About a year and a half ago, Alex Gallis came back home. He drove back past the strip malls and sorority houses to where the road narrows and straightens, back past the same whitewashed storefronts and the restaurants where his father had taken him as a child. He came back to the town in the shadow of the university he had left a decade earlier, 12 credits shy of a degree in political science. Gallis had been gone from Chapel Hill those 10 years, living out West and working in and out of the ski industry and restaurant business. But his home was back East, and he needed a change and a resume boost, so he returned to his Southern roots by way of culinary school in Charleston, S.C. It was there, he says, that he "just lucked out."
"I got in there at a good time," he says, shrugging, but the story of how this self-described "ski bum" became an executive chef has a lot more to do with hard work than good timing. He'll tell you that he was fresh out of Johnson & Wales Culinary School, where he had graduated second in his class and was a member of the select culinary team, before he landed his first chef position in the kitchen over which he now presides.
That kitchen, where the stereo can't quite drown out the sound of grills being scraped and dishes clanking, is behind a storefront in Carrboroâ - a little further down the road from the college town where Gallis grew up. For over five years, that storefront has read "Acme Food and Beverage Co.," and people from all over the Triangle have been walking through the door.
It's a Thursday night when I push that door open. The diffuse light of evening gives the clean lines of the tables and countertops a subtle glow. I notice the bar is nearly empty, as I head back around the corner to the kitchen, tape recorder in hand. "Slow night," someone tells me. Slow enough that everyone in the kitchen has plenty of time to look up from their respective tasks and wonder about my presence. The air is permeated with grease and spice and olive oil; the bright lights reflect harshly off the polished metal counter that separates me from three cooks. I stare down at the meticulously arranged ceramic bowls of sauces and seasonings sitting on a table in front of me and hear a blonde-haired man in a white uniform tell his surprised crew that there are no new tables in the restaurant. "Slow night," someone says again. There will be plenty of time for me to listen.
"A lot of ski bums work in restaurants," Gallis tells me. We are sitting at the long black bar out in front of his kitchen, a tape recorder between us. He speaks with animation, his hands gesturing in the air. He tells the story of how he had "tinkered around" in the restaurant business - both waiting tables and managing - for years before finding his calling at Acme. But it wasn't until he got serious about the culinary business that he landed a job in a restaurant like Acme, which has recently garnered some of the best reviews in the area. It has been voted among the Top Ten Tastes in the South by Southern Living and among the Top Fifty Neighborhood Restaurants in the Country by Bon Apetit. You don't get this kind of press by bumming around.
Gallis hesitantly describes the cuisine that's garnering all this buzz as "new world" or "fusion." He speaks excitedly about the opportunity to combine two disparate genres like Asian and Southern - his two favorite cuisines. "I think it's hard to lump what we do into one category because that's what, to me, is really cool about being able to cook at this place - basically whatever I want to do - whatever genre, whatever regional thing... I can do it." It's his love of eclecticism that allows Gallis to offer Acme customers such distinctive dishes as a spicy corn and tortilla soup, an Asian barbecued duck breas, and a cheese plate all on the same "small plates" menu.
Although the original design for the menu was to gut it completely and build from scratch every six weeks, Gallis has altered this vision slightly during his 14 months as executive chef. He prefers to phase in new dishes slowly, and to keep old favorites on the menu. For example, he says, the oyster salad and the fried calamari have been on the menu for as long as he has been the chef. He describes these dishes as "two signature things that people absolutely fell in love with right off the bat, and they've never come off [the menu]." This slow but steady approach to menu changes ensures that his regular customers- and there are a lot - ill recognize some favorite dishes, but also find new tastes to try. He tells me about one woman who eats at Acme four nights a week. Must be nice.
I scan the menu with relish back in the kitchen; Gallis has offered to fix me something to eat. There is still so little bustle that I can stand quietly while the able staff prepares my choice: basil risotto cake stuffed with goat cheese on a bed of sauteed spinach with carrot and beet syrups. I sit down by myself at the bar and lean intently over the fragrant dish, cursing the Loop pizza already in my stomach. Tearing into the lightly browned cake almost feels wrong to me after watching its careful preparation. Almost.
The marvelous final product that Gallis and his staff prepares comes from their attentiveness to detail, especially in selecting fresh, local ingredients. "I shop all spring and summer and fall long at the farmers' market down the street," he says. "I have very close relationships with probably five or six of the farmers... That's half the joy is dealing with people like this. They work so hard and turn out such beautiful things." He models this practice of buying ingredients locally from the proprietor of Durham's renowned Magnolia Grill, Ben Barker, a man Gallis refers to as "pretty much my idol."
Gallis grew up eating at Magnolia Grill, and he credits Barker and his wife and partner, Karen, with influencing him to become a chef. He jokingly refers to Barker as "the godfather" of the restaurant business in this area. It seems that almost every notable chef around here has some sort of connection to him - a situation that actually serves to temper stiff competition in the Triangle, which has a much higher number of highly paid chefs than most other metropolitan areas the same size, he says.
I head back into the kitchen, which is still rather quiet. With his extra time he recounts stories of more hectic evenings. One night he had to prepare an entire menu for a 25-person wine-tasting dinner from scratch after a seafood shipment was late. "I had to do a five-course meal that I had to conceptualize, prep and execute in three hours - it was insane," he says. I try to visualize the details he narrates: the rumble of nerves in the kitchen, Kevin Callahan, Acme's owner, starting to drink because he was so worried, and then a table of 25 people who raved about his creations and were none the wiser about the short prep time. I try to see the kitchen the way it was a recent Friday night when Gallis and one other cook prepared every hot plate of food in the busy restaurant, a job usually shared among four or five people. "We pulled that off, too. I mean it was awful while it was happening, but when it was done, it was great," he says.
It's after nine now, and the bar is starting to fill up with 20-somethings on their way to a concert. A blonde girl chats with the bartender and slowly swirls her drink. The tables in the back are still thinning out. Soon that front door will swing open again and put me out into the night air. I will drive back past those same plate glass windows and front porches and watch the road widen in front of me. And maybe late tonight, Alex Gallis will wake up from a dream that he has forgotten to order shitake mushrooms, or that his pork dish is burning in the oven. But for now the kitchen is still quiet, and I sit staring out at the Carrboro night, watching the patrons drift in and out.
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