Chef and Green-Minded Entrepreneur Steve Schimoler of Crop Bistro

Nationally recognized as an innovative chef, entrepreneur and inventor, Steve Schimoler's resume is unlike anyone's in town. A self-taught kitchen maestro, Schimoler opened his first restaurant, The Terrace on the Plaza in Long Island, NY, at age 23. But the driven and innovative catalyst behind the Warehouse District's Crop Bistro didn't stop there. In two years' time, he had three more businesses (Loafers Bakery and Gourmet, The Terrace Too and his flagship restaurant the three-star Black Walnut) up and running in the New York area.

The road ahead went on to include becoming VP of product development for Cabot Creamery in Vermont; an accidental discovery there (incorporating liquids into butter) launched him headlong into food product development and in no time truck loads of intensely flavored butters were sold across the nation. On the other end of Schimoler telling it, everything after that has been a whirlwind -- an expected byproduct of being involved in the food industry. Stints with NutraSweet, Nestlé North America, SYSCO, a product development firm called Right Stuff and restoring a 200-year-old Vermont Grist Mill as the Mist Grill restaurant.

Busy? An understatement. With a slate of successes big enough for most to consider retiring, Schimoler's taking his passion for food, green-minded entrepreneurial sense and product innovation to Cleveland at large... with no signs of slowing down.

Schimoler, who has been featured on Food Nation with Bobby Flay, the PBS Master Chef series, and as a writer-columnist for Flavor and The Menu, has also served as the President of the Research Chefs Association. He ended up in Cleveland a couple short years ago (2006) to take over the role of Director of Innovation and Development for Nestlé North America. While here, he fell in love with the town and decided to stay here.

The outgoing chef's Crop Bistro and Bar takes an "irreverent approach to food" and his sense of humor is always somewhere on the plate. As Schimoler explained to Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian last month at his bistro, Crop is doubling as a test kitchen and concept center (he's working on some product lines for SuperTarget stores now) and is combining the "art and science of flavor" with Crop's morphing menus all at the same time.

Cool Cleveland: Reading your biography, it's hard not to be drawn into your incredible work and life experience. Talk about how it all informs your creativity as the chef and proprietor here.

Steve Schimoler: If you look at my resume, if you will, I look at the food business in a much different way than others might. I see it as three points on triangle -- business and operations, where consumer lives if you wil retail or food service; supply chain, the "ingredients piece," which includes manufacturing and development of those things; and the third is how we get it all to the ops/distribution side. Connecting those three dots is my sphere of influence; I’ve made it my point in immerse myself in each of of those points. I’ve gotten pretty well-versed in operations side and how to run [a restaurant].

But when I left New York in 1990, I immersed myself in product development and manufacturing and helped bring some culinary influence to the commercial side of the retail food business. In the 80s when I started my own place, there just wasn't the availability of sophisticated items. Everything was value-added, saved-labor, as well as consistent, easy-to-use and convenient. Dijon mustard and jalapeno poppers were a big deal back then! (laughs)

I wanted to understand that business and perhaps influence it in some manner. I came up with several inventions and started a consulting company that touched millions of meals. I got to work with some really brilliant food scientists and launched products through R&D. The biggest names -- the Krafts and Con-Agras and Heinz, Nestlés... they all have amazing power for manufacturing. But distributing something more boutique, created by those who had the best products on the market, was a downfall for both the large and small companies for different reasons.

It sounds a lot like the triple-bottom line for sustainability that organizations like Entrepreneurs for Sustainability espouse. So putting those pieces together -- getting unique and boutique out to market in a larger way -- was is what's driven you in large part to explore the business side the way you have?

Yes, and it became clear there was no other way to starting Chef Express -- ChefEx -- as an antidote to the large distributor model. I figured it was an efficient way to bring small amounts of quality items to have access. The irony is that after two years of doing it, we sold [the business] it to SYSCO, which is who we were going after with our approach. They had what we did not have -- robust infrastructure, lots of customers. It became really clear to me at the time, to really move the needle, you had two ooptions -- start from scratch, raise lots of cash and be patient to build something meaningful, or go to the people who already have it and shift the paradigm, leverage critical mass in a meaningful way.

That's very different than the way most chefs would even bother to look at it... and certainly different than restaurateurs look at it. Knowing what I do, I decided I would not give away my intellectual property for a salary; I wanted to control the destiny of my business -- good or bad -- on my clock. It's driven us at Crop to a different way of operating; every recipe that we create here is an opportunity to be something more than just a couple plates a night or a week. Confidence in the ability to celebrate failure as much as success.

We hear a lot about sustainable food practices these days; everyone's going green including restaurants. What trend do you see taking hold beyond that one?

[Sustainability in food] is definitely here to stay, but so is the Molecular Gastronomy movement. where science is being used to enhance the culinary experience. Leveraging food science can actually improve quality. Our Lobster Latte is so good we use 2% milk in it, not cream and butter. [Editor's note: it sure tasted like butter and cream when I first had it!] The "functional starches" we use are not available in general marketplace, but they creates that creaminess but with 75% less fat than any traditional bisque.

That speaks to understanding the role that fat plays in food -- fat acts as carrier for flavor and gives us the mouth feel that we associate with lushness and satiation, but there's a point of diminishing returns. Fat will coat the palate and eventually fighting the other flavors. When other people talk about food at Crop, we always hear they can taste all the ingredients and that everything has own integrity... it's clean but satisfying food. By using 2% milk, light nuances of wine, tarragon and lobster opens up the palate opens up for other flavors to have their day in the sun. We use flavor extracts as well -- like with the mentholated habanero ice cream here [points to "Some Like It Hot" on the menu] with chocolate cake.

[Editor's note: "Some Like It Hot" is more than just a nod to the Tony Curtis flick -- it is a hot-food freak's dream with Warm Flourless Chocolate Cake, Mentholated Habanero Ice Cream, Mango-Lime Coulis and Citrus Tuile].

So you have an infused, denatured menthol cooling sensate -- an industrial ingredient mostly found in gums and candies -- balancing out the spice and heat of the habanero pepper. Everytime people eat it, they say never had experience like that. Cold temperature of ice cream, heat of habaneros. All melting away with a cooling effect, in a bizarre way. It's a different experience.

But I want to stress we're not doing frankenfood; quite the opposite. We're just approaching food with access to different natural ingredients and in a different way.

Talk about sustainability and the farm-to-plate movement -- is it the biggest trend in food today? And is it a fad or is it here to stay...?

It's here to stay. I'm just as passionate about ingredients as I am the creative side of things. With another arm of our company Local Crop we're moving closer to the point of usage with local ingredients. We use fresh ingredients and are helping the distribution channel in that regard. Think about what we were talking about earlier about boutique dishes and think the same way about local farmers -- they have the best ingredients, but no infrastructure or distribution channels to take advantage of that. So we're helping get that going locally.

The economic benefits of keeping dollar within a certain radius, the environmental upside of local food model and reducing fossil fuel are all enormously difficult when you're dealing with small farmers struggling just to manage their daily lives of fields tilled and harvesting. They don’t have the bandwidth or wherewithal to do anything other than roadside stands or a commodities auction. That's finite. As a chef, we want those local ingredients and want to keep them in town. It only makes sense.

And frankly, as romantic as buying and eating local sounds, it's not a Robert Frost poem we're talking about here. That romantic notion of strolling to farmer’s market with wicker basket and feeding 20 people with your take for that day is just not reality. And even if you're intending that, you just can't manage that kind of haul-in every day. With Local Crop, hopefully we can make some inroads for the farmers and restaurants alike to do the right thing and make it all easier in the process.

Trying to manage individual contact with 20 farmers pushes me to point whre it’s just totally impractical. And that's how it is for a lot of chefs. Not even to mention that the farmers may or may not have what you wanted or needed. It's a management nightmare to effectively manage that; with Local Crop, hopefully that's my legacy and the most powerful thing that we can do as a food community: to have and utilize a system where the Internet-enabled farmer’s market helps by empowering suppliers to participate in existing -– key word – business model that already has checks and balances for quality and logistics.

Sustainability concepts don’t mean shit if there aren’t sustainable business practices supporting them.

How do you come up with something like Pac Rim Popcorn, which is covered in veggies and slathered with hot sauce...?

Everyone says "Where’d you come up with that??" And I usually say "On drugs!" (laughs) Let's just say I've enjoyed a very free lifestyle and the oppoetunities to look at things abstractly -- all for the better. (laughs)

Actually, there's a legitimate explanation behind it: Sony Loews Theaters wanted to redo their theater menus; I spent a year creating movie theater food in one of my jobs in an attempt to make those foods more interesting. One of those creations was flavored butters. Long story short, after a year of testing, they went back to their usual ideas, but we kept at it.

That's our M.O. With a wealth of opportunity to be able to play and experiment, we arrive at the most rewarding thing about cooking. We never have a cookbook here, and if we do it's strictly for points of reference. You need to be able to take risks with food and also know what level of restraint you need in the process. We’ll never go all abstract [Jackson] Pollock at Crop -- it's all more of Dali with traditional Monet going on -- harmony, presentation.

So you really look at food like multi-layered art?

Visually, it has to be continuity, as well as flavor. A dish is a portfolio of memories and ingredient memories -- which hopefully get embedded in limbic core of your brain that captures aroma.

That’s how I cook. Intuitive. Physiological intuition of how things work together. Unencumbered creativity is why my guys are thrilled to come to work every day. It's interesting to have the background in food science, because having access to hundreds of products -- some widely available, some not -- empowers me to see the art of possibility in food. It's endless, equal to artist’s palate of colors where there are millions of greens and blues, with ingredients like pigments.

I envision and can visualize flavors. I can look at blank paper and populate menu items in a short period of time, all pulled from my historical database. It's whimsy that keeps me enjoying food.

And almost like photographic memory... so what are you currently testing in your kitchen right now?

We're launching eleven items with SuperTarget in the coming months and they'll be going to 250 SuperTarget stores. The recipes were all developed here and integrated and introduced customers here first. We figure test marketing for study is ludicrous.

We think that the unsoliticed choices made by patrons who are voting with their wallets and giving invaluable feedback is a much more real world situation. They tell us if they don't care for something, like something, or if they love it and want it again. That's a powerful inditator of products and what has an opportunity to succeed.

That sounds like the perfect way to success.

We don’t settle for less than perfection; the staying power that becomes the glue of rest is really the people here. The food can be the easy part in many ways, but the total package of delivery isn't always. But our set of standards are not negotiable.

Check out Crop's New Years Eve Prix-Fixe dinner celebration on Wednesday December 31 starting at 5:30PM. Details about that, Schimoler's wild menu, his live music nights at the bistro and more are available at http://www.cropbistro.com. And if he's there, try to say hi... he's one hell of a guy.

From Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian peterATcoolcleveland.com
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