IN CONVERSATION WITH
YES, CHEF!
Chef Robert Maluso has spent 35 years delivering world-class food, almost ten of them creating dishes for airport passengers across North America.
As SSP America’s Executive Chef & Vice President, Culinary, he oversees some 350 restaurants in North America and is renowned for his creativity, ingenuity and work ethic.
But as Maluso tells us, he almost turned his back on the culinary world to pursue a career as a photographer. We find out what, thankfully, kept him in the food industry and the key to his success.
Great to meet you, Robert. Tell us how you ended up in the food & beverage industry.
I grew up in New Jersey, in the northeast US, and my family had a diner. It was actually a luncheonette, which is a working-class place where postmen, landscapers and construction workers would come for breakfast and lunch.
I was 14 when I started getting stuck into little tasks in the kitchen. But then I ended up standing on a milk crate at the grill – you can’t tell from a photo, but I’m not exactly tall, so at 14 I had a hard time. It was a family restaurant and the minute I walked in there it just clicked for me. It was like, “Oh my God, this is exactly what I want to do.” And from then on, that’s all I did.
From High School I wanted to go and study cooking. The Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park [in New York] was a relatively new entity, and when I told my mom and dad that I wanted to be a chef they thought I was completely off my rocker. At that time there were no American chefs of any note.
I understand that your career development coincided with some big names emerging.
Yes, it just so happened that American chefs at that time went on to rule the food world and the whole industry changed. We had Jeremiah Tower, Charlie Trotter, Anthony Bourdain, Susan Milliken and I could go on. All of those great people going into kitchens in the same period.
We were all very close in the industry, young upstarts in the same neighbourhoods, after hours in the same bars, watching each other’s careers grow. Food was suddenly cool.
I was in the perfect place at the perfect time, and got to ride the wave. It was really, really fun. American chefs became celebrities.
Is there anything else you ever considered as a career?
I was a paperboy for a little while, back in the day when there were actually papers, and that was the only other job I had. But actually I love photography and considered that for a brief period of time.
I am still an avid amateur photographer and I even dabbled with food photography for a while at one of the companies I worked with.
If you go even further back to when you’re dreaming as a little kid, I would have loved to have been a race car driver.
Where do you live and work most days?
I live in a beautiful part of the US in Asheville, North Carolina, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, very close to the Tennessee border.
It’s a gorgeous place to be and the food culture is off the hook. It’s just been voted as the number one food hotspot in the US.
We’ve probably got eight James Beard award-winning chefs here and more breweries per capita than any other town in the US – we’re this little enclave in the middle of the mountains; it’s just a really cool place to live.
Do you get to travel a lot, or are you often stuck behind the stove?
‘Get to’ is an interesting way of putting it. I kind of have to. We’re in the airport restaurant business, so I travel quite a bit. I have a full complement of support chefs out there that are in the field every day, 100% road warriors.
I certainly visit the branches and the airports on a regular basis. But managing a department means you do have to spend a little bit of time in your office, managing that department.
“When I told my mom and dad that I wanted to be a chef they thought I was completely off my rocker”
Do you still get pleasure from travel or is it like a busman’s holiday?
The actual ride on the plane, I get no fun out of that at all. But getting into our kitchens and spending time with the chefs, getting people excited and meeting the cooks that we have partnerships with in the street restaurants is super fun. And eating everywhere, all over North America. There’s nothing wrong with that. But after a week on the road, it’s nice to get home, that's for sure.
What’s the difference between a ‘normal’ chef and an airport chef?
First of all, cooking is cooking and a kitchen is a kitchen. We’re still cooking food, working a line, waiting for those ticket machines to churn out the orders. But what’s different is some of the challenges we have with space.
Airport kitchens can be tiny. I mean, really tiny. Some don’t even have any hoods or ventilation, so we have to have all this special equipment brought in, which means you then have to have special recipes that will work with that special equipment. The logistics become mammoth. In a normal kitchen, generally, the prep kitchen is right behind the line and the store room is close by and the refrigerators are all you know, to-hand.
But in our world because the space at airports is so valuable, we don't get to build huge kitchens. And so sometimes the kitchen team is walking several miles a day. Refrigerators could be downstairs or, or they could be a 20-minute walk away. Even the vendors have to jump through hoops. They have to be TSA (airport security) approved, just even the grocer or the produce company that you use. So the logistics of all that is challenging and then just getting to work is a challenge. A cook coming to work in an airport has to park off site, get through TSA first, do all the background checks, flash their permit, all the badging and then be able to get to work. Every single working day. So it's a challenge.
How do you sell this to young people starting out in the industry? Because we’re all struggling to attract people into food and drink, especially in kitchens.
You have to distinguish yourself as an employer of choice to attract people into this specialised industry. But the real selling point is, you tell me where you want to live, where you want to go, and this job can put you right there. Tell me where in the US or in any of the Americas or, quite honestly, anywhere in the world you want to build yourself a career and you can live there.
Chefs love to travel and sample different foods and cultures, and we can offer that. It’s a really interesting career path.
We’ve got two or three regional chefs today who started out in the company as junior line cooks, and now they’re managing entire regions.
That’s fantastic – so there’s a real chance for career progression for everybody.
Part of the way we structured the culinary team was to give the cooks a path forward. Because if you don’t have that, they’re just going to go to the next place as soon as they’re ready to level up.
We have regular calls with our whole community, we have recognition and discussions around best practices and learning. So there’s a great community there.
There’s a lot of checking to make sure the culture’s where we want it to be, that the regional chefs have what they need to support the business and themselves.
We do a lot of street-side restaurants that we translate into the airport environment – we work together with those street-side chefs and those relationships are important. We try to authentically adapt their brand and their style of cooking to the menus in an airport environment; that’s a big part of what the whole culinary team does.
Asheville, North Carolina is famed for its 250 food trucks and the place that Chef Robert now calls his home and culinary inspiration Photo: ©ExploreAsheville.com
With eight resident James Beard Award-winning chefs and a community of farmers markets, Asheville has established itself as one of the foodie capitals of the US Photo: ©ExploreAsheville.com
How do you choose what goes on the menu? Is it seasonal?
We are refreshing our menus right now actually. We’ve got somewhere in the region of 350 restaurants in North America and we’re constantly refreshing. We’re also writing menus for the new businesses on an ongoing basis.
We only have a few menus that we change seasonally because that’s the right thing for that concept. In Indiana, Indianapolis we have a seasonal menu and feature local products throughout the year. To be honest, I’m not sure that the average traveller is that interested in what’s in season when they’re connecting through an airport.
I think it’s just got to be on-trend and current and so when we analyse our menus to do a refresh we pull a menu mix report. We’ve got incredible data in this company – we’re able to see what are the top ten bestsellers and the highest sellers overall. Where’s the profit; where’s the cost of goods? We analyse the menu and fold in all the knowledge we’ve gained since the last time we touched it with the trends on vegetarian, sustainability, on all the different lenses we use.
What dishes are perennial bestsellers?
It’s the US, so the burger is king. Although it’s not my most favourite thing to do, it’s certainly what we sell the most of. So we have lots of fun and do some interesting toppings – we don’t sell a regular hamburger with lettuce, tomato and onions; that’s not what we do. We do something with a brand identity: an interesting aioli and a topping like roasted mushrooms or whatever grabs us. It’s always premiumised, but we also do some great on-trend dishes. In San Francisco, instead of doing the normal loaded French fries, we make a Mexican ‘elote’ sweetcorn sauce and pour it over, so we’re elevating that as well.
We take things that people are comfortable with and add value.
Do people eat differently in airports?
I think travellers in general tend to be nervous. They’re anxious about going through the airport. They’re leaning towards comfort food because it’s simple. You don’t want to scare them, so you take a comfort food trend and give it a little tweak, a nice twist.
Is the great vegan wave that was predicted slowing down?
Yes. We’ve added some iconography to our menus to identify vegan and vegetarian items but we don’t call them out in special places because if you don’t want to sell something in the US, put a big sign next to it that says ‘Vegetarian’ or ‘Healthy’.
Nearly 20% of our menu offer today is vegetarian and vegan, but not because we try to push that. Organically a particular cuisine, for instance, Mediterranean, happens to have more vegetarian options that are delicious and worth putting on a menu.
I think that if you add vegetarian or vegan items with that in mind, so that the brand identity stays there, it fits well with the overall concept. But this concept of vegan ‘meat’, well that never made sense to me. There is no market for what I call ‘analogue meats’, and that’s because the ingredients are so complex and convoluted.
You are famously healthy yourself, so do you feel you want to put healthier choices on a menu?
We want to make what the customers want – it’s simple. We're a for-profit company and, at the end of the day, we’re not here to teach people or to guilt people. We’re just here to give people what they actually want; if more people want vegan or vegetarian or plant-based, we will absolutely supply that for them based on our research. I am not here to try and educate people about healthy eating.
Chef Robert Maluso began his career as a teenager working in his family’s diner – he now oversees 350 restaurants in North America alone
Let’s talk data, a big theme of FAB 2023. Is yours all done in-house or do you hire an agency?
We have an incredibly complete database here in the company; it’s pretty amazing. I have eight people on my team just managing the culinary data. They’re looking at the recipes, the ingredients, the cost, the profit, and all that is managed in-house so we can understand our sales mix, our cost, all of it. And then on top of it, we use a third party to help us understand the high-level trends and what we might be looking at months and years down the line.
Can you give us a hint of what’s coming next?
People are moving away from pure comfort food and more towards authentic regional cuisines, bold local flavours – fresh, simple ingredients. Comfort food still works, but give it a twist. And they want to have some understanding of where we are with sustainability and provenance.
How do you convey your sustainability practices?
I was previously the Culinary Director for Sustainability at the second-largest catering company in the world, so it is part of my background and I do enjoy it. We have a robust sustainability platform here at SSP, but what I find is that if you don’t tell people that you have sustainable practices, they’ll assume that you don’t.
How do you feel about social media?
Mostly, it’s great. There’s so many cool and funny chefs. The whole culinary community is on Instagram and it’s awesome. I get some trends from there for sure.
What’s the best airport meal or snack you’ve ever had?
One of my favourite restaurants in the whole portfolio is called Mulberry Street at La Guardia. It’s a casual sit-down, really nicely designed, and it’s with Mark Forgione, who’s a well-known celebrity chef in New York. But the emotional connection is that his father, Larry Forgione, who really changed the restaurant business, came up at the same time as me. He’s in that same group of people that I was talking about earlier. The dish I love there is Broccolini Sausage Orecchiette, you know the little pastas that look like tiny ears, in a beautiful butter and white wine sauce – there’s maybe ten ingredients in the whole dish. Absolutely delicious.
With all the travelling that you do, what’s your best travel tip or hack?
It’s simple. For my fellow chefs, because we travel with knives and sauces and all sorts of things that you can’t bring on a plane, just ship the stuff overnight – don’t check a bag.
Before you go, who’s your dream dinner guest from any period?
You could go in a million directions here. But if I get to pick who I eat with tonight, I’m eating dinner with the people who grew the food.
FAB eZine
January 2024
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