Community Spotlight: Decatur TO THINE OWN CHEF BE TRUE Kevin Gilliespie sets his sights on Decatur with Revival

By Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish.com

Celebrity chef Kevin Gillespie squints in the spotlight.

The former “Top Chef” contestant has a brand. He has a following. He plans to lend Decatur some of that brand when he opens Revival, hopefully by this summer. It isn’t another restaurant with Gillespie’s name attached, he said. He hopes it will be something special.

Gillespie, 32, always just wanted to be a chef. It’s what he’s wanted to be from the time he was a boy growing up in Locust Grove, Ga. He’d watch cooking shows on PBS and follow his grandmother Geneva –he calls her “granny” – around the kitchen. His parents were taken aback when he told them he saw cooking as a career path.

“People weren’t just saying chef a lot back then, so I think they were a little bit surprised,” he said.

Surprised but not opposed. They fed his passion, taking him to visit a culinary institute while on vacation. That was beginning. The journey is far from finished.

Following the call

Gillespie grappled with the idea of a culinary career throughout his formative years. While his family was supportive, they made it clear he’d have to carve his own way.

“Poverty was a very real thing for us, so my parents told me from a very young age that if I wanted to go to college I had to make that happen on my own,” he said. “I worked really hard in school and was accepted to a very prestigious university, and that was the plan. I was going to go there. I had my way paid by another company here in the state. At the end of high school, in the 11th hour moment, I told everyone I wasn’t going to do it. My heart was in cooking and in food and that I was going to try that.

That prestigious school was MIT where he planned to pursue a degree in nuclear engineering. He didn’t freely offer that information and it doesn’t appear in his official biography.

“I generally don’t put on record, because I don’t like to boast about it. I think it’s a bit boastful,” the celebrity chef said.

He began his formal education at the Art Institute of Atlanta and eventually became the chef de cuisine at Woodfire Grill, working for chef Michael Tuohy.

Tuohy remembers his protégé as a young man with a gift.

“I knew before I hired him that he was a bright person and had a great attitude, and I didn’t know how talented he was until after I brought him on and started working with him,” Tuohy said. “He’s a super talent with great passion and has always had it.”

Top Chef

Tuohy is originally from Sacramento, Calif., and after decades of immersion in Southern culture, he decided it was time to move back home. Gillespie had relocated to Portland in 2006 with his mentor’s blessing. The young chef spent his time in Oregon learning the business side of running a restaurant without compromises and got a glimpse into a scene where people had a connection with where their food was grown and raised. But he was also homesick.

When Tuohy decided to sell, the new buyers gave Gillespie the opportunity to be the chef and run it. It was during this time that Gillespie got his first taste of failure.

He set about reshaping Woodfire based on his vision, making it more of a reflection of Southern cuisine. What he forgot was that for many years Woodfire was the vision of his mentor and for many customers, the chef’s departure signaled the end of their favorite restaurant.

There were nights with many empty tables. He said one night there were only two people in the restaurant. It wasn’t that the food was lacking. Gillespie notes that he was getting decent reviews.

“But we had an empty dining room and could not pay our bills,” he said. “We were all leveraged out. Lo and behold, in February 2009 I got a phone call from the producers of ‘Top Chef.’”

Gillespie said he was initially reluctant to do the show.

“But I had so much interest in not seeing my first time out of the gate fail,” he said. “What does a 25 year old kid have to lose to a certain degree other than pride and reputation? I agreed to do ‘Top Chef.’

It turns out it was the best decision I ever made.”

What is reality?

Reality can take on a new meaning when someone sticks a camera in front of it. Filming began that year and Gillespie said some things about the show were quite accurate.

“What I believed to have been very real were those times when we were in the kitchen,” he said. “When the clock began and when the clock ended, that was real. That’s not staged. That’s not forced. That pressure. The intensity. That’s the part that is absolutely unadulterated and real.”

Other aspects of the show were the inevitable result of sticking people in tense, high pressure situations.

“We were put in scenarios where they could predict the outcome,” Gillespie said. “Forced reality? Maybe. Scripted? No. But the truth of it is, when you put 17 alpha personalities in a house together and you take away their ability to make personal decisions. … When you put people in that kind of mental duress, people start reacting to minutiae. No one should lose their mind over their eggs being scrambled the wrong way.”

He finished filming the show and went back to work at Woodfire where business was still slow. Then the show debuted in August.

“I was in absolutely no way prepared mentally for the way my life was going to change,” Gillespie said.

The “Top Chef” contestant became a fan favorite, winning quickfire and elimination challenges in front of millions of viewers.

Or, as his mentor Tuohy put it, “He just kicked ass.”

On fire

It gave his business a nice kick, too. Suddenly Woodfire was running out of reservations and booked up for months.

“In one night our lives changed and we went to a restaurant that couldn’t accommodate how many people wanted to come into it,” Gillespie said.

The attention also brought its share of headaches. Gillespie said he’s received boxes of hate mail from viewers. He still gets it, he says.

His wife and friends tell him to shrug it off. Sometimes he can’t let it go. When your life’s work is your career, the critiques cut a little deeper.

Gillespie said doesn’t want to sound ungrateful. He realizes that having a high profile helps far more than it hurts.

“I’ve been given a gift,” he said. “We use my name and my face and my brand – as weird as it is to say that – to ensure these restaurants stay full. I’ve learned to play the game, because there is a game to it. Even when it stings, there are people who would give their f---in’ left arm to be in the situation I’m in.”

Roots Gillespie left Woodfire in 2012 to create a restaurant that was distinctly his own. In 2013 he opened Gunshow, a freewheeling dining concept with an ever-changing menu that puts customers closer to the kitchen. According to the website it was, “Inspired by Brazilian churrascaria-style dining and Chinese dim sum.”

There’s a certain defiance in its aesthetic and its insistence on disruption of the traditional flow of the restaurant.

Gillespie’s next step will in some ways be a step back, to the dinner table on Sunday where his family shared meals that were not to be missed. There’d be a main entree and plates filled sides that the family would pass around as they ate.

“You would’ve had to have been in the hospital to get out of these meals,” Gillespie said. “It was a priority. It remained a priority forever.”

That tradition became the basis for the idea behind Revival. Gillespie hopes to open in the old Harbour House space on Church Street in June. He said it will be the kind of experience you’d get if you were a lucky guest at the Gillespie family table, one that is deeply personal. It will reflect his belief that one of the key ingredients of Southern culture is in dangerously short supply. He said he couldn’t think of a restaurant in Atlanta that honored the cooking traditions his grandmother kept.

“I couldn’t think of a single place that you could go and it made me really sad,” he said. “It made me really worried. Something that’s really important to Southern culture is our food ways.”

Until recently, he couldn’t find the space for the Revival concept. He had been working on another project, a barbecue restaurant called Terminus City. In addition to Revival, Gillespie also plans to open up a secondary concept in the restaurant’s patio space called Communion Wine.

“I have a hard time with the current world we live in and how detached I think that we are from one another a lot of the time,” Gillespie said. “I like the idea that people will have an opportunity to sit with their neighbors and share something that brings them together. This is not forcing strangers into an interaction they can’t handle. It’s saying, sit around the table. Share some drink. Share some atmosphere.” Gillespie will save Decatur a seat.