Last week we posted the first part of our interview with Chef Tom Condron, Executive Chef and co-owner of The Liberty Gastropub in Charlotte, North Carolina. This week we’ve got the rest of our conversation with Tom where we touched on some things like why he’s grown to like pairing his dishes with beer, some general cooking questions and what challenges he faces as a professional chef cooking for his own family.

PJ: When I was here for the mango event a couple of weeks ago, you made a comment about pairing food and you talked about wine, but you also said these days you actually look forward more to pairing things with beer. Given that this is a Gastropub, tell me a little more about why you would rather pair with beer than wine these days?

TC: I tell you this is shocking to me to tell you the truth. I mean I’m in my late 40s and I grew up like most young kids sneaking beers – and not very good ones. Then when I got into the industry my family was very much into buying, storing, and selling wines. And later in my early 20s I really fell in love with wines and through the next 20 years my whole life revolved around food and wine.

Being a chef and in doing thousands upon thousands of wine dinners I would always kind of grunged if one of my managers said “Hey, Chef, can we do a beer dinner?” I’d be like “You’re crazy, nobody wants to come to a beer dinner”. Who wants to sit down and drink five different beers with the five different courses? I’ve done a few in my past life and I didn’t particularly like it all that much.

Then when we opened up this restaurant and we decide to go Gastropub the key component of the whole thing was beer. That’s really what Gastropubs are surrounded around – good food, good beer. And the great thing about it is that America leads the craft beer industry. America has started revolution in the world of beer making more than Europeans have. The Europeans have always had good beer, but the Americans with the craft movement have really taken things to the next level.

I guess I was lucky because when I got to do the Gastropub is when this craft movement really started taking over, and it’s really fantastic. All these beers now that you taste are incredible. The nuances of these flavors you can really pull it out. I’ve been drinking wine forever and I think I have a pretty good palate. I know what I like and I know what I don’t like. I’m always willing to try things, but I can’t pull out the different nuances of wine that some people can by any means. I can pair wine with food. I can do a pretty good job at that, but the beers, you can really taste the flavors in these beers. And not only you can really taste flavors in these beers but they really go great with food because of what these beers are made with and how these craftsmen are brewing things with different herbs and different berries, and different woods, I mean it’s amazing.

In my opinion beer lends itself to food as well as wine does, especially these crafted beers and it’s really fun to do it. In the day that we live in now you can’t open up the local paper and not see 12 – 15 wine dinners in one week going on. Because everybody is trying to do something to bring in guests and there’s a lot of talented, creative chefs out here in Charlotte that are trying to do this all the time. But you don’t really see a lot of beer dinners. You will, though, I think down the road in the next five years.  It’s possible that beer dinners will maybe surpass wine dinners.

You can take the most highly crafted allocated beer that there is and still serve anywhere from a 10 to 16 ounce portion for $6. You can’t take a highly allocated glass of wine that’s out there that’s really high-end and sell it for even close to $6 –it’s going to be anywhere from $15 to $25 dollars. So, you could take a Bell’s Hopslam, one of the most highly allocated beers out there, get it in and you could serve it for $6-8 in a restaurant and have one of the best beers produced in the country.

PJ: You guys have done a lot of beer dinners. Recently, the Southern Tier introduction in North Carolina. How has it gone as far as how they’ve been received?

TC: Good. Southern Tier is out of New York, a brewery that’s been doing really good beer for a very long time and finally has had the opportunity to come here to North Carolina. We did their roll out. The craft beer movement is big; it’s really very, very big. Bigger than I ever thought it was and beer lovers out there are just insane about their beer. It’s just like wine lovers out there and what they are saying about their wines. People will go anywhere and everywhere to try beers that they have not tried. We’re very lucky that Matt, my business partner, is so into beers and is one of these beer lovers. He brings in the most unique beers and he’s always searching for something more and unique. At the same time we still stay true to what we’re doing and we still have PBR on, but next to the PBR will have one of the hardest to get beers as well.

PJ: A couple of general cooking questions, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. Talk to me about salt; specifically sea salt versus kosher salt. Do you have a preference?

TC: Sea salt, I cook pretty much everything with sea salt. Kosher salt, you know, we use Kosher salt if I’m going to season short ribs before I sear them. The reason is, is that it’s going to cook for such a long period of time. Sea salt I use it when I’m sautéing fish or pan searing meat and chicken. Sea salt is natural. Kosher salt is natural in a sense, but additives are added to Kosher salt. There’s nothing they do to sea salt other than dry it and harvest it.

Now, some sea salt they do smoke it and add some things to it to give it a different taste and profile. I’m not into that stuff. I like good sea salt and with sea salt there are the many different grades. There’s sea salt that is basically used for your everyday cooking, then there’s flake sea salts that are for finishing dishes.

There’s nothing better than searing something and monte buerring (basting with butter), then putting it on the plate and finishing it with a little bit of sea salt. Salt makes you salivate; it opens up your palate and tells you something good is coming. It enhances the food.

Kosher salt has its place. Iodized salt has its place in baking and that’s about it. You can also get into all kinds of different things like this salt made in Hawaii that’s got lava flavor in it from the volcanoes. Good stuff, but give me maldon sea salt from England any day, I’m good with that.

PJ: Duck fat. I’ve got to ask you about duck fat. I said to someone that I had just bought some duck fat to make some duck fat potatoes and I also made rillette after I had your duck rillette here. A friend of mine just went off me about how bad it is. Everything I’ve read says that duck fat is very similar to olive oil. Is that accurate?

TC: Yes, it is. I mean duck fat is — and it’s like anything else. It’s all moderation. Duck fat is a cleaner fat, it’s not as bad for you as lard or beef fat. So it’s a healthy fat, but it’s something that you don’t want to consume every single day. And that to me is the great thing about food; everything is great in moderation. For those people that won’t eat something because of dietary restrictions or concerns that’s totally up to them. To me I’m a person that wants to try everything and eat everything, but, again, it’s all in moderation. To me duck fat rules. If I had the opportunity I would cook everything in duck fat. If I had cholesterol that was sub zero I would eat everything with duck fat.

PJ: OK, last question. Since this is for Digital Dads, as a professional chef which challenges do you have cooking for your own family?

TC: Well, I have probably have the biggest challenge because my mother-in-law, who lives with us, is Italian and is probably the best chef in our household. Her food is absolutely incredible. So, like most dad’s out there that have the opportunity to have their mother-in-law live with them, I would say that I have a bonus because I have a top notch chef that lives with us. Sunday suppers at my house are absolutely out of control for sure.

Other than that, as a chef everyone always say to your wife that “Oh, you must be so lucky because you’re husband is a chef.” I think that chef’s wives are the unluckiest wives because a chef is always in the kitchen in their restaurant and hardly ever home cooking. So, most have to be like most wives out there. They struggle to get the food on the table as well because all our time is pretty much spent in the kitchen, and not a home kitchen.

Since it is Father’s Day weekend I thought it would be fun to profile a chef who is also a father of three. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Chef Tom Condron, the Executive Chef and co-owner of The Liberty Gastropub here in Charlotte.

I’ve written about The Liberty a number of times from my first experience at one of Tom’s cooking classes to making his Chorizo and Chocolate Crostini for an episode of Digital Dads in the Kitchen.

Here is a little background on Tom from The Liberty’s website:

Tom has been in the restaurant business since he was fourteen, working at the famed Dorchester Hotel in England. He has worked for eight Michelin starred chefs throughout his career. He is University of Florida Graduate, and later attended Johnson & Wales. He went on to work at such restaurants as Le Cirque, Jean Louis @ the Watergate, Aqua Restaurant in San Fransisco, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Restaurant, the Peabody Hotel in Orlando and the Blue Ridge Grill in Atlanta. He joined the Harper’s Restaurant Group as Executive Chef for Mimosa Grill in 1997, and would come to open many of Charlotte’s best restaurants.

PJ Mullen: Tom, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate you taking time out to talk with me today. I’ve got a few questions for you, but first of all for those who don’t know, what is exactly is a Gastropub?

Chef Tom Condron: The term Gastropub was coined probably about 1985. It started out in Clerkenwell in London and some chefs who had all the Michelin restaurants decided that they were little tired of trying to keep up with the struggle that it is to be a Michelin chef, and the money has to be spent into it just to maintain and to gain more stars. They were British boys and they grew up in the pubs. The pub food in England back in that era was pretty much your typical pub fair. Good beer, not very good food, but most people didn’t go to the pub really to eat.

They decided that they wanted somewhere where they could go and have really good food, really good drink but at a more affordable price than you would pay to go to a Michelin starred restaurant. So, they took over an old freestanding pub and made it into what became The Eagle. Was it the first one? I don’t know, but it was definitely the one that put Gastropub’s on the map.

They started out producing really good food at really good price point with really good beers, and it really caught on.  Now people from all walks of life could go and eat well and drink at affordable prices. It took off all throughout England and then all of a sudden some of the other big chefs got into it – the Gordon Ramsay’s of the world, the Marco Pierre White’s of the world; all of them got into to putting up Gastropub’s because not only was it affordable from the cost standpoint of opening a restaurant, but it was also something that you could give affordability to your patrons as well.

PJ: Now, you were with the Harper’s Restaurant before you opened The Liberty, what drove you to open The Liberty?

TC: The Harper’s group is great. I came on board in 1998 with the job of turning the Mimosa Grill into a fine dining restaurant. From that point, we started to grow the company before I left to five fine dining restaurants: Mimosa, Upstream, Zink, Arpa and M5. I absolutely loved it. It was a great learning experience to open up different concepts at the high-end, but it was all high-end.

To be really honest, I was tired of serving a $38 seabass on a plate just to try to make ends meet and make the food costs work and serving a $16 house wine by the glass. I couldn’t afford that when I would go out to eat and lot of people couldn’t afford that when they go out to eat, either.

My perspective on what should go on in the restaurant business changed. I really wanted to do my own place and do it where it’s affordable and approachable to the guests. Most people thought we are crazy to open up at the time when we opened, but we decided that we wanted to open the restaurant and try to give Charlotte a Gastropub.

PJ: Now, when you’re creating a dish, where do you draw your inspiration?

TC: You know it’s funny, Jean-Louis Palladin once told me when I worked with him that you’ll be in your late 30s, or even in your 40s, before you realize what type of chef you really want to be. Of course when I was in my early 20s, I thought he was full of baloney, but he’s absolutely right. I think the older you get, the more simplistic you become and with what you want to do. You no longer want to try to change the world and reinvent everything anew. You want things very simple, very pure. So, my inspiration is definitely to simplicity.

In the Gastropub, because of the price point that I sell my food at, it does limit me in the sense that I’m not going after that high-end, very expensive center of the plate item like a filet mignon, or even lobster as a signature thing. I’m not looking to put on something that I would need to sell in the high 20s or even in the 30s just to make the food costs work. The inspiration comes because now you’re using product like pork belly or shanks. Things that are not unfamiliar to the American palate, but are not the items that when most people think about when they’re going out to eat.  Most people go out to eat and they want to eat salmon or filet mignon.  They want lobster – higher end things because that’s what people are accustomed to eating.

The inspiration also comes by procuring really high-end quality product. Our pork is locally grown and raised; our beef is locally grown and raised. A good portion of our produce is locally farmed and organic and has very low carbon footprint. We’re not trying to make a statement here that we’re ecological, sustainable, local and everything. We’re not trying to make that statement. I think we let the food show that that’s what we do, but we’re really looking to do is to get the people back into eating good food and good food that’s affordable.

Also, teaching cooks to get back into cooking and to really enjoy what they’re doing. I’ve got a lot of young cooks here who still want to work with all the outlandish, but great ingredients that are out there, and we try to provide some of that to them, still I want them to become good cooks first. Then after that they can experiment and become who they’ll become 20 years from now.

PJ: Speaking of locally, you recently planted your own herb garden so some of your ingredients in your dishes are as local as they could be. How has that worked out for you?

TC: Oh great. You know there’s nothing better than being able to walk out and cut fresh herbs and use them that night and then the next day cut fresh herbs and use them that night again. We had a space and wanted to grow something, so we popped it in there.

We outsource a lot of our local stuff here. I have two farmers from whom I buy a lot of my basic ingredients on the menu. They grow a lot of fresh herbs for me. They’ve got a small little half-acre of land where everything they grow we will buy. And it’s all the herbs and everything. Stuff that I know that we used on a regular basis day in and day out and you want that to be as fresh as possible. I can get that four times a week versus buying it through other procurement sources, which is a week, two weeks old already by the time we get it. But we had a little spot we wanted to do something nice and aesthetically it looks good.

PJ: I’ve been to a couple of your cooking classes and I always have a great time at them. One of the things you said that really stuck into my mind is that good food takes time. And you talked a little about the slow food movement. Is that a part of the driver in using some of the lesser known cuts of meat for the main proteins in your dishes?

TC: I guess the upside to doing the Gastropub is like I said earlier that we have to do cuts of meat that are at a more affordable price point. Nowadays not much is inexpensive, most cuts are getting expensive, but because we have to use cuts that are working muscle meats they are better cuts to begin with. They are always more flavorful with a better fat to meat ratio. However, because they’re working muscles, most items are not something that you can just roast, quick sauté, or grill like a filet mignon. So, they need some time to be able to do correctly and a lot of that is slow, slow cooking. Either by slow roasting or braising to really enhance and bring out the flavors of these meats.

Filet mignon is a beloved meat not only in America but in England and pretty much worldwide, but the funny thing about filet is that it is very flavorless piece of meat. I did a cooking class last night and I showed people how to pan roast filet mignon to really get a good glaze on it – keep a liquid in it while it’s searing to keep it moist and how to get a good crust to form on it. Then you can get some good quality and good flavor out of a filet. But, to put a filet mignon on a grill and cook it in 12 minutes like most restaurants do to get it up to a medium rare temperature you don’t put a lot of flavor into it.

Even if you are using wood and hickory it’s not on the grill long enough to pick up the flavor. So, again, it’s a very tender piece of meat on a plate but it lacks depth and character in my opinion, whereas a braised piece of meat of working muscles, slow cooked and slow roasted you can really taste the work.  Done right, you can really taste the passion and the love that somebody has put into it in cooking it.

PJ: I definitely agree with you on that one. When I was just out in the work force as a young professional I always wanted to go somewhere where I could get filet during business dinners. It wasn’t until I started really exploring cooking myself and started braising beef short ribs that I decided I would never order tenderloin again.

TC: It’s always great to watch the young cook when they first braise something for the first time and you watch their eyes when they take in the whole process. It’s not something like putting a piece of meat on a grill and grilling it, then 15 minutes later it’s off the grill and you plate it before it goes out into the dining room. When they finish that dish they’ve had to prepare and monitor throughout the day, you could just see the light go off on their heads and that’s one of those things I think really changes these cooks. I don’t know if the culinary schools really teach that, as much I think that’s something that they really learn when they’re in the restaurant business.

Come back next week for the second part of my talk with Chef Tom Condron, Executive Chef and Co-Owner of The Liberty Gastropub.