Chef Jeremy Blutstein calling himself, as he did, “just a 43-year-old Jewish dad living in Springs who likes to cook,” is kind of like a Ferrari calling itself just a car.
This Amagansett native who rose up the culinary ranks to be, most recently, executive resort chef at Gurney’s and the star of the glittering Showfish, is back in Montauk at the helm of Mavericks, at the site of the old East by Northeast at 51 South Edgemere Street, where, incidentally, he also did a turn as executive chef.
He took time to sit down and talk about the new restaurant, opening April 21, his “Food is Bond” hashtag on his incredibly popular Instagram account at @chefblutstein, and his family.
So what are your hopes and dreams for Mavericks?
To bring some hospitality back to Montauk. I’ve been a part of many of the openings out here myself, but the smash-and-grab model for a tourist town loses a step when it comes to service and hospitality.
I think we’ve built a space that dictates carefree and whimsical, but at the same time, it’s classy. And the food that we’re offering is of a higher level when it comes to execution.
Your restaurant persona, your brand, is #FoodIsBond and #Localism. Can you explain?
I think that if you’re going to operate within a community, you should support it. And the easiest way to do that from an ethical standpoint, from a chef’s perspective, is to use the farms that we have available. We won’t serve anything that we’re not purchasing directly from a farm, from Bridgehampton to Amagansett. We made a specific choice to source all of our beef from New York State, and we’ll also procure some goods from the Hudson Valley. But the majority of our products will come from the Eastern End of Long Island, which has prolific farming and cheesemaking and beekeepers, and all of the other fun people that we involve ourselves with.
You grew up out here. You cut your teeth at Estia’s with Chef Colin Ambrose. You’ve been Chef de Cuisine at Almond —
— Chef de Cuisine at Almond, I opened up Crow’s Nest out here. I opened Surf Lodge in 2008.
So when did you have time to educate yourself about all of these farms?
The guys who I looked up to as a kid cooking out here, Pat Trama at Della Femina, and Joe Realmuto at Nick & Toni’s, Jason Wiener, and Colin specifically, really pushed farms to the forefront; Nick & Toni’s having their garden, their relationship with Quail Hill, and then, obviously, with me meeting Alex Balsam in the first grade and becoming best friends since. There’s always been an attachment to it from the guys who I was watching cook out here. And that being said, the farmers which we now use are friends. They’re the people who come over to the house for dinner.
So speaking of dinner, you made a conscious decision to be a private chef, to start your family. What the hell hooked you back in to the restaurant biz?
The need to bleed. (Smiles.) Look, we accomplished a lot with Gurney’s in 2019, and then Covid hit and the world kind of changed. And my wife and I found ourselves furloughed from work. We found out Jahrn was pregnant. And I said, “Look, how can we make this work?” And so I took a position working privately, which allowed my wife not to work for over a year, and really enjoy the whole process. And it also allowed me to be present for the first two-and-a-half years of Poppy’s life.
It’s nice to hear that something good came from the pandemic.
We don’t mean any disrespect, but that was such a great period for us. There’s a lot of people who suffered an enormous amount of loss, but I think there’s also the flip side of that coin, is that a lot of people got to start a family, or be with their family.
Right. So getting back to you coming back to restaurants…
Right. Vanessa Price, she’s one of our partners, called me. We had some very frank conversations of what was the goal here, and she sold me on it with transparency and honesty. And I think that that’s a really great way to start any sort of working relationship or business relationship.
So tell us about the food. You said it’s a classic steakhouse.
The tagline for the restaurant is we’re a steak place, but we’re not a steak place. We’re not ignoring the fact that we’re not in Midtown. We’re not ignoring the fact that suits aren’t coming here. We’re not ignoring the fact that people may or may not be in bathing suits when they walk through the door, or that they certainly will be the next day. And that they don’t need a 40-ounce rib eye to the head.
But when it comes to the steaks, we’ll have the classic cuts, rib eyes, and New York strips and porterhouses and filets and like I said, from New York, everything’s coming in 32-day wet age to us, and we’re putting up to 40 days of dry age on it in-house.
But the other side of it is that with seafood, we’re going to treat seafood like beef. So we’re going to serve tuna on the bone. We’re going to serve swordfish, fluke, black sea bass, tile fish on the bone.
And there’ll be a lot of the things that at a classic steakhouse you would expect to see, but instead of the run-of-the-mill sides, like spinach with some burnt garlic clove in it, we’re doing creamed spinach where the base is made with smoked bone marrow. We’ll have roasted mushrooms, but it’ll be like four or five different varietals, and it’ll be finished with the preserved lemon salsa verde and anchovy breadcrumbs.
We’re doing a baked potato because, I mean a fucking baked potato, right? And it’ll be served with the usual suspects — the Arby’s/Golden Corral move. Sour cream, the cheddar cheese, the chives, all of that fun stuff.
We’re making all of our pastas in-house. Rémy Ertaud, my sous chef, my executive sous, was also spearheading a three-star Michelin pastry program in Paris for the past two-and-a-half years. He was at Showfish with me prior. He’s also stepping into the role of pastry chef as well. And so all of our ice creams will be spun in-house.
Will we have some interesting flavors?
We’re doing ice cream sandwiches, so we have a chocolate sea salt cookie with a super-green Sicilian pistachio ice cream. And then for the oatmeal, he is going to do a sesame ice cream.
But a lot of plays on those classics is to make things more fun and not as rigid. And to be a little bit more veg forward and add femininity to a fairly masculine concept.
Oh, that’s interesting, yin and yang, huh?
The space speaks to that as well. You have the classic kind of walnut millwork that’s throughout the place, but it’s still super light and still super airy. And it still feels like you’re at the beach, but you’re in a more formal space.
And from an operations standpoint, we’re 185 seats inside, so we’re not weather dependent. So when it’s 8,000 degrees in July, and the last thing you want to do is eat a steak, you can come in here in bone-chilling air conditioning and enjoy yourself a martini and knock back a piece of dead cow. We also face due west, there’s a sunset right across every night.
Your Instagram account has always been a constant, and you take the most incredible photos of food. Your portraits are beautiful, but they also can be disgusting at the same time. And I think that’s what you’re going for, in a way. You’re showing the reality. So you know where your food comes from.
Well, food has a face. Whether it’s a duck you eat or it’s the fish you eat, or it’s the head of broccoli. I mean, everything in its natural state may be gruesome, but it is a part of life.
Look, I’m just a 43-year-old Jewish dad living in Springs who likes to cook.
You make a lot of interesting choices. Like smoking your own duck.
Real cooks cook at home too. I enjoy cooking for my family. I mean, I cook for everybody else’s every day. Poppy’s been eating food that I’ve made since day one. The first solid food she put in her mouth was a smoked duck wing. She grabbed it off the table while she was sitting on Jahrn’s knee in my kitchen. And we just looked over — she was four months old. I was like, “Well, I guess the kid is definitely mine, right?”
You see yourself as a conduit between the fresh food and the consumer?
The men and women who I looked up to as cooks and chefs growing up had respect for the purity of the ingredients. If I can get something that is as fresh as a fish out of the water or a carrot out of the ground, it’s my job not to fuck that up. So all I’m doing is applying salt, heat, pressure, whatever it may be, and trying to deliver what was already perfect out of the ground to the plate.
And it’s difficult because you try not to overthink it. And some people, it’s not my jam, but some people really kind of overthink it and overmanipulate the ingredient only to lose the essence that the ingredient had in the first place, so what was the point? Sure, you made a frozen aerated mousse out of carrots, but it doesn’t taste like carrots anymore. Yeah, it’s pretty, but nature’s pretty good at making things pretty itself. I’m just the middle guy.
But I think that people are enjoying what we are producing here because we take so much time to make those relationships with the people that we get our stuff from, because they make us look good. And so for me, I need the public to understand that this is a group collective effort.
For more information, visit mavericksmontauk.com.
