From the time he worked in a deli as 15-year-old in central Wisconsin, Branden Karow has loved cooking. He tired of frozen chicken covered in ice or boxed meals heated in a microwave — he wanted to make things from scratch.
“It’s selfish, really. I want to eat good food, and to do that, I had to learn how to cook,” he explained of his entry into the culinary arts.
A career in the kitchen seemed natural to Karow, but he knew he needed more behind him to make it happen. “It got to the point I didn’t feel my career would advance without a little education,” he said.
So he attended the closest culinary school, Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where, “to be honest, I didn’t learn much in school,” he said. “I was sleeping in class and working my butt off at work.”
But, he said, he met the people he needed to meet, which led to an internship with Thierry Rautureau at Rover’s in Seattle’s Madison Valley.
Karow spent the first two months slicing mushrooms, cutting chives and chopping parsley at the high-end French restaurant. “All of it had to be perfect,” he said. And “I learned a bit of refinement.”
The six-month internship turned into four months of work, mostly as a volunteer.
Then came stints at Fandango and Cascadia before he returned to Rover’s kitchen.
“I was constantly challenged [there,]” Karow said of his return. “Every day was, ‘Do it better, faster.’ Nothing was ever perfect. It was constantly challenging to get it that way.… It gets your mind going.”
During his subsequent six years at Rover’s, Karow said he found Rautureau and chef de cuisine Adam Hoffman to be “definitely easy-going guys. I don’t think either one ever yelled at me. Both wanted to teach people and pass on what they knew.”
Karow went on to work as a line cook for Ethan Stowell’s now-closed Union, Anchovies & Olives and How to Cook a Wolf before settling in at Staple & Fancy in September 2010.
He credits his promotion to chef de cuisine the following February to his work ethic: “I’m always here first and usually leave last.… It was always my goal to run a kitchen; I always knew I would do it, but I didn’t know how or when. I worked hard and made sure that when something came up, I was the next one for the spot,” he said.
It helped that Stowell’s style is “very similar [to mine], which is why I like it.… With the exception of a few ingredients, it’s basically the same simple stuff {I’d make],” Karow said.
His own favorite meal is to “catch something, pull [something] from the garden, put it onto the grill and invite friends over to share.”
He explained, “It should be simple — preferably local, grown well and taste good.… Fresh meat and fish and vegetables — anything in season, right out of the garden. Just [add] salt and pepper and olive oil, and put them on the grill.”
His activities outside of the kitchen are equally rustic: fishing, gardening, digging for clams, hunting, foraging for mushrooms, crabbing, making salami, brewing beer, skiing, biking, camping.
Because of Seattle’s proximity to all this, Karow said he plans to stay here a while: “I have no reason to leave.”
— Vera M. Chan-Pool