Gordon Rader

I met Gordon Rader through Astred Jones. Astred recently graduated from Gordon’s program, interned at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, and promptly got hired on full-time. Astred deserves all kinds of kudos – she’s smart, ebullient, has tremendous perseverence and is dedicated to the culinary arts. I’ll venture to guess that she was Gordon’s favorite student this year. Astred decided that Gordon, being the chef he was, should be introduced to Fairfield’s eclectic foodie culture and to me, being the food snob that I am. We met at Revelations over pizza on an ArtWalk night last fall and our introduction immediately spun out of control into foodie debate to the point where the rest of our party possibly started to feel alienated!

I did not keep in touch with Gordon since that evening several months back, but something about the whole sustainability and ongoing food discussion here got me thinking that I should respond to his long-outstanding Facebook friend request. It’s a good thing too. Gordon immediately invited me out to check out the Culinary Arts premises at Indian Hills. I trekked over to Indian Hills on Wednesday and was pleasantly surprised by the setup.

The kitchen has the standard setup, but what was of real interest to me was what’s called the “Studio”. Gordon’s recognized that the media frenzy around food should be a wave ridden with care. He’s also recognized (before any other program at Indian Hills, I should add) that social networking has value. The studio incorporates a ceiling-mounted camera pointed at an instructional counter, behind which lie the standard kitchen accoutrements: 6-burner stove, commercial oven, deep fryer, and more. The idea here is that students should be able to create instructional videos and upload them to Facebook, YouTube, wherever. A large flat-screen mounted on the wall nearby provides feedback, but is also used for instructional videos.

Gordon’s trying to instill the core of social networking and cosmopolitan cuisine into his students. There’s obvious resistance though. He regularly deals with the “But Chef I don’t like that Mexican shit” and “Chef, nobody wants that spice stuff”. It’s the sort of thing that would make my patience wear thin very very quickly. Gordon takes it all in stride (albeit with a bit of Hell’s Kitchen-esque attitude) and cajoles his students into realizing that culinary arts is not about making baked potatoes and some grilled beef alone.

Gordon’s challenge is large enough with only the idea of introducing global cuisine to a large disinterested student population. He has taken his students on trips to France and Italy. But add to this that he maintains a quite interesting blog which he’s working on getting his students to participate in as a general requirement for his courses, and his regular updates to FoodBuzz, and you just start getting the sense of Gordon’s drive. Watch his Twitter feed and you realize that this is a man who’s maybe marginally insane, but in a good way

Gordon invited me, my wife and my friend Rushad as his guests to his students’ Contemporary American Dinner special menu on Thursday, July 9th, prepared by students Mangal Tamang and Ron Wixom. My wife and I are vegetarian and the chefs-du-jour very graciously prepared vegetarian options for our culinary delight. Mangal’s a Fairfield resident, via Nepal.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had the snobbish and overly-opinionated view that Indian Hills could largely be written off. It’s an institution that does not inspire inventiveness or innovation as far as I could tell. I’m having to rethink all my prejudices thanks to meeting Gordon Rader.

In the upcoming parts of this series I’ll bring you Gordon’s vision of SE Iowa’s culinary future, including the American Culinary Foundation sub-chapter for this area and his work on sourcing locally, organics and green energy at the Indian Hills program. And reviews of the American Contemporary Dinner by Mangal and Ron.