of Chez Paul. “There were not very many women in the restaurant business at the time,” she notes — and just four in her class at Kendall. Though she initially intended to get a hospitality degree there, Contos soon found herself attracted to the culinary programming. Her restaurant background gave her a leg up, she says.
steps for three days until the restaurant’s manager agreed to let her do a trial day. “I just always wanted to be with the best, and that was the best place in the city,” she says. After she graduated, Trotter offered her a chef position, which she held for a year. For the next phase of her career, Contos launched a private-chef business and cooked for highend clientele at parties across the country. She returned to Chicago in 2003 to work as chef at the Chopping Block Cooking School, but a childhood dream of living in Vermont began to beckon. “I grew up in the heart of downtown [Chicago] in Courtney Contos talking to a class a brownstone,” she says. “This whole Vermont thing was Contos began staking out Charlie just really magical; I think it was [the TV Trotter’s, which had stopped taking interns series ‘Newhart’] that planted the seed … I from Kendall because, she says, too many knew that my next step was going to be here.” burned out in short order. Contos was And so it was, when she found work undeterred; she camped out on the back at the Cook Academy. But after five years
mATThEw ThoRsEn
grammar school, I was allowed to take up to four kids to Chez Paul for lunch. My dad would send [the restaurant’s] Rolls-Royce over, and we’d hop in, go to the restaurant. We had one hour. Our food would be waiting. We’d always have chopped sirloin and hollandaise sauce, and on the side were these potatoes that we always ordered extra of, and we’d drink Shirley Temples.” Why didn’t Contos ever open a restaurant of her own, as many of her James Beard-winning classmates from Kendall did? She has a simple answer: Her family had a saying that the restaurant business led to “gray hair, alcoholism and dying young.” While she always loved food and wanted to share it, she says, she opted to skip the most stressful route. Early in her life, she got a taste of a more palatable path: cooking as bliss. At age 16, Contos took five months off from school to help a family friend run a small restaurant in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. She remembers spending her days on the beach and her nights running the restaurant: “There were no windows, [the space] was all open, and it was literally on this cliff. It was probably the size of this store, and there was always Roy Orbison playing … By the end of the night there’d be dancing. It was just so fun.” Upon her return to Chicago, Contos began working for her father in the office
there, Contos began looking around for the next thing. She says she had her eye on the storefront at 65 Falls Road in Shelburne; when a different kitchen store closed there in early 2013, she jumped on it. Chef Contos Kitchen & Store gives her the opportunity to educate, cook and be creative all at once. “I feel like every morning I’m just shot out of a cannon, there’s so much to do and so much to learn,” Contos says. “I’m just so excited about all of my projects.” Contos keeps a reminder of her rigorous background on a shelf in her shop: a blue caviar tin that she spilled in Charlie Trotter’s kitchen during her internship. “I have this brand-new tin of caviar, worth probably $1,300, upside down,” she recalls. “I mean, what do you do? Everyone’s looking. So the chef de cuisine, Matthias Merges, who’s now one of the top chefs in the country, came over with a spatula, flipped it over … and, when the tin was empty probably a month later, he gave it to me. “Every day,” says Contos, “I come through here, I turn the lights on, I see that tin, and it just reminds me to maintain excellence.” m
INFo
chefcontos.com
THE JUDGE RULES IN YOUR FAVOR. Discounted 2014+15 season passes, also good the rest of this season, now on sale.
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MOTHER’S DAY Alice’s Table: 10am–2pm / The Foundry: 11am–3pm Deadline to purchase May 12th, 2014
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Roasted Flounder, Herb Crusted Porketta, Beef Tenderloin, Duck Confit Buckwheat Crepes, Eggs Benedict, Baked Brie, Martini Pineapple Shrimp, Salads, Desserts and more. FOR MENUS AND PRICES: jaypeakresort.com/MothersDay TO RESERVE: Alice’s Table: 802.327.2323 The Foundry: 802.988.2715 4/21/14 5:48 PM
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