Dry Creek Kitchen's Charlie Palmer

<p>Charlie Palmer was born with a keen curiosity about how things work and an eye for detail. Both have enhanced his reputation as a big-name chef at the helm of a hospitality franchise that stretches from New York to Healdsburg.</p><p>When strolling through the 2-acre pinot noir vineyard at his Dry Creek Valley home, for example, Palmer will call winemaker Clay Mauritson to let him know a drip emitter is broken or missing.</p><p>“He just loves to be out there,” Mauritson said of the bicoastal chef, who is learning to make pinot with the help of Mauritson and his grape-growing family. “Charlie loves to come out and get an understanding about why they are pruning a certain way.”</p><p>In 2007, when Palmer opened his latest restaurant — Charlie Palmer at Bloomingdale’s in Costa Mesa — Mauritson was there to witness the meticulous restaurateur in action.</p><p>“I was just blown away,” Mauritson said. “He was literally moving things around, from the way that the vases were arranged on the table to pointing out a tiny, minute scratch on the floor.”</p><p>Palmer characterizes himself as “optimistically aggressive” — in other words, he’s not afraid to take charge — while admitting to being a bit of a neat freak.</p><p>“I like things in their place,” he said. “In the kitchen, I’m always on top of it, saying ‘We should be more organized and precise’ ...You can’t cook in a mess.”</p><p>This attention to detail helped Palmer rise from teen-age pot washer to student at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, N.Y. Later, he honed his technique at some of New York’s top French restaurants, then opened his own fine dining restaurant, Aureole, in New York at the age of 28.</p><p>Now at the helm of a growing empire that includes 11 restaurants, plus a handful of hotels and wine shops, the 49-year-old Palmer doesn’t appear to be slowing down.</p><p>This May, he will retool his flagship Aureole restaurant and move it to New York’s new Bank of America tower. At the new space, Aureole will serve lunch and offer a more streamlined dining experience.</p><p>“For it to be prominent for the next 20 years, we had to make some major changes,” Palmer explained.</p><p>Meanwhile, Palmer is in the process of building a second boutique hotel in Healdsburg and is developing a resort hotel in Las Vegas.</p><p>A hands-on guy, with battle scars on his beefy palms to prove it, Palmer begins and ends every work week on an airplane, commuting to and from the kitchens of his 11 restaurants.</p><p>Every weekend, he returns home to Healdsburg to relax and reconnect with his wife, Lisa, and sons Courtland, 15, Randall, 14, and Reed and Eric, 11. Palmer relishes his role as a dad and takes the job quite seriously.</p><p>“When I’m here, I want to take them to school and pick them up and do the sports things,” he said. “That’s the important thing, to spend as much time as you can with them.”</p><p>Palmer’s down-to-earth attitude reflects his childhood as one of six kids — four older brothers and a younger sister — growing up in dairy country in central New York state.</p><p>“I didn’t grow up in a fancy neighborhood, and that grounded me,” Palmer said of his childhood in Smyrna, N.Y. “I don’t take anything for granted.”</p><p>Palmer’s father ran his own business as a plumber and an electrician, and his mom kept the books. Even as a kid, Palmer worked on the farms, milking cows.</p><p>“My dad instilled the work ethic in me,” Palmer said. “He was always preaching to us that we could do anything we wanted to do, we just had to put our minds to it.”</p><p>Palmer’s dad also reinforced the idea that you have to work hard to get ahead, a lesson that Palmer now passes on to aspiring cooks.</p><p>“As a young chef, I was very fortunate to get where I did, but looking back, I worked hard at it,” he said. “In this business, there’s no getting from here to there without the work.”</p><p>While in junior high, Palmer started working as a dishwasher at the Colgate Inn in Hamilton, N.Y. Around the same time, a neighbor who taught home economics ignited his passion for cooking.</p><p>“She got me interested in making pies and pastries,” he said. “Then she dared me to take a home ec (economics) class.”</p><p>In high school, Palmer would go to practice every day after school — he played football, lacrosse and wrestled — then would wash dishes for four or five hours a night.</p><p>He worked his way up to prep guy, then brunch duty. Before he knew it, he was visiting the prestigious CIA campus at Hyde Park and considering a culinary career.</p><p>“It opened my eyes,” he said of the CIA. “I met all these guys who had years and years of experience ... it was inspiring.”</p><p>After graduating from the CIA in 1979, Palmer went to work at La Cote Basque, then one of New York City’s most revered restaurants. There, Palmer worked as the butcher and refined his charcuterie skills.</p><p>In 1981, Palmer went to work in France, landing at a three-star Michelin restaurant in the town of Vonnas, owned by Georges Blanc. Later, he returned to France to work at the renowned Alain Chapel restaurant, also near Lyon.</p><p>Back in the states, Palmer got a job at a small country club in Westchester county, then landed a five-year gig at the cutting-edge River Cafe in Brooklyn.</p><p>“It was a great opportunity and an amazing stage to work in,” he said. “The sourcing of ingredients was a big, big deal.”</p><p>At the River Cafe, Palmer started to connect with growers and was able to showcase seasonal ingredients like ramps (a kind of wild leek) and Columbia River sturgeon.</p><p>Along with other American chefs, he began to experiment with a style of cooking that fused French techniques with global flavors.</p><p>“Asian influence became part of what we did, and the simplicity of Italian cooking,” he said. “You were free to pull different flavors from different places.”</p><p>Palmer calls this style “American Progressive Cuisine,” because it’s a work in progress. “We’re constantly changing and going forward with it,” he said.</p><p>Palmer opened his first restaurant, Aureole, on the tony upper East Side of Manhattan in 1988. The restaurant was an immediate success, charming diners with its deep-flavored dishes served in a stylish setting.</p><p>Meanwhile, the successful chef was starting to think about settling down. He met his future wife, Lisa, at a restaurant where the former ballerina was working.</p><p>“I used to take my dates there,” he said. “Then I realized the reason I kept going back there was her.”</p><p>After dating for a year or so, the couple got married in a little church on Maui, then started raising a family in their small apartment off Central Park East.</p><p>In the meantime, they had hatched a 10-year plan to get out of New York City. Palmer had spun off multiple restaurants on both coasts — Aureole and Charlie Palmer Steak in Las Vegas, plus Metrazur in New York’s Grand Central Station. He figured he could live anywhere, and he chose Wine Country.</p><p>“Obviously, the whole food and wine thing was a big part of it,” he said. “We’d been to Healdsburg a couple of times ... and I loved the little town, the town square and the surrounding area.”</p><p>Palmer opened the Dry Creek Kitchen and Hotel on that Healdsburg square in 2001. It was a turning point in the town’s evolution from farm hamlet to food and wine mecca.</p><p>“It’s a safe bet that one day Healdsburg’s defining moment will be said to date from 2001, the year Charlie Palmer ... reopened the Hotel Healdsburg with a brand-new restaurant,” New York Times writer Frank Prial wrote in 2005.</p><p>By the summer of 2004, Palmer had moved his family to Healdsburg, where he had built a house and planted a 2-acre pinot noir vineyard.</p><p>By 2006, Palmer was so determined to bring in his first pinot crop that when the crew failed to show up, he picked the entire vineyard himself.</p><p>That year, Mauritson and Palmer launched their first vintage of Charlie Clay wines, making 350 cases of 2006 Charlie Clay Pinot Noir and 50 cases of a reserve wine called The Duellist.</p><p>“Clay is the winemaker, and I’m the dabbler,” Palmer said. “But it’s really fun to be involved, from growing to harvesting.”</p><p>In Healdsburg, Palmer has made his weekly commutes more bearable by tricking out his car with gadgets and hiring a driver to take him to the airport. While he’s away, the driver helps ferry the kids back and forth among their three schools and sports.</p><p>On weekends, Palmer likes to head out to Sake ’O for fresh sushi, or to the Singletree Inn for a simple breakfast of eggs over easy. Even at this understated breakfast spot, the eggs come from a local guy and the bacon comes from Hobbs, a much-loved brand of bacon used by many Bay Area restaurants.</p><p>“I don’t think there’s a better time to be cooking in this country,” Palmer said. “It’s become important to people, and they want to know where their food comes from.”</p>