d give you the materials and some of the techniques. We’d get

the recipes. It was learn as you go. For me it had a de-mystification effect. I was in the best restaurant in the world, and it was just a restau-rant. It wasn’t a science lab. Just a restaurant.” Edwards left Spain after seven months in 2004 and compiled a list of American chefs he wanted to work for. That included Fabio Trab-occhi at Maestro in Tysons Corner where he again clawed up the food chain, this time with a major difference. “Everything up to that point was like I was in boot camp,” he said. “At Maestro, I was now a starter in the big leagues. There was an expecta-tion of excellence that was clearly defined, and anything less was not acceptable. It required extreme focus, and this is where all the values to become a chef are instilled. “It was like going to cooking school all over again. We cooked so much from scratch it was unreal. If it called for lemon juice, you squeezed a lemon into a strainer. I was chopping herbs to order…The cooking was so pure, and every-thing was fresh.” Maestro closed in 2007, but moved to New York City, in SoHo, with virtually the entire staff re-locating, including Edwards. The new place was called Fiamma and opened to rave reviews, but Edwards wasn’t wild about living in Manhattan and decided to come home. He then served a valuable stint as executive sous chef for the Moon Bay restaurant at National Harbor “where it all came together for me. “The resort experience, the huge staff, learn-ing the executive and administrative side of being a chef is what I was able to hone,” he said. “We’re not just cooks. We’re also mediators, motivators and sometimes magicians.” His last stop before Salamander last August was at Patowmack Farm restaurant in Lovetts-ville. It was far smaller than Moon Bay and offered pure farm-to-table cuisine. “I was cook-ing everything,” he said. “We had a pastry chef, and a dishwasher and that was about it.” Edwards said he also became intrigued when he kept hearing about Salamander and its future plans. “I had been watching it from afar and I knew I wanted to get back into a larger scale opera-

tion,” he said. “I wanted to be part of something big, part of a larger team and have a much greater audience.” He has all of that and more these days, with responsibility over Harrimans and the Gold Cup dining rooms and a cooking staff of close to 40. Some are in the early stages of their careers and eager to learn from Edwards and his boss, executive chef Sean McKee. “It’s never a done deal,” Edwards said. “We set the bar very high even before we opened and every time we think we’ve reached it, we put it up a few notches higher. There are days when it clicks better than others, but we learn from past mistakes and move forward. That’s the way a team grows.” Edwards and several staff members also teach weekly cooking classes in the resort’s kitchen studio, complete with two big screen televisions for up close and personal views of food preparation by masters of this culinary universe. Hotel guests and drop-ins from the local area make up the student body for classes that can accommodate as many as 24. Edwards commutes to the resort from his home in Sterling and yes, he said, he does most of the cooking for himself and his wife Martha. Winnie The Pooh peanut butter balls are not on that menu. Instead, he loves doing tacos, with as many fresh ingredients as he can stuff into the shells and no recipe necessary. These days, it just seems to come naturally. n