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[SIDE DISH]
Chris Ladley Learned How to Cook Through Grit and Google Written by
CHERYL BAEHR Editor’s Note: We encourage all readers to order carryout or delivery from Nudo House today and in the coming days as a measure of social distancing due to COVID-19. Nudo House works with Postmates for delivery and also offers easy and efficient carryout services.
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hen Chris Ladley thinks back on what he learned about cooking from his parents, he realizes that each taught him an important side of food. After his mom and dad divorced when he was six, his time with each of them seemed to center around the kitchen. At his mom’s house, his culinary education was all about resourcefulness. Because money was tight, he watched in amazement while she repurposed dishes multiple times or made a big batch of cheese sauce for the week because it was cheaper than opening a box of Kraft. If his mom’s house was about learning to stretch a budget, his dad’s was about ingredients and technique. The pair would get inspired by classic cooking shows together — including Julia Child’s The Frugal Gourmet — and would head out to the store to buy ingredients so they could recreate what they saw in their home kitchen. His experiences with his dad taught him about technique and higher-end ingredients — something he felt that rounded out what he learned with his mom. “I like to joke that I learned one hundred things to do with a can of green beans from my mom,” Ladley laughs. “We learned to repurpose and made a game out of it. At my dad’s, we’d go out and get shallots and cut them with his Henckels knives. There, it was all technique and higher-end stuff. I think it was the perfect yin from my mom and
Chris Ladley leads the kitchen at Nudo House in the Delmar Loop. | TRENTON ALMGREN-DAVIS yang from my dad.” As chef at the Delmar Loop location of Nudo House (6105-A Delmar Boulevard, 314-370-6970), Ladley uses the skills he learned as a kid on a daily basis. However, he also draws upon the trial-by-fire training he got while working at his first restaurant job. As a teenager, he was hired at Uncle Bill’s Pancake House in south county as a busser and was regularly scheduled to work the Sunday “post-church” shift, an experience he describes as positively brutal. Though he was exclusively front of house at first, his job description drastically changed during an overnight shift he just happened to pick up. “One night, I picked up the third shift — the overnight drunk shift — and was bussing when a couple of cooks went out to go on a beer run. They never came back because they had warrants and got arrested. One guy in the kitchen threw me an apron and said to me, ‘You make pancakes and bacon.’” Ladley continued to work at Uncle Bill’s throughout most of high school until he left the industry to work for a local disc jockey company. For five days out of the week, it was his job to entertain people, or as he says, “throw the best party in town.” This led to jobs as a bouncer and eventually working in nightclubs — one of which led him back into the restaurant business. “I was working at a nightclub on South Broadway, and one of the partners had a restaurant space in Bevo that just didn’t work out for him,” Ladley says. “He asked if I wanted to take it over, and I said, ‘Sure.’ Instead of hiring
someone, I decided to run the kitchen. It was definitely a case of not knowing anything so we tried everything.” That bar and grill, the Wicked Lady Pub, was a rapid-fire education in every aspect of owning a restaurant. Half of the equipment didn’t work, the heater and air conditioner didn’t work, and the roof was so bad that if it was snowing outside, it was snowing in the kitchen. Ladley rolled with the punches, though, and in the process also learned how to create menus and make some seriously good food. “I learned through Google,” he says. “If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. I wasn’t going to use pre-made pizza shells, so I looked up an easy pizza shell recipe. If we didn’t like the way something turned out, we tweaked it. There were a lot of happy accidents and a lot of friends helping who allowed us to learn as we went and not fall flat on our faces.” The Wicked Lady Pub had a good run but shut down when business in the overall neighborhood declined, Ladley says. He knew that he wanted to keep cooking, so he reached out to chef Gerard Craft, explaining that, though he’d never gone to culinary school, he had a wealth of experience and a work ethic that would make him a good member of the team. Craft gave him a job, and Ladley worked in various positions throughout Craft’s restaurant group before leaving the country to work in France, where he fell even further in love with cooking. After returning from France, Ladley landed the chef position at Herbie’s. Although he admits he didn’t think he
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would get hired, he rose to the challenge and learned what it was like to run a large-scale restaurant. From there, he went on to work at the Block and then Quincy Street Bistro. After that restaurant closed, he again found himself working for Craft at Sardella before getting the offer to run the now-shuttered Snax Gastrobar in Lindenwood Park. “The food was great; the staff was cool,” Ladley reminisces. “The neighborhood was great. We got to see people bring their kids into the place in wagons, walking up from their homes. We were so proud of the place, but things just weren’t there.” Following Snax’s closure, Ladley was contacted by his friend, Qui Tran, about coming to work for him and his partner, Marie-Anne Velasco, at Nudo House in Creve Coeur. The restaurant was an immediate and roaring success and eventually expanded to include a second location on Delmar Boulevard. Now, Ladley runs the kitchen at that location, thrilled to be in a position where he gets to spend his days making people happy and doing what he loves. “I feel like, growing up where going out to eat wasn’t something we always got to do, I learned not to take it for granted,” Ladley says. “That’s why I love to make others happy when they come into the restaurant. Cooking and taking care of people — now that I have a chance to do it, it’s a real trip.” Ladley recently took a break from the kitchen to share his thoughts on the St. Louis food and beverage scene, the one ingredient never allowed in
MARCH 18-24, 2020
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