Steve Lawson Part 2: Overplayed and Undervalued

Inside The Pressure Cooker

"Discover the bonds of the kitchen and the passion of cooking with Inside the Pressure Cooker - a show dedicated to the misfits, pirates and chefs who thrive in the chaos of the culinary world."

"It really does take a special someone not only to survive, but to really thrive in an environment of just what feels like complete fucking chaos, but it's pretty damn controlled."

Steve Lawson is a chef and restaurateur with 25 years of experience in the industry. He has a passion for mentoring the next generation of chefs and is an avid environmentalist, gardener, and seafood enthusiast.

Steve Lawson has worked in restaurants for the past 20 years and has seen a range of people come and go, who thought they could hack the job but couldn't. Through his experiences, Steve has discovered his passion for cooking and mentoring, particularly with seafood. He recommends finding a good chef knife and shoes for the job and for anyone interested in entering the culinary world, he advises to learn discipline and reach out before you move to another location, as well as staging in unfamiliar places. Through his story, Steve encourages others to take the time to explore and find their passion.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. The unique bond shared by cooks, and chefs and how it's in their blood.

2. The importance of having good shoes in a kitchen, and the differences between steak and seafood when it comes to technique.

3. Exploring the culinary scene of the Pacific Northwest and the benefits of staging in a new place.

Other episodes you'll enjoy:

The Lady Line Cook

Austin Maynard

Ariel Guivi

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[00:02:37]

This was kind of a funny question I asked you. I said, So you've been in Denton for a while. You've been down to Dallas for a while. You've been out there studying some food. You've been to a couple of restaurants, working?

[00:02:51]

I should say so. I was curious, like, what do you see is overplayed? And your answer was food served on planks. Yes. Food on served on wood is overrated.

[00:03:02]

I'm tired of it. Wood is disgusting. You can't get a clean. Is this based on your history at a restaurant that served a lot of food on wood boards? Yeah, and it's been every restaurant I've worked at.

[00:03:17]

Really? Yeah, they did it at the hotel and they do it here, too, at my current place. Why do you think everybody's putting food on the boards? I feel like it's good for color, contrasting. But you can make a plate any color, and you can clean a plate properly, or a piece of ceramic or glass or whatever with those boards, people are cutting into it and food is going down those cracks.

[00:03:45]

You can't do anything to clean that. Yeah, no, there's certain food I didn't mind putting onto a board, but when it came to the point where someone was going to need a knife to cut, I was just adamant about putting it onto a plate just for that reason. But I always lost that battle. Always. I get it.

[00:04:10]

The other part, too, is like serving steaks on a board, which if the steak didn't have time to rest once you start cut into it, or if you've got a sauce, the shit's just running everywhere for sure.

[00:04:26]

At the hotel, we had a big old 48 ounce drive and it came with a poison, and you would pour that on there and it just goes all over everything, dude. Because there's nothing to catch the sauce. Did they do that at the table? It was an aramic, and the table would do it to themselves.

[00:04:48]

Why would you put the sauce for the steak on the side?

[00:04:55]

It's because we did it on a board. If we did it on a plate, we could report it on there.

[00:05:02]

That's what I'm saying. Desk the damn boards. I hate them.

[00:05:08]

Yeah, go ahead. And it's killing all the trees.

[00:05:16]

I don't think that the boards are killing the trees, but it's probably the paper. Yeah, that's fair. No, actually, a lot of the boards were made from fallen timber, are just older. Like the boards that we were using were just fallen oaks and pecan that are just prominent in this area. Well, that's cool.

[00:05:44]

At least we're recycling, I guess. Yeah.

[00:05:50]

That's interesting, though. Would you consider yourself environmentalist? As much as I can be. I still indulge in stuff that I can't recycle, but I do my best to recycle and compost. Compost?

[00:06:04]

Do you compost at home? I've been trying to during the summer, yes. I've been starting to do a little garden. I got a lot of plants around the house, so I feel that I can. What do you have in your garden?

[00:06:17]

This year I did peppers and squash and zucchini. I did some herbs like dill and terragon and mint. That was pretty much it. Okay. You can expand that at all.

[00:06:31]

Was that all indoors or was it outdoors? It was outdoor. Okay. The summer heat killed it, but I. Had a good spring yeah, that's why I was wondering about all that.

[00:06:44]

Interesting. I never thought of you as the gardener. I evolved, you know? Oh, absolutely. You all have.

[00:06:53]

After working in Dallas, I started to appreciate food a lot more, or I guess I would say after COVID. And we really may respect what I did because I didn't cook over the pandemic or half of it. I did not. Right. So what did you do during the pandemic?

[00:07:14]

I was stocking shelves at a grocery store, and then I ended up working at a food truck later on part time before I got back on at our place. Okay, so you had the chance, you went and did something else, but yet you came back to the restaurants. Yeah, because stock and shelves is not fun. It's very simple work. Well, even then, like, a lot of people in COVID were laid off and went and found other work.

[00:07:44]

Some enjoyed it, some didn't. But at that point, a lot of people took that opportunity to kind of find themselves again and search after something else. Did you ever feel that or did you know that you're going to be right back in the restaurants when it hit? I don't know. Whenever I was talking to the shelves, all I thought about was cooking.

[00:08:04]

So I never thought about myself doing anything else. I know. I didn't want to work in a grocery store. That was awful. Yeah, I couldn't imagine I couldn't do that either.

[00:08:18]

It's just such mundane work. Yeah. Just putting stuff, putting boxes on the shelf. People took it really seriously too, but I was like, I'm used to doing so much more.

[00:08:31]

So what do you geek out on now? You've really discovered the culinary world, right.

[00:08:43]

You've made your own path for yourself. You didn't have the traditional background, whatever the hell that traditional schooling meant for some people. And you kind of fell into cooking, and then you just knew it was for you and you really missed it during the pandemic. And you're really pushing yourself to grow and learn now. So what is it like you geek out on the most when it does come to cooking?

[00:09:09]

I geek out on pasta ever since I worked at the hotel. We did a different pasta quite often, and I just fell in love with different noodles, shapes, different stuffings, different sauces, different pan sauces. It's all so much fun. And I also learned to love seafood. We did a different fish every week at the hotel.

[00:09:30]

We cooked a lot of scallops and mussels, and seafood became a big part of what I like to cook too. That's good, because honestly, seafood is a great one to learn to cook and to cook properly because as you found out, it's a lot more delicate. It's temperamental. Temperamental, sure. But you've got to use a a of hell lot more finesse with a seafood.

[00:09:58]

With a seafood. Wow. You've got to use a lot more finesse with seafood than you do with that 64 ounce fucking porterhouse. For sure. Obviously, night and day differences there, but seafood is a good one to learn to work with because, yeah, you've got to be quick, and you've got to pay attention to it.

[00:10:21]

You're right. It's temperamental because you don't have that margin of error that you will with, like, a steak. And also, you got to know you got to be able to tell if a muscle is bad or oyster is bad. You can get someone really sick. It takes a lot more handling all around, from raw to cooking.

[00:10:39]

And then pairing seafood with essentially their garnishes and veg and proteins and all that stuff is a different art and science to itself, because you can easily overpower fish if you're not careful with what you're pairing it with. That's cool. I wish we had more seafood in the North Texas area. I understand why we don't. We're kind of landlocked.

[00:11:04]

I feel like we got some pretty cool stuff at the hotel. We had a lot of golf caught fish, which was kind of cool. Lots of grouper, lots of tile fish. We had amber, jack. All that stuff was pretty cool.

[00:11:20]

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of fun stuff you can play with out of the Gulf or the Third Coast, they would also call it. Yes. So based on your experiences, what would be the word of advice that you would give to someone walking in the door that was you eight years before? I would tell them, hey, you're going to have a lot of fun, but you're also going to have a lot of hardship, but it's going to be worth it because it's going to make you stronger, and you're going to learn some discipline, which is definitely what I needed whenever I started cooking. How are they going to learn discipline.

[00:11:50]

By getting yelled at? As soon as I asked that question, I was like, I don't know if I want to know the answer for sure.

[00:11:58]

Okay. What books are you reading right now? I've been reading the whole fish and Maddie Madison to cookbook. All right. And then one of the last few questions I ask is, outside of a chef's knife, right?

[00:12:13]

You're opening up your toolkit. You bust out your chef knife. Now everybody has to have a quality chef knife that they're working with, so that's kind of taken out of the equation here. What's the next thing out of your kit? I think on my answer, I said shoes.

[00:12:31]

My birkenstock. You got to have shoes in your kit, bro. But it's still a tool, though. Okay. If we're going for tools, I like my own fish spatula.

[00:12:42]

Okay. But I'm going with shoes. Shoes. You got to have good shoes to work in the kitchen. Your backs may kill you if you don't.

[00:12:47]

You said you wear burks. I do wear burks. You wear just Burkies? I wear the super grip boston burks. Yeah.

[00:12:53]

I went through a phase where, man, it took me a long time to figure out what kind of shoes worked for me. I did the Burke's, and then I did just other styles of Burke burgund stocks before I finally finished. I say finished, but ended on clogs sunita. And there's another popular one, I don't remember, but once you learned to walk in them and they saved my knees and my back so much, they were actually pretty damn comfortable shoes. I mean, they're heavy for sure, but I hear you, man, because I was having just constant back pains.

[00:13:24]

My knees hurt all the time. And then I also didn't realize that your knees and your lower back are connected. So when one hurts, the other one, they work together. They go hand in hand, you know? Yeah.

[00:13:36]

I was wearing walmart shoes before I started wearing perks. And whenever I switch over to perks, I was like, wow, what have I been doing for the last fucking six years? I hate to say it, but I mean, you're right. Then I guess the next investment out of a chef knife would be shoes. That does make a lot of sense.

[00:13:54]

I will give you that one. Yeah. Because I went from paying $20 a pair to birks are $150. But they last you four times longer. Yes.

[00:14:04]

As long as you take care of them. I've seen them. They can get haggard for sure. Yeah, that's why I like my Burkies. If they just kind of got ugly, I would literally just take out the insoles and run them through the dishwasher.

[00:14:17]

Nice. That's what's up.

[00:14:25]

Then I just kind of throw them in the back of the car and they'd be dry the next day. I mean, you're a crazy cat lady. We cover that. I am a crazy cat lady. I do love my cats.

[00:14:35]

I guess it's like what the future holds for me. I'm hoping I can get onto this new fine dining spot and work there for about a year. I would like to get out of Texas at some point. Where do you want to go? I think Pacific Northwest.

[00:14:52]

Like Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, montana? Somewhere up there. Colorado wouldn't exactly be the northwest, though, right? That's fair. But it's still right there.

[00:15:05]

Everything is a lot closer together up there, so it doesn't really matter.

[00:15:11]

You know people out there. I've got a few friends in Colorado. Okay. It always helps to kind of know someone wherever you're going to land for sure. Just so when you get there, you least got a place to crash and someone to help you kind of that knows what's going on.

[00:15:35]

I will say the restaurant is big of a place. It is. It's a very small world. But each little individual, city and state, so to speak, has its own little niches. And when you first get into it, you can easily get into the wrong spot just because you don't know for sure.

[00:16:00]

Yeah, reach out before you move. I know it's not anytime soon, but for anybody, just reach out to other people through social media or something like that and just kind of, hey, I'm coming. What's the deal? And also, if I do end up going out there, I would like to go out there beforehand and scope out the cooking scene, see what's hot and what's not. Yeah, it wouldn't be a bad time to stage as well at that point, for sure.

[00:16:30]

That'd be fun, man. Yeah. I've lived in Texas. I've lived in Texas my whole life, so I would like to go somewhere else eventually. No, it's good.

[00:16:43]

I mean, you should travel, man. Talk about you enjoy seafood and some of that stuff. The seafood up in the Northwest is just fucking amazing. Yeah, it's right up there next to the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just the Northwest because they get a lot more product out of Alaska as well.

[00:17:04]

So Southern California and some of those areas, they do have some pretty good seafood, but it's not just as prominent as it is up in the Northwest. I don't know why exactly.

[00:17:21]

That is strange. I know Seattle has a huge fish market up there. Yeah. Well, Steve, I wish you all the best. Wherever you go, you're definitely on the rise.

[00:17:34]

You've got the right mindset and the right work ethic for it. So good luck to you, brother. Thank you, sir. And thank you for listening to this episode of Inside the Pressure Cooker. If you enjoyed this episode and feel like you're able to take something away from it, please go to Apple podcast and rate and review us.

[00:17:54]

If you don't use Apple Apple podcast, please follow us as well as share this episode with a friend. This is a publication by Rare Plus Media, hosted and produced by me from Rare Plus Media and myself, Chad Kelly. Thank you for listening. Keep kicking ass.