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Chef
John Shields
Coastal
Ventures, Baltimore, MA
Chef
Participant: Cooking for
Solutions Conference 2006
Chef
John Shields, Culinary Ambassador of the Chesapeake Bay,
is a nationally acclaimed expert in regional American
coastal cuisine. His career began informally when, at
a very early age, he worked with his grandmother Gertie
Cleary in a church hall kitchen. They fixed businessmen's
luncheons and parish fund-raising dinners for dozens to
hundreds of guests. Grandmom was the perfect teacher.
"I remember as a small boy in Baltimore my grandmother's
excitement with each approaching season and the treasures
it offered for the table," John says. "We would
marvel at the first asparagus of the spring, breathe in
the sweet, musky fragrance of ripe Eastern Shore melons,
and laugh at the antics of feisty blue crabs as they escaped
from overflowing bushel baskets. When my grandmother prepared
the food, be it vine-ripened tomatoes or fresh-from-the-bay
rockfish, I was always aware of the quiet reverence she
felt for these prized gifts."
John's illustrious professional career began by accident.
After studying at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, this
Baltimore native moved to Cape Cod with aspirations of
becoming a rock star, and played the piano in bars. Then
one day an injured friend asked John to work his shift
in the kitchen of a popular Cape Cod inn. Little did John
know that his first day, spent making 36 pie shells, would
evolve into many years as a restaurant chef/owner, author,
and host of national public television series.
In the 1980s, John moved to Northern California, where
he joined the New American Food revolution. He was first
executive chef at A La Carte, a highly regarded French
restaurant in Berkeley. But he missed the food of his
youth, so he opened his own restaurant, named it for his
grandmother, and began to introduce San Francisco Bay
area residents to the wonderful regional American fare
of the Chesapeake Bay. Gertie's Chesapeake Bay Café
was located in Berkeley's famous "gourmet ghetto,"
where soon-to-be stars such as Alice Waters, Jonathan
Waxman and Jeremiah Tower were reinventing American cooking.
Gertie's quickly gained enormous popularity, and California
magazine hailed it as "a shining star in the culinary
constellation of Northern California restaurants."
Nearly two decades, and many, many crab cakes, later,
John made his way back to Baltimore, where he now lives.
He owns and operates an award-winning restaurant, Gertrude's
at the Baltimore Museum of Art -- still paying homage
to his grandmother, though a little more formally.
John is the author of three cookbooks on the cuisine of
Chesapeake Bay: The Chesapeake Bay Cookbook (Addison-Wesley,
1990); The Chesapeake Bay Crab Cookbook (Addison-Wesley,
1992); and Chesapeake Bay Cooking with John Shields (Broadway
Books, 1998). In 1998 public television stations across
the country began airing John's series "Chesapeake
Bay Cooking," based on the book. For the series,
John hit the road, interviewing folks around the Chesapeake
region and showing how they prepared their favorite regional
dishes. The series was so popular it ran for years.
John's second series, "Coastal Cooking with John
Shields," currently being shown nationwide on the
Public Broadcasting System, follows a similar format with
interviews and on location episodes filmed in some of
the most spectacular coastal regions of the United States.
The companion cookbook, "Coastal Cooking with John
Shields" (Broadway Books, 2004) contains 125 recipes
from the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf Coasts and Hawaii.
John's writings have appeared in numerous national publications,
including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Coastal
Living, Southern Living, and Esquire. He is a frequent
guest chef on radio and television, and he teaches classes
in American coastal cooking at private culinary arts institutions
around the country.
Currently, he writes a column for the monthly magazine,
Baltimore eats, and the quarterly, Edible Chesapeake.
He is an active member of many community organizations
such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental
group dedicated to protecting the Chesapeake Bay and its
surrounding wetlands. He's also active in a variety of
professional organizations, including the International
Association of Culinary Professionals, Chesapeake Sustainable
Business Alliance, Slow Food, and the Chefs' Collaborative,
which promotes sustainable agriculture through use of
indigenous foods and local suppliers.
And by the way ... he still wants to be a rock star
Restaurant
(s)
Coastal
Ventures
- Chef John Shields
Baltimore, Maryland
www.johnshields.com
Chef
Recipe(s):
Catfish
Po Boys with Apple-Fennel Slaw
Other
Great Related Links:
Cooking
for Solutions
Healthy
Choices, Healthy Oceans Cooking for Solutions
and the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch
Programs are empowering seafood consumers and
businesses to make choices for healthy oceans.
To learn more, visit www.seafoodwatch.org.
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