A REAL
Pêche
Matthew Chasseur and his wife Ashley opened Pêche.Restaurant in Palisade in August this year. We spoke to the New Hampshire-born head chef and co-owner about his culinary career and why he and Ashely decided to open a restaurant in rural Colorado With a resume that is pretty much as impressive as they come, it is more than a little surprising that Matthew Chasseur has ended up in little Palisade after a culinary journey of around 20 years that has seen him train and work in New Hampshire, New York, London and Chicago. Chasseur’s introduction to the world of food, real food that needed to be caught or grown, plucked, gutted or cleaned, began when he was a child in New Hampshire. “I came from a family that hauls its meals from the soil, the woods, and the waters of New Hampshire,” he says on the Pêche. Restaurant website. “My father often spent his autumns in the woods. In [the] days [that followed his return], we would get lessons on hanging and
aging the animal, the process of skinning, and the complete breakdown of all the different cuts.” Chasseur started his formal culinary career working for Michael Buckley, New Hampshire’s pioneer of high-end cooking, at his restaurant Michael Timothy’s when he was a sophomore in high school. This is where Chasseur says he learned the fundamentals of what it took to be a chef and restaurateur. From New Hampshire, his culinary pilgrimage took him to the Culinary Institute of America in New York City where he spent two years training before moving on to the Mandarin Oriental in London where he held a few positions during his two years there. It was here, he says, that he would be forced to utilize everything he had been taught. WESTOF105.COM
Leaving London, he moved back to New Hampshire where he spent the summer of 2007. Then in September of that year he got a call from friend Justin Albertson (who is now Chasseur’s sous chef at Pêche) that would change his life. Albertson told him about an opportunity at a restaurant in Chicago. That restaurant was Grant Achatz’s Alinea, a restaurant that since its inception in 2005 has been showered with awards including being awarded three Michelin stars from the venerable food guide every year since the guide’s inaugural edition in 2011. “September 10 I flew out to Chicago and did two days in the restaurant to feel it out and see what it was all about,” he recalls. “It took the first hour to know that this was the place I wanted to be.”
