Mark your calenders. Take off work. Buy your Action Zone Passes.

The Winter Dew Tour is coming to Snowbasin, January 14-17.

And they selected Sonora Grill as one of the Top 10 Places to go in Ogden!

The competition is stiff and there really is a tangible difference between a chef and a cook. Many people can cook delicious and excellent creative food, whether you’re well-trained in a classical kitchen or you cook at home and you just love it and adore it and your cousin Edith says you make the best ambrosia salad in town and you can always be found in your kitchen kneading a bowl of purple Peruvian potato bread dough, you still might not have what it takes. The reason being, a professional chef is just crazy enough to require a particular specialized mania for crazy ideas of a certain sauce, compote, salsa, salad, sorbet, strawberry soubise, curry coullis, or whatever…that only you know it’s going to work and you won’t sleep til it does, and you’re just loco enough to prove it.

You’ll need to have that slightly off-key commitment to working as a professional chef as part of your skill set.

Period.

Most good cooks are too smart to become chefs and many chefs forget how to cook once they start writing menus, watching food quality, organizing parties and special events, and all the other boring stuff that isn’t cooking.

You must become the food, Grasshopper.

Point being is that I’ve spent more years as a professional chef than years as a cook or a skateboarding teenage punk and I’ve known an awful lot of cooks who just don’t make it and several cooks that have blown my mind with their creative talent that seems to come out of like nowhere.

Doris Chavez was one of those cooks you meet that would change your whole way of thinking about food. No cooking school, Doris started out as a high school kid in L.A. and ended up as a line cook at Border Grill, a high-end, upscale Mexican restaurant in Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip. She was working for me, poor girl. I’d been bouncing back and forth between opening a restaurant in Pasadena and just coming off a street food eating trip from Mexico City, hadn’t been getting hardly anything more than like 4 hours of sleep a night, I’d just had a sous chef quit on me to take a job at Caesar’s Palace as a banquet chef so I was down to my last 2 sous chefs who were running the place while I was away, and while I was pretty sure I was in my right mind, it’s likely that I wasn’t.

I was on my phone at McCarran Airport, coming in from Burbank, asking my meat purveyor, Ali, “Hey, Ali! How you been? Did you get my whole pigs in at the restaurant? You did? O.K. Great, thanks, I got a go, Ali.”
I took a cab back to the restaurant and Doris was on shift. I said, “All right, Doris, let’s cook. We’re going to cut these pigs into parts and grill the chops and smoke the loins and brine the hams and braise the legs, right? You ever broke down a whole pig before?”

“No.”

“Perfect…give me my knife over there, will you? I’ll break em down. You make a sauce. Make it Mexican. Use chiles…something killer…”

“Uhh. What should I do?”

“I don’t know…make it good.”

I probably wasn’t the sweetest chef in town. But somehow she had the intestinal fortitude to go to work and this is what she made:

1 pound of cascabel chiles, seeds removed
1 pound of ancho chiles, seeds removed
12 cloves of whole peeled garlic, charred on a comal (a flat griddle)
2 whole yellow onions, peeled and cut in chunks
6 roma tomatoes
1 1/2 gallons of chicken stock
1 cup honey
½ cup sherry vinegar
kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Simmer together in a large pot for 45 minutes and puree in a blender till smooth as silk.

That’s all there is to it. The complexity of the sweet and sour, spicy and earthy flavors impressed me but the simplicity of it blew my mind. The other 2 sous chefs I had had given her the nickname Cholita and I called the sauce Cholita Sauce. It went on the menu as a steady staple sauce and it was fantastic. I promoted her to my 3rd sous position and she turned out to be pretty good at it.

Cholita is perfect on grilled double thick pork chops…Come to think of it, I’m going to run that as a special at Sonora Grill, in honor of Doris Chavez, La Cholita.