Meet the Tastemaker
Chef Shawn Cirkiel of Backspace, Parkside and Olive & June knows a thing or twoabout rolling up his sleeves and going all in
In the grand scheme of restaurant careers there’s a natural progression from kitchen help (anything from dishwasher or prep cook), to line cook to sous chef to chef de cuisine or executive chef. Very rarely do you climb each rung of the ladder in the same restaurant. And if you’re smart, you hop from one good restaurant to the next picking up skills, ideas, experience and hopefully, a good work ethic.
You don’t have to dust off a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential to learn how do it, simply ask any of the chefs in the big leagues — Austin or any other big city — and they’ll tell you the same: It’s kitchen bitch, to cooking in the weeds, to having some authority, to having all authority. And the ones who are savvy enough to stay in the game, take the next step from executive chef to restaurateur.
“It’s just the next natural progression,” says Tastemaker 2012 nominee Shawn Cirkiel, chef and owner of Austin’s well loved Parkside, The Backspace and Olive & June restaurants. “You can’t be the main guy in the kitchen forever. You have to move on to other things and let the people who work for you grow. A musician friend of mine once made the comparison to famous rock bands like the Rolling Stones having to play the same song from the 1970s over and over again; at some point, you have to change things up a bit or you’ll go insane.”
When it comes to moving through the ranks, the 36-year-old Cirkiel has done it all, from sporting dishpan hands in his family’s restaurant at the age of 14 to pressing out pizza dough at Austin's Pizza to training and running kitchens at national heavyweights such as Café Boulud, Domaine Chandon not to mention well invested time at Austin’s former Jean Luc’s Bistro and Uchi.
"A musician friend of mine once made the comparison to famous rock bands like the Rolling Stones having to play the same song from the 1970s over and over again; at some point, you have to change things up a bit or you’ll go insane.” - Shawn Cirkiel
Having spent 22 years in the industry, he’s more than paid his dues. But in more recent years, he’s not only honed his culinary talent, but his knack for how to run a successful restaurant as well. After a couple of years in Napa Valley at Domain Chandon, Cirkiel returned home to Austin in 2008 ready to open his very own place, Parkside.
To say the modern gastro-pub was an instant success is an understatement. In its first year, Texas Monthly magazine listed it as one of the “Top 10 Best New Texas of 2008” and later voted the restaurant’s decadent burger as one of the best in Texas, and Bon Appetit magazine deemed it one of the “Hot 10 New American Taverns.” At that time, it was the first of its kind in Austin offering a variety of small and large plates that dazzled just about every palate. (If you haven’t been, the French fries, the blonde pate and a selection of fresh oysters are a must.)
Following Parkside’s rise to local (and national) fame, Cirkiel added a second restaurant to his line up in 2010. The Backspace, which is literally in the back space of the Parkside building, is a small, comfortable restaurant for those who like a more intimate environment. The Italian-driven cuisine is inspired completely by a single, Italian-made brick oven Cirkiel had shipped from Italy and fashioned behind the bar as the pillar of the restaurant’s menu. (The very authentic pizzas are to-die-for as is the brick-oven roasted butternut squash antipasti with pumpkin seed pesto when it’s in season.)
Once The Backspace was up and running according to Cirkiel’s meticulous standards, another opportunity came along. Something he had to jump on fast. Last October, when pan-Latin restaurant El Arbol shuttered its doors, Cirkiel swooped in to claim the prime Bryker Woods neighborhood space. In about three months, he turned the space around to open Olive & June to an eager throng of diners who had long awaited an authentic Italian restaurant in Austin.
“I’ve always wanted to do this kind of food,” says Cirkiel. “And my chefs Justin Rupp and Steven Cak have too. This is a way for us to make food that we like to cook for ourselves. It’s what we like to eat. There’s really something for everyone on this menu. But at the same time, the quality of ingredients and attention to detail that I’ve always found important are there.”
Olive & June is not your Americanized Italian red-sauce kind of place. No lasagna or spaghetti and meatballs here. Instead, you’ll find a versatile menu of authentic regional Italian dishes including heavenly handmade pastas such as the butternut squash mezzalune, playful “piccolo piatti” small plates such as saffron-infused suppli (fried risotto balls), and entrees from a wood-fired grill including thick-cut pork chop with rosemary.
In its few short weeks on the dining scene, it has weathered a siege of anxious customers with relative grace and ease, something Cirkiel hasn’t always been able to do. “Usually I can be an intense kind of guy,” says Cirkiel. “Opening Backspace gave me an ulcer. But with this, I’ve managed to go with the flow. The main challenge has been getting all the systems in place.”
By that, Cirkiel means the flow of everything in both the kitchen and the front of the house. The general design of the restaurant originally made him think they’d need to create system of pacing and management that would be different from his other restaurants.
“It was an entirely different space altogether. So we thought it would need a different way of doing things. We set up our kitchen differently and re-organized how our hostess staff would work. We made a lot of changes,” says Cirkiel.
But it only took a couple of weeks to figure out that the best way to run Olive & June was to run it the same way as Parkside. As they say, if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Within a couple of weeks, the new restaurant took on the Parkside “process” and things really began to hit their stride.
With three very unique and very different restaurants under his belt — all within a four-year time frame no less — Cirkiel has figured out a thing or two about how to make it in what is commonly known as a volatile industry. He’s learned the importance of respecting the ingredients you use in the food that you serve. He’s learned how to be mentored by those who know more than him and how to mentor to those who want learn. (Top Chef Paul Qui is one of those he has mentored.) And he’s also learned that you’re only as good as the way you treat the people who work for you. To put it simply, you really have to care. And that’s something Cirkiel takes very seriously.
Which means that even when you’re the head honcho and you’re doing everything from approving menus and payroll, to managing relationships with purveyors and customers in the restaurant dining rooms, to hiring (and firing), you also have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and work hard to help your team succeed. It’s something Cirkiel found himself doing during the week of SXSW when Parkside turned more than 600 customers on a Saturday night alone. As the week of South-by mayhem waned on, Cirkiel wound up covering for a few of his dishwashers one evening and a busy night’s worth of dishes himself.
“It’s just part of it,” says Cirkiel who also gave much of his staff the day off on the Monday following SXSW. “My guys were dead tired and by the end of a week like that, when it’s your business, you have to be willing to be ‘all hands on deck’ all the time. It’s like being a parent. You have to be ‘all in’ with your kids all the time. You have to be the same way with your restaurants.”
Have you ever seen tres leches look so pretty? (Pictured: matcha tres leches atPhoto by Amber Heckler
Sometimes you can just see that a taco is perfect. (Pictured: birria tacos with cheese at Palo Seco 512)Photo by Brianna Caleri