Profile: Chef Chris Viaud

BUILDING THE NEW HAMPSHIRE HE WANTS TO SEE: A MORE DIVERSE AND FLAVORFUL PLACE FOR EVERYONE

BY BETH SANTOS

It’s a Saturday night and the Greenleaf, a seasonal farm-to-table fine dining restaurant in Milford, is bustling. Through a set of double doors, Chef Chris Viaud is managing a busy and exciting kitchen. He plates a dish of herb-crusted cod and sends it out into the dining room, the smells of basil and pancetta lingering as it leaves. Food is Chris’s happy place, and serving his community with new tastes they might not have explored yet isn’t just fun for him, it’s how he’s creating the New Hampshire he wants to live in.

Viaud, who is a first-generation Haitian American, moved to New Hampshire when he was 15. “In the Haitian community, you’re typically assigned your professional roles — either you become an engineer or a nurse, a doctor or a lawyer,” Viaud explains. When he told his parents that he wanted to become a chef, they were very supportive. Still, members of his family, especially his grandmother, had concerns. “They had that same mindset of what I need to be,” he said. “And they would ask, ‘can you make a career out of this?’”

Viaud didn’t just build a career; he created a legacy. He enrolled at Johnson & Wales to study culinary arts, worked for a number of high-end restaurants in Boston, moved to New Hampshire where he opened a bakery at the age of 28, and after that launched Greenleaf. In 2021, he was invited to “Top Chef,” Bravo TV’s long-running culinary competition, where he made it through nine rounds.

“I came back from ‘Top Chef’ with a whole new outlook on how I wanted to view myself as a chef and as a person. And it just really opened my eyes that there’s so much more to this industry than you’re led to believe. You don’t need to focus on French cooking, or Italian cooking, or Spanish cooking. There’s this whole global market of cuisines that have not yet been explored. And those of us who have the ability and opportunity and know-how to be able to promote our own culture, we should jump on that and be the beacon for this new emergence of dining,” Viaud explained. It was with this new-found

understanding that Viaud brought his family together for a completely new dining concept and his most personal restaurant venture yet, a Haitian restaurant called Ansanm that’s staffed by his own family.

“The original premise behind Ansanm was just bringing the family together and learning about the food that we grew up eating,” Viaud explained, citing that Ansanm is the Haitian Creole word for “together.” The restaurant truly is a family venture — his dad can often be found fixing and rebuilding things, his sister holds down the fort at Greenleaf managing marketing and administration, and at Ansanm, the person who runs the menu isn’t Viaud — it’s his mom. “She creates the menu, and then we scale the recipes she’s cooked at home for a larger quantity,” he explains.

Of course, working with his family has been full of exciting twists and turns. “For our first dinner, my family had to remind me that they don’t work in kitchens, and sometimes they don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve learned to be a little more calm and relaxed. I love seeing everybody excel and grow. And to be able to do this all together as a family is really the core of it always.”

Directing his culinary craft toward Haitian food is deeply personal, not just for Viaud, but for his whole family. “When my siblings and I were teenagers, we were sick of rice and beans and plantains and macaroni and cornmeal,” he laughs. “We’d say, ‘can we please just have pizza, grilled cheese and tomato soup?’ It wasn’t really until I started having these reflections of who I am that I realized that the best way to relate to somebody is through their upbringings. And part of that, of course, is the culinary history. Haitian food is so rich and diverse. Different regions and countries have brought so much to the table, and we’re just now finding those correlations between who brought what, at what time and how those flavors influenced the cuisine that we eat today.”

There was a time when Viaud shied away from the limelight, but he realizes that showing a deeper part of himself will give other chefs — and other people — the confidence to bring their whole selves into their work. “At first, I used to say I’m just another chef coming in to do what I love to do and cook. Then most recently, with the George Floyd murder and the protests that were taking place, that’s when I really started using my voice and sharing similar stories that you’ve heard all across the world where Black men or women had felt marginalized or treated unfairly,” Viaud explains. We have the ability to use our voice to make some change or embark some action. Now that I have had this exposure, I do think more critically about how I’m using my voice, how I’m using my opportunities to help promote that there are different cultures there in New Hampshire, that can be kind of learned from and respected, and that everybody deserves the right to be treated equally. I’m not speaking up for us, then who is?”

For Viaud, speaking up is just part of the solution — it’s also about cultivating that next generation of changemakers. “I want to be able to groom that next generation of chefs in this area that can say, you know what, it’s okay to be different, it’s okay to take our inspirations from our past experiences, and morph that into what we want to become,” Viaud says.

Despite his own efforts to make New Hampshire a more diverse and inclusive place, Viaud recognizes that there’s still a lot of work to be done. “Even reading the recent statistics, it’s kind of boggling to see where we stand. New Hampshire still has a long way to go in respecting everybody’s values, traditions and beliefs,” Viaud says. “But with more people that are willing to use their voice and their background to say, ‘We’re here, we’re part of your community. We’re not what you think we are,’ I think there’s a better opportunity for growth.”

It’s with that mindset that Viaud pushes forward, not just building new culinary creations, but inviting everyone to join him at the table and in a statewide dialogue. Change, he believes, first comes with ourselves.

“I would like to see a more diverse and inclusive New Hampshire. But that means that we need to have open hearts and minds to the possibility of other things and seeing what other cultures and other people are doing. Without anybody opening up and saying, ‘this is where what I hope the state becomes,’ then we have no opportunities for growth. It’s on people like me who are willing to make that jump and say, there is a chance for anybody to do anything. For me to say I own both an American restaurant and a Haitian restaurant, why can’t that be the dream?” 603