SANFORD RESTAURANT’S JUSTIN APRAHAMIAN DRIVEN BY DETAILS
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
June 3 2014
Beard Award-winning chef learned from mentors, created his own flavors
By Nancy J. Stohs of the Journal Sentinel
In the end, it came down to a white anchovy.
Justin Aprahamian was working as a dishwasher for a high-end restaurant
and attending culinary school. He wanted to be a chef — that he
knew. But the picky eater was still very much in play.
The picky eater who carefully extracted each tiny bit of diced onion
from his father’s homemade spaghetti sauce. The child who wouldn’t
touch certain foods.
His mother, Nancy Aprahamian, still teases her son, the celebrated
chef-owner of Sanford Restaurant, about the call she got one day
from his KinderCare teachers. Little Justin had thrown up and was
“very sick.” She wasn’t buying it.
“Did you make him eat applesauce?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“He’s not sick,” she told them. “He doesn’t eat applesauce.”
Fortunately, Steven Wade Klindt, owner of Steven Wade’s Cafe in New
Berlin, was more persistent with his young employee. “You want to
be a chef, right?” he challenged him when he balked at the tiny fish
offered him. “Then you have to taste everything.”
So he took a bite of the anchovy.
“And it was awesome,” Aprahamian recalled. From then on, he said,
he tried anything.
His resistance was understandable — after all, he was just 16,
having finished high school a year early. And last month, Aprahamian
became Wisconsin’s youngest chef to earn a James Beard Award. At 30,
he won Best Chef-Midwest for his work at Sanford, which he bought
from its founder, Sandy D’Amato, and his wife, Angie, in December 2012.
Aprahamian still expresses surprise at his good fortune, especially
his coveted medal, which a few weeks ago was still sitting on the
pool table in his east side living room, waiting to be framed.
Winning the award was a surreal moment, he said. His mom said they
had to tell him when his name was announced at the awards ceremony
in New York, “Justin, that was you.”
“It’s weird to even be on the radar, here in Milwaukee,” he said.
But those who know him suggest an inevitability to it all. And they
will tell you there’s a lot more to the young chef and restaurateur
than the food he serves his well-heeled diners.
Cooking was his thing from way back.
“I helped my mom in the kitchen a lot,” he recalled in a recent
interview. “I went to farmers markets with her, I helped her make
Christmas cookies.”
He also spent hours at a time making traditional Armenian dumplings
with his dad (whose grandfather had emigrated from his homeland to
escape the genocide) and other Armenian specialties, including a
holiday bread called gatah that his mother said takes all day to make.
“He would thrive on all-day projects,” Nancy Aprahamian recalled. “The
putzier, the more ingredients, the better. He’s definitely into
detail.”
He got his food service start “as a lad of 12,” he said, when he
helped his uncle cater a corporate party at the zoo. He spent the
day assembling fruit kebabs.
“I got done, and I couldn’t believe I got paid to do that,” he said.
After that, he was a regular helper.
A passionate student
After finishing at New Berlin Eisenhower High School, he enrolled
immediately in the culinary management program at Waukesha County
Technical College while working at Steven Wade’s.
“I remember him as being probably one of the most passionate
students…I think I ever had,” said retired culinary instructor James
Holden. “He was not challenging to have as a student, but you needed
to keep him challenged. I’d say, ‘OK, see what you can do with this.’
I wanted him to be creative, and he never missed the mark.
“I think if he got one or two wrong on a quiz or exam, that was it. He
pretty much aced everything.”
As Aprahamian’s two years there came to an end, Holden encouraged
him to “put on a sport coat and dress shoes and just go meet Sandy”
D’Amato. By that time, Klindt, Aprahamian’s first mentor, had died
of cancer. “I’m sure he’ll recognize your passion,” Holden said
of D’Amato.
Aprahamian did as instructed, knocking on Sanford’s back door, and
after an interview was hired on the spot — at 18 — as a prep cook.
D’Amato remembers him that day as a “well-mannered young kid that
I had a good feeling about. He had a good attitude. He wanted to
learn….I could tell he was someone you’d want to be friends with.”
“I think very quickly Sandy realized what he had there and he nurtured
him and brought him along,” Holden said. “I know Justin was just as
pleased as all heck to be there.”
‘An obsessive researcher’
Ralph Selensky has been a server at Sanford since the beginning. In
fact, he started working with D’Amato in 1981, then at John Byron’s
restaurant.
“Justin could be Sandy’s son,” Selensky said when asked to compare
his two bosses. “Stylistically, they’re very similar.”
But D’Amato points out one indisputable difference. “Justin’s an
obsessive researcher, he’s very organized,” he said.
This is evident to anyone who visits the Aprahamians’ home a few
blocks from the restaurant. His collection of more than 1,500 vinyl
LPs fill bookshelves in their dining room. They’re alphabetized by
artist, lined up chronologically and are even cataloged. He also has
1,000 CDs on shelves in their bedroom.
He collects beer bottles and all things Lowenbrau, a hobby born out
of a childhood spent going to flea markets with his parents.
They share space with his “ridiculous cookbook collection,” as he
calls it, organized on bookshelves (made by his dad) lining three
walls of their living room.
One of the first food books he bought was “Larousse Gastronomique,”
the encyclopedic tome of French cuisine. “Steve (Wade Klindt) would
give me a word to look up each night, and then we’d discuss it the
next day,” he said.
Aprahamian’s favorite books now include “The French Laundry Cookbook,”
“Culinary Artistry” by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page and “Made in
Italy: Food and Stories” by Giorgio Locatelli.
And since 2005, when he became sous chef, he’s saved every single menu
from Sanford. Each one is dated and in order, stored in a series of
binders. He also has more than a dozen spiral notebooks containing
all of the recipes he’s developed, all handwritten.
Bringing his own flavors
To his credit, Aprahamian has “kept the things that were Sanford,
Sanford,” said Selensky, while bringing his own touches to the
restaurant.
Beer is one of those touches. Sanford’s beer list used to fill
half a page. Under Aprahamian, it’s grown to two full pages, and it
includes mainstream brews starting at $3.50 a glass up to cellared
beers topping off at $200.
“Beer always just seemed more accessible to me,” Justin said. “Wine
so long for me was intimidating.”
Collaborating with John Lavelle and Hinterland Brewery in Green Bay,
he’s just brewed his first beer, a rhubarb beer in the Belgian saison
style. Called Serre (French for “greenhouse”), it was served at a
dinner at Sanford on Monday night.
That project involved driving to Chicago with his father to pick
up 800 pounds of rhubarb, and then juicing it all by hand with
two standard-size juicers (“a painstaking process,” according to
Aprahamian).
Aprahamian’s ethnicity has redefined the restaurant, too.
“With his Armenian background, he does a lot of cured meats and
sausages,” Selensky said. “And Justin will pickle anything. We have
fiddlehead ferns in September, ramps in January. He pickles cherries,
apricots, plums, he pickles pickles. It’s a pleasure to see, actually.”
But any cuisine is fair game. Authenticity with a twist, capturing “the
spirit and key flavors of a cuisine” are the chef’s goals. The greatest
compliment to him? “This tastes so much like what my grandmother used
to make.”
After returning from a trip to Italy, he did a Florence-themed menu.
“It put one customer in tears,” he recalled. “The food reminded him
so much of home.”
‘He doesn’t stop moving’
As a boss, Aprahamian is “fun but tough,” said Sanford manager Jeff
Zastrow. “It’s that kind of good balance.”
And through all the upward promotions he’s kept his sense of humor.
“You’ve got to have a sense of humor in this stressful business,”
Zastrow remarked.
D’Amato also remembers that humor. “He’s able to quote most of
‘Napoleon Dynamite,'” the retired chef said. “When I was in the
kitchen, all these guys, they would do movie lines all night.”
The young restaurateur’s love of music is also well known. “He’ll do
crazy road trips where he’ll drive 20 hours straight to see a band
in a library and he’ll drive right back,” Selensky said.
But there’s no music in the Sanford kitchen.
“In fact, when we’re working, there’s no unessential communication,”
Selensky said. “It’s quiet, we’re focused, everybody needs to be
focused.”
Asked the secret to the young chef’s success, everyone mentioned the
same thing.
“His drive,” said Zastrow. “He doesn’t stop moving. He puts in insane
hours. It seems there is always something coming up, something in
the works, something new coming ’round the bend. He’s brewing beer,
he’s setting up the dinners, working with charities, trying to mentor
the younger chefs.”
On one recent crazy-busy Saturday, the chef-owner pitched in by
filling butter dishes to “help us get through the night,” Zastrow said.
But the Aprahamians — wife Sarah works as host, server, bartender,
bill payer, wherever she’s needed — don’t routinely work six days
a week, the way the D’Amatos did for the first several years.
The restaurant is closed on Sundays, and Justin usually takes Tuesday
or another day off.
They considered living upstairs from the restaurant, as the D’Amatos
did for so long, but there wouldn’t be enough room, Justin said.
“Plus, some separation is good. We’re three blocks away. We can be
there in seconds. But a day off is still a day off.”
Change is coming
Life will change for the couple in September, when their first baby
is due. Sarah’s already scaled back her duties to be more flexible.
Several friends who are chef-dads have been telling Justin to spend
less time on the line. He gets it — but it’s hard to give up cooking.
“That’s the passion that got me here in the first place.”
That passion seems to run in the family. Selensky referenced Justin’s
grandfather Charles Aprahamian, a pioneer in medical trauma who ended
up teaching at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Various doctors
who’ve dined at Sanford have told Selensky they knew him.
“I only met his grandfather once or twice,” Selensky said, “but from
the way it sounds, Justin is just like his grandfather. He’s driven,
he’s tough, he’s funny, he’s fair.
“And it’s really about knowledge… The only difference is, his
grandfather handled a scalpel, and Justin’s got a cleaver.”
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