That Chef Kid Revisited – Mpls.St.Paul Magazine

I first wrote about Spencer Venancio in a blog post titled “That Chef Kid” in January 2019. At that time, he was a 14-year-old from Woodbury hosting $100 pop-up dinners at Bardo. They were spectacular for someone who had spent more years in middle school than he’d spent in the kitchen.

At the time, the buzz focused on whether or not Spencer should be working a night job instead of just being a kid and playing hockey or something. As if playing hockey isn’t also a job. My thoughts about Spencer focused on the fact that he wasn’t just flipping burgers; he was following a passion and creating art. If he had been a kid who’d formed a band and was writing music, no one would have balked. As I saw it: Spencer was creating edible operas. I was looking forward to what he might do and how he might hone his craft.

After that series of dinners, and no small amount of press, I ran into Spencer around town, most notably at a chefs’ potluck at Tim McKee’s house. Steven Brown was giving him crap in the kitchen, and the kid was laughing it up. I thought, OK, he has mentors; this is good. But then 2020 happened, and everything stopped. It had been a couple years since I’d seen Spencer. Then in September, he sent me a note to say he was running a pop-up on weekends at Bar Brava. My reply: IN.

Turns out, that chef kid had been working at Gavin Kaysen’s Demi. He started as a food runner at Spoon and Stable but proved himself enough to land a position in the kitchen. Not a bad classroom—especially for someone with a fresh and open mind who wants nothing but to learn.

The six-course dinner at Bar Brava that night was both refined and humble. You could see the celebration of ingredients with an intense dill purée sitting simply next to a perfectly pink piece of heritage pork, but you could also discern complexity of technique within a caramelized buttermilk sauce crowned with ribbons of kohlrabi on the same plate. That meal was bright curiosity and thoughtful appreciation plate after plate, roots and wings. Oh yay, I thought, we are in for some good stuff from this freshly-turned-18-year-old. And then he told me: He was done. This was it.

Sad for myself, of course, I asked what had taken him off the culinary path. “At the same time that I was working at Demi, I started getting into some classes that I really liked, like AP Language and a statistics course,” he said. “I couldn’t ignore this new academic interest, which I hadn’t had before. It was that and the hours of restaurant life. Demi was awesome, and I loved it there, but working from 3 pm to whatever is hard. And I know it’s the life. Restaurant hours are the same no matter what. It doesn’t really go away just because you get older and more successful.” He was on his way to symphony practice as we were chatting over coffee, and we ran down which colleges he’d be applying to in the next few weeks.

“I also had to ask a kid in my physics class if he would come cook with me one night because I didn’t have staff!”

– Spencer Venancio

“I think the great thing about restaurants is the indirect skills that I’ve learned—there are so many things that you learn other than cooking, like work ethic and the ability to withstand pressure,” he said. “We had a debate in one of my classes, which was: Do you think that kids should have jobs? A few people were strongly opinionated that kids should focus on school. That’s crazy. The things that you learn from working in restaurants are super valuable. Those skills will serve me anywhere that I choose to take my life path. Your brain is just lit up in so many different ways!”

And unlike a kid who bails from the Olympic soccer–training path from burnout, high-level cooking can still happen every day, even if it’s just feeding your own brain and stomach. Though, with the flexibility of the industry, Spencer feels like he could still do pop-ups if he misses it.

This series at Bar Brava was the first time he’d really run the show all by himself—from menu costing and ingredient sourcing to staffing. “It was the first peek into ownership, having to make decisions on what I could afford to put on the menu,” he said. “And it was hard! I also had to ask a kid in my physics class if he would come cook with me one night because I didn’t have staff! He’d never cooked before, but we worked it out.” I gave Spencer my son Matt’s number, as he is a former line cook turned geologist who doesn’t work nights. Matt showed up for Spencer’s last weekend of the pop-up and had a blast cooking with him, essentially proving my point.

Can you imagine being Spencer’s roommate in college? I envision him in his chosen college town exploring new foodways while deciding if he should become a lawyer or a writer or a cook. He knows that he carries the skills he has learned with him, and I’m quite sure he’ll know how to use them in his next life.

“In middle school, I would make a pie every Friday,” he said. “I’d just bring an uncut pie to school and set it in the middle of the lunch table. I wasn’t a particularly popular person in middle school, but everyone wanted to be my friend on Friday.”