Restaurant Profile: Pêche.Restaurant Debuts in Palisade

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.

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.”

The following morning he met with Grant Achatz and Chef de Cuisine Jeff Pikus who basically asked Chasseur what they needed to do to get him to relocate to Chicago. “It was a simple response on my behalf. I just needed a few hours to go and find an apartment and I needed a week to drive out to Chicago.”

Later that month on Sept. 25, Chasseur started working at Alinea. “[It was] the day precision, refinement, efficiency, tenacity, and push entered my life,” Chasseur says on the Pêche. Restaurant website. “Alinea polished my craft. Each day was spent taking a raw ingredient and pursuing countless ways to achieve the perfect balance of taste, texture, appeal, and shape, while never misleading from the integrity of its original form. Grant Achatz pushed me to chase my imagination.”

Chasseur spent six years in Chicago at Alinea before leaving at the top - as chef de cuisine - for personal reasons. That was in 2013. Two years later he became the executive chef at High Lonesome Ranch in De Beque, Colorado.

“Ashley and I finished up in Chicago and at that point we knew we were expecting our first child, so we decided to go and be close to our family and we would work on opening a restaurant,” he says. “We spent about a year and a half trying to put a project together, [but] we eventually got to the point where we realized that the dream we saw wasn’t going to come to fruition,” he says. “[Then] Ashley saw a posting for the ranch.”

Chasseur wasn’t completely unfamiliar with Colorado having interned at the Little Nell in Aspen during culinary school, but even though he agreed to fly out to High Lonesome Ranch, he had pretty much decided this wasn’t going to be the right place for him before he even got to the ranch. “I landed in Grand Junction and immediately thought that there was no way I was living in a desert.” But after getting to the ranch and seeing how things worked, and how different it was from Alinea (where, Chasseur says, there are 25 cooks with each one being responsible for one element) and how everyone was forced to wear many hats, he was pretty much sold on the job. Wanting to spend time together as a family and raise their kids helped with the decision. “That small town in the middle of nowhere gave us that opportunity.”

Which brings us to Pêche.

Chasseur says that he always wanted to open a restaurant, but Pêche is completely different from a restaurant he and Ashley would have opened five years previously. “We were striving for a three Michelin star, landmark restaurant,” he says. “Ashley and I are so happy it didn’t come to fruition.”

From the perspective of the food, the desire to serve the best plates possible remains, and local, seasonal produce is key to that. Chasseur says that it was his time at High Lonesome Ranch, driving from there to Grand Junction to pick up groceries for the restaurant, that revealed all of the people in the area who were taking the time to grow delicious food. It turns out that his time at HLR was sort of an unwitting five-year journey sourcing all the ingredients he would use in Pêche.

There is also a desire not to be restrained or pigeonholed by a particular type of cuisine, instead allowing creativity to flourish and ingredients to shine through, highlighted by the menu at the time of writing which includes both herb-basted lamb and jerk chicken, while a recent Facebook post informed everyone that the daily special that day would be poke made with ahi tuna that had arrived that day.

Moving forward through autumn, Chasseur says that the food is going to shift. “You’re going to see more confit items and more braises. We’re really going to move in that warm direction with fresh bread, more root vegetables,

more jams and preserves,” he says. Preserves and jams, in particular, are a good example of how Pêche proposes to support local farms throughout the year when there is no fresh produce available.

One thing that won’t be making a permanent appearance on the menu is seafood. Chasseur does bring in fish on pretty much a weekly basis, but it is a small amount with the goal of selling it out as soon as possible to ensure customers get the freshest seafood possible.

And even though Chasseur says that he and Ashley are glad that the landmark restaurant they previously wanted didn’t work out, don’t be mislead. Pêche is a fine-dining restaurant, at least in terms of the quality of the ingredients and the execution of the dishes, but you aren’t going to feel as if you are in a fine-dining restaurant. That is down to a general feeling you get from Chasseur that the restaurant, while dedicated to serving delicious dishes, should be a more holistic addition to the community it is in.

“I would say we are casual ... we’re not trying to do tasting menus or long, drawn-out dining experiences. We really want to drive home that this is a place to come and be comfortable,” he says. “Paired with delicious food.”

Then there are more practical considerations to running a restaurant that Chasseur has learned over the years, particularly at HLR. “I have been able to stop and truly look at all

aspects of not only cooking but running a business,” he says. “This is the first time during my culinary career that the numbers have become just as important as the food and service. The food, beverage and team can all be flawless, but without a sound financial operation, nothing is possible.”

That is perhaps where wife and coowner of Pêche Ashley Fees Chasseur comes in. Ashely brings an incredible restaurant pedigree to the venture, too, having worked at Alinea (which is where they met) as the hostess before eventually going on to become the assistant general manager at Next (another Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas venture) before moving to Colorado with Matt where she ran the front of house for the food and beverage team at The High Lonesome Ranch. Ashley eventually became the general manager of Josh Niernberg’s Tacoparty in Grand Junction before Pêche became a reality.

Kitchens, particularly of the type Chasseur made his name in, are notorious for being very high pressure environments, and so away from the food, Matt and Ashley are committed to making the environment at Pêche one that focuses on the wellbeing of the staff, including themselves, as much as possible.

“It took moving out to the Ranch and to Western Colorado, [and seeing and experiencing the millions of acres of public land] to realize that there is a way to have a professional career and to be able to enjoy life.”

And to make sure the staff have the time to enjoy what is on their doorstep, Pêche has two teams - one that prepares the restaurant for service and one that executes service. Chasseur says that translates into a happy staff and that in turn gives customers a better experience.

Pêche is currently open for dinner Tuesday to Saturday from 5 -9 pm and for Sunday brunch from 10 - 2 pm. Reservations are highly recommended.

Photos: Pêche.Restaurant