Levi Richard

Who inspired you to become a Chef?

Levi: My grandfather, being from Texas, would BBQ a lot—tri-tip, brisket, chicken, and all kinds of stuff. My grandmother was an amazing cook and did a lot of baking. Almost all of my birthday cakes up until I was 13 came from one of my grandmothers. So, any family get-together, whether it was Thanksgiving, Christmas, or just a regular gathering, was always full of food. When I stayed with one of them, we would always be in the kitchen cooking together. I really grew up with this love of food, not just for myself but as a way to show appreciation and love for others—something that was really instilled in me by my grandparents and the rest of my family.

Levi’s other grandmother grew up on a farm in Mississippi before moving to Baldwin Park. He fondly remembers summers spent with her, where if they wanted dessert, they had to make it themselves.

Levi: My strongest memory is of making ice cream…we were never allowed to buy it from the store. My grandmother would make the ice cream base, and then we’d sit on the patio, taking turns cranking the old-fashioned ice cream maker with the wooden basket and metal crank. As it froze, it hurt your arm, and by the time you were done, you were so exhausted you didn’t even want the ice cream anymore.

During the winter, a friend would bring persimmons, and his grandmother, Leora, would make persimmon cookies and cake—something Levi’s dad especially enjoyed.

Levi: Even now, when my parents visit at Christmas, I make sure to have persimmon cookies at Grains & Grounds (the cafe at Chumash Casino Resort) so that when my dad comes downstairs for coffee in the morning, they’re there for him. And if I go down to visit for Christmas, I always bring persimmon cookies with me because they’re something my dad loves.

I understand you didn’t always plan to be a chef and figured you could always go back to college after culinary school. Do you feel like you made a good decision?

Levi: Looking back, I think it was the best decision. Having the opportunity to live in different places, being able to travel and meet different people with different nationalities in different parts of the world has really shaped how I see food and how I see the world in general. It’s changed how I work and how I see things. I think that I’m a better person, arguably, or a different person than I would have been. This career path has allowed me to see and do stuff that I never would have thought was a possibility for some little kid from Ontario, CA.

How have your travels as a chef influenced you? Can you give me an example?

Levi: I went to Mexico City last year and I had tried this fungus that grows on corn — which looks gross, but it is delicious! So, I don’t know if I would have eaten corn fungus if I had not been a chef and I was not in Mexico City, you know?

If I was a music teacher and someone was like, ‘Levi I have this moldy ear of corn. Are you hungry?’ I’d be like, ‘Of course I’m not. That sounds disgusting.’ But now that I have a better appreciation, I understand what is happening. The importance of this food to this culture, even if you may not like it, makes you want to try it — to understand and appreciate the history that food has had on the people that use it. And so, when I say, food has changed me, I think that’s what it is.

What kind of desserts and confections do you like to make?

Levi: Throughout my career, I’ve always had this goal of trying to take these impressive techniques and match them with flavor profiles that are not scary or weird. If it’s strawberry shortcake, maybe it looks interesting and it’s really sophisticated, but they’re flavors that you’re going to be familiar with. 

It’s equally important that the simplest thing is delicious. And I think that people often overlook that. So, for me, I want someone to enjoy a chocolate chip cookie just as much as I want someone to enjoy the honey vanilla cake. Yes, the honey vanilla cake arguably is more beautiful, but is it necessarily more delicious? I don’t know. Are you going to enjoy it more? I don’t know. But you’re really going to enjoy the chocolate chip cookie, that deserves the same amount of respect as everything else we’re doing.

Your colleagues tease you about this, why do you break your cookies?

Levi: I don’t know where this comes from, but everywhere I’ve worked all of my teams have always said the same thing: I’ll pick up a cookie, I’ll break it in half, I’ll break that half, so I’m holding a quarter, break a piece off of it, eat it and then throw all of the cookie away.

I won’t share it with you, we can’t split it, it’s mine, I’m going to have a piece this big and then I’m going to throw the whole thing in the trash. And I don’t know why but I often see the other chefs here doing it as well. Whatever it is, you break it and look at it inside just to see what the texture is like and typically you smell it.

So, I don’t know, maybe it’s me thinking I’m some fancy chef person or maybe I’m just not as hungry as I thought. I really don’t know.

It’s funny though because if I like it, I will come back and get a new cookie and break that in half and then the whole thing starts all over again.

Are there certain dishes that continue to be a challenge for you today?

Levi: That’s a hard question because often what will happen is I’ll have an idea and I’ll become obsessed with that thing. Whether it’s a technique or maybe it’s a fully finished dessert or a flavor, I have to do it.

Last year, it was pistachios. It was like I had just discovered them. I didn’t. But everything had to be pistachio. Just because. I don’t know why. And I think the year before was cherry. All summer, it was like I had found out what cherries were the day before and I was just blown away. So, I may see something that I think is interesting and then I’ll just become obsessed with it and I don’t know if I ever fully become satisfied.

I think right now I’m obsessed with making pretzels. If I wasn’t doing this right now, I would be in the kitchen making pretzels. I have canceled meetings because I want them to be great. And every batch of pretzels is delicious but I’m looking at, ‘is the size correct, if I allow it to rest for this long how is it different.’

It’s not so much about, ‘can I make delicious pretzels.’ It’s a fantastic product, but I also feel like there’s still room to improve. So, I’m making pretzels everyday because I would like to find the best possible pretzel that we can. Then once I reach that, a week later, I might change my mind again. I’m still never going to be fully satisfied.

Usually, a new obsession just takes over and I forget about the pretzel.

How do you balance the satisfaction of creating something great with the drive to constantly improve and refine your work?

Levi: I think we do a really good job but I also acknowledge that there’s room for improvement and refinement. I’m very lucky that I have a team that is also on board with that same idea of: we do a good job but how can we make it better? And then, once we hit that plateau, how can we, again, make things better. So, I think we’re constantly focused on improving and refining what we’re doing.

I don’t want to say I’m never satisfied. I’ve watched a lot of shows and see chefs say that. And that’s not the case. I’m very proud of the team that I have and the product we put out. But I also acknowledge that there are things that could be done to make them better.

I think I’m hungry because I want to offer the best product to our guests but it’s also very personal because I want to be able to make the best thing that I can for myself. I think that the journey is finding something that I can keep refining and keep refining almost so I can love it even more and then I get to share that with you.

Like the cookie. We spent a long time working on something as simple as a snickerdoodle and chocolate chip cookie. They are really delicious. And part of that is because we have really high-quality ingredients, but also, I specifically wanted a small chocolate chip because I wanted the chip to be dispersed evenly throughout the dough. Typically, with a chocolate chip cookie, you have larger chunks, which is nice, but you don’t get as much chocolate in that. Same thing with the snickerdoodle, we spend a lot of time making sure the creaming method is done properly because we want you to enjoy it as much as we enjoyed it in the kitchen.

What do you think ties all Makers together?

Levi: I think it’s either an intense love for what they do or a freakish obsession. Or both. For me, I love pastry and I love food in general. I just become obsessed with something that I care about and then I want to share that care with you.

The pastry kitchen at the Chumash Casino exists just for me. I make stuff that I want to eat, and my friends and family would enjoy. They’re also beautiful and sophisticated, but at the end of the day, they’re just really delicious, simple things.

It’s your day off in the Santa Ynez Valley, what do you do?

Levi: I live in Los Alamos and have had this standing date with Mike and Sarah from Peasants Feast where we’ve been meeting at 3 o’clock at Babi’s on Sundays. Or I will go to Bodega on occasion because it’s a nice space and the BBQ is great on the weekends.

One of the beautiful things about the valley is that you have so many people in food. Well, you have fewer than you would in DC, but it’s a much closer-knit community. So, you have these incredibly talented people who are just randomly in the Santa Ynez Valley. You can go into a tasting room and meet the winemaker. Or you run into chefs when you’re walking across the street or going to a grocery store

You have real community with these people who have passions that you share. So, to answer your question, whatever I’m doing, I’m drinking, whether that’s in Los Alamos or somewhere else in the Valley. But normally, I’m at a tasting room or out eating lunch.

We’ve talked about cookies, we’ve talked about cherries, we’ve talked about pistachios, what’s your next obsession?

Levi: I think, one, I love chocolate. And it’s just like wine, it depends on where it comes from—how the ground is, how the sun was that year, the water, it’s going to change from year to year. 

Which not everybody really notices. When I was a kid growing up, for most of us, there were three kinds: milk chocolate, dark chocolate and white chocolate. And it probably was not very delicious. But there are so many more options now. 

And there are so many similarities to wine — depending on how the fog is, how the water is, the dirt, where it’s located, how much sun it’s getting — all of this changes the end results and the flavor profiles in that chocolate. 

So you can get something that’s very nutty and almondy all the way to something that tastes like peaches or is very fruity which most people don’t know. So, it’s nice to be able to work on those things and create items with these chocolates for our guests. And when I say guests, really just me because I want to do it.