Professional techniques and tricks applied at home and in the field
Growing up on Cape Cod, my father constantly took me clamming, quahog digging, muscle scraping, lobstering, and fishing mostly for bluefish and striped bass. After high school, I left home to work at a restaurant in the San Juan Islands of Washington State where we gorged ourselves on wild salmon, black cod, halibut, and spot prawns. From there I moved to my first major city, New York, and it was the first place I had lived where fresh caught seafood didn’t make up a majority of my diet. It was a major food culture shock.
In NYC, I was a broke cook crashing on a friend's couch while I staged in restaurants to learn as much as I could from Michelin starred chefs. My diet became: family meal at the restaurant for lunch, then a slice of dollar pizza at 3am on my way home. After New York, I moved to a farm in Indiana. Growing our own produce was a game changer, but raising my own proteins just couldn't compare to the diet of foraged seafood I grew up eating. It wasn’t until then, I realized how spoiled I was (foodwise) growing up! I realized how much I missed sourcing a good portion of my proteins personally as opposed to just buying everything at a grocery store.
Hunting has always been of interest to me, but I was always weighed down by the working hours I had to keep as a chef. Work always came before anything else in my life: the obligation to be available when something inevitably went wrong made hobbies impossible to keep. The year leading up to my first hunting experience, I had just opened a new restaurant in the least healthy and sustainable way. I was working 7 days a week for the first six months, shaving that down to a mere 6 days a week the next year.
After a few years of that insane schedule, I had the opportunity to become a partner in the same restaurant. So I bought in and hired a reliable chef de cuisine which gave me some much needed free time. I realized quickly that I needed an outlet or hobby that wasn’t tethered to the restaurant. So I bought an old compound bow and read a few books and watched as many video tutorials as I could find online. With a little more online digging, I found a hundred yard, public archery range nestled into the lakefront of downtown Chicago (of all places!) and made it part of my weekly routine to stop there as much as I could before work.
When Covid hit, it was the longest time I hadn’t been in a professional kitchen since my career began 13 years earlier. I decided to go to a doctor (for the first time in a decade) for a routine flu shot and check up because I had been having shooting pain and numbness in my wrist. Turns out I had carpal tunnel for some time and had been ignoring it. I had the surgery, and after months of physical therapy I was able to return to the restaurant and worked a few shifts, but they all had to be cut short because I still couldn’t work like my usual 14 hour shifts.
I made the leap to restaurant consulting because it allowed me to continue doing what I know and love, but also provided flexibility so I could finally really learn to hunt. I attended some DNR "Learn to Hunt" classes and found a goose outfitter a few hours away who took me under his wing. I went goose hunting six times that first season and attempted to hunt public land twelve all day sits to only see one doe pass 30 yards without presenting an ethical shot. The rest of my hunts were marred by others enjoying their right to use the same public land dirt biking or hiking. I still enjoyed every second of those first deer-stand sits, but I knew if I wanted to become a serious hunter I would have to do some better scouting.
Cut to present I made a couple connections with other local hunters I had met through guided hunts, seminars, classes or online forums. We got together and I would always cook some sort of meal after which the rest of the hunting party would be asking for recipes and techniques that I had used which sparked the inspiration to start this site.