There’s a new chef in town…
Aslan is excited to welcome Adam Grossman to the team! An avid food enthusiast and long time chef– Adam comes to us with over 15 years of experience in the kitchen.
Adam started working in a kitchen at age 14, after his dad purchased a vegan pizza restaurant in Seattle. “It was a good intro to the industry for me” said Adam. Surprisingly enough, Adam’s skill for cooking didn’t exactly stem from his family. “My parents were [actually] horrible at cooking…So growing up I assumed that cooking was some mystic art that you had to study for years to understand…It wasn’t until I took Home Ec in the seventh grade, you know, actually sitting down with directions to figure out how things work together that I realized it’s not [that hard].”
“I always knew I wanted to cook”, says Adam. “Whether it was experimenting at home or taking all of the cooking classes I could get my hands on…Cooking is just about everything I’ve ever done“.
Adam was hooked. From seventh grade on, he dove into the world of cooking. “I had an amazing high school culinary program and my teacher there used to be the professor at Seattle Central for their culinary program. She taught most of the chefs around Seattle. She saw some promise in me and got me into one of the best restaurant’s in the city, which I was not ready for. They fired me within 10 weeks… That’s the only time I’ve ever lost a job.”
Things turned around quickly for Adam though, as he secured a position at Salty’s Waterfront in Seattle shortly after, where he stayed for 3 years. “They really taught me how to cook”, noted Adam, “it was just a crazy amount of volume…That’s when I learned that I could actually be good at this.”
By 19 years old Adam was hired on by a startup restaurant in Edmonds to run the kitchen and design an entire menu for organic wood-fired pizza. “That job was fun. A lot of responsibility for a 19 year old... I designed a really awesome crust and some good pizza recipes, but there’s only so far you can go with pizza you know” added Adam. “So after five years of cooking in a kitchen, I decided to go to culinary school”.
Adam attended La Cordon Bleu in Seattle. “It was so much fun” stated Adam. “The best part was at the end, you had to do an internship. The internship could be at any restaurant you wanted, as long as they made [food from scratch]. So I applied at wd~50 in New York, working for Wylie Dufresne doing molecular gastronomy in an actual Michelin-starred restaurant in Lower East Side Manhattan, and they let me in!”
“I worked in a basement for 12 hours a day. My entire station was the size of one sheet tray that I put over a sink because I was an unpaid intern– I was mostly getting in their way” laughed Adam. However, even as an unpaid intern, Adam recounted the experience positively. “I learned so much… we clarified our stock with a centrifuge to make transglutaminase, an enzyme that binds proteins. [Dufresne] called it ‘meat glue’” recalled Adam. “We [were constantly] mixing science and food to figure out what [we could] make.”
After completing his internship, Adam made the move back west, where he spent the next few years working in fine dining and Italian. He even made the move to Las Vegas at one point to cook, only to return 6 months later. “I just got burnt out” admitted Adam. “So I moved up to Bellingham to go to business school and quit cooking altogether.”
While attending business school Adam accepted a job as a chef for Bellingham Cider Co. “No matter what I did…The kitchen just kept drawing me back in, over and over” says Adam. It wasn’t long before he was asked to transition into the head chef role, a role which he would attempt to do while still attending school full time. Trying to balance a hefty work and school schedule, Adam eventually dropped his studies to pursue cooking full-time.
After working a year-long stint as Bellingham Cider Co.’s Head Chef, Adam now joins our team to assume the role of Kitchen Manager. “I want [Aslan] to be its own free-standing exciting venture” stated Adam. “You’re not [just] here for Aslan beer… I want people to get excited about coming in to eat our food…We have so many talented, passionate people in the kitchen who want to have fun with the food” added Adam. “If someone comes up to me with an idea for a new dish, we’re going to give it [an honest] try”.
The inspiration for a new dish? “Seasonality” says Adam. “Seasonality inspires my menu items as well as local sourcing. For example, we’ve been working on a new dish called the Oktoberfest Bowl. It was actually all Dex’s idea (line cook at Aslan), but we’ve been working together on the execution. The other day we fermented 60 lbs of apple kraut. It’ll be comfort food…heavy cheese sauces, mustard, cream…everything you crave”. Adam was right about that. The Oktoberfest bowl is an absolute culinary delight. Perfect for those crisp fall days when you’re craving a hearty and flavorful dish.
Since taking over the role of Kitchen Manager, Adam has already helped facilitate the introduction of five new menu items, including our most recent burger addition, the Aslan Bison Burger. This burger features our signature bison patty topped with Beecher’s cheese curds, HOSA aioli, Batch 15 caramelized onions, and arugula, all sandwiched between two sesame buns. An ingenious twist on some of our staple ingredients. To say we’re excited to see what he comes up with next would be an understatement.
Welcome to the team, Adam! We sure hope you’ll stay a while.
