Chef Gregory Cortelyou

There were early signs that I was going to be a chef, but they were largely ignored. I had other ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Nevertheless, I filled spare time as a child poring over 1950’s cookbooks, trying recipes, making pies and cakes from scratch. I also spent lots of time pretending to do homework at the kitchen table while watching my mother cook. This was my early schooling.

After college, I put aside my dreams and worked a series of odd survival jobs, one as a waiter in a very nice “Continental” restaurant in Austin, Texas. I could never take my eyes off the cooks, and I would go home and make the dishes I watched them make in the restaurant. Finally I got my break when a friend asked me to work his one man kitchen on 6th Street in Austin. One man meant also washing my own dishes, in the sink! But it felt like I was home. After 2 weeks he said I was the best cook he had ever seen.

I moved up to New York after about a year of that, working in a large restaurant in Rockefeller Center which was a far cry from my little kitchen on 6th Street. In no time at all, the guys I was working with saw what they had, and I worked my way up that ladder. In 1985 I found myself at Louie’s Westside Café on the upper west side of Manhattan, where I would spend the better part of the next 20 years. I started out there as a cook, this was a neighborhood restaurant, but it was a neighborhood up and coming and hungry for something better than what had been available. The chef was very talented, and was trained in a classic French style. I learned fast and well, and in a years time took over that stove.

The “schooling” after that became about eating in New York’s finest restaurants, imitating, reading, stealing recipes and honing my skills. I was the workaholic chef, working like mad to keep up with the scene and compensate for lack of formal schooling. Mexican food had always been something I loved, living in Texas for 10 years helped with that.

In New York I found myself working with cooks from Mexico who would cook the most amazing food for themselves, food which was nothing like the Tex Mex I had experienced. These guys were my friends too and once about 10 years ago I went to Mexico to visit one of them, it was meant to be a cheap vacation just to get away and experience something new. It turned out to be the lighting of a fire.

The food I ate at family tables all across Mexico on that trip and several subsequent trips started a passion for Mexican food and cooking that could not be stopped.

When I found myself at the Sunset Grille, I had come home again. Real Mexican cooking is like no other cuisine, and none before has ever satisfied me the way this does.