Matthew Blau ain’t your average chef. A stout, strong-featured New York native, Blau followed a markedly nontraditional path from conception to kitchen. His parents, Eric Blau and and Elly Stone, were involved in the Manhattan theater scene, responsible for creating the well-known off-Broadway musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. A theatrical career, however, was not in the cards for young Blau, who suffered from a self-diagnosed case of ADHD that would eventually lead him to drop out of high school. “I don’t really know what ADHD is,” he told me, laughing, “but I was certainly not a conventional learner.”
From there, Blau meandered: he took up graffiti writing, bussed tables at a mob kitchen, attended the New York Restaurant School’s culinary program, founded an enterprise called Sushi Madness, and worked as a real estate agent.
Eventually, in 1987, Blau says he followed a pretty girl up to Brattleboro, where he began cooking vegetarian fare at the Common Ground and nurturing his growing love for the country. As soon as his creative itch returned, Blau drove across the country and landed a gig at a San Francisco restaurant, Lalimes, under the guidance of Armenian chef Haig Krikorian. “San Francisco is a beautiful city,” Blau reflected, “but I needed to be in the country.”
In 1992, Blau returned to Brattleboro. After founding and selling two successful restaurants—Max’s and Metropolis—he began a new venture in 2008: Fireworks.
Fireworks ain’t your average restaurant. With a well-curated bar, a knowledgeable wait staff and a lovely brick-top patio, this versatile hot spot really feels like a small-time getaway. Whether the centerpiece of a romantic evening or the prelude to a tipsy night out with friends, its handcrafted cocktails and thin-crust pizzas won’t disappoint.
I sat down with Blau to chat about Fireworks, among other things.
Daniel Pastan: Where did you get the idea for Fireworks?
Matthew Blau: I had seen this type of restaurant that uses an incredible brick oven called a Woodstone. They produce this great thin-crust pizza. So I thought, “That’s what Brattleboro really needs—a place which is not Domino’s, and it’s also not $35-per-plate fancy—beautiful food, fresh food, arugula salads, great cheeses, wild mushrooms on a canvas of pizza and pasta, so we lower the prices to a very affordable range.
I think in this sort of market you need to hit a very broad demographic. So the idea is, we get farmers eating here, we get parents getting babysitters for their kids and coming here on date night, we get everybody. It’s an affordable foodies’ place to get a great night out and not break the bank. We brought it over to Keene in December, 2011 and built it even bigger. They seem to love it there.
What has made your restaurants so successful?
I think there are several things that set us apart from other places. One of them is our earnestness. You really need to shoot for being the best at what you do. The best-case scenario is that you are the best at what you do. If you don’t hit that mark, you still stay good. I see too many restaurants not being the best at what they do. They may be decent to begin with, and they lose it all in a few years.
Also, we really try and have a staff that we think of as family. The relationship carries over into the customer experience. Job one for us is putting out great food and providing great service. Job two is enjoying what we do. Without both of those things, it’s not an enjoyable experience for me.
Are there any new projects on the horizon?
A couple of years ago, I started thinking seriously about Mexican food. I’ve been to Mexico a dozen times, fifteen times, and I love Mexican food. There’s this Americanized Mexican food, but I always felt like most anywhere I went for a burrito, I basically got a wrapper filled with vaguely Mexican-tasting mushy stuff. Great Mexican food has got the same elements that all great food has: a juxtaposition of textures and flavors, of sweet and spicy and crunchy and soft. So I got the idea for Milagros Kitchen, which opened June of this year.
How do you develop your recipes?
There are chefs out there who just kick my ass. I spend a lot of time researching who does what the best, and then I steal it from them. Why not respect my customers enough to serve them that, rather than try to stroke my own ego by serving them something that I get some sort of ego gratification from, but is not as good? We went through five or six different pizza doughs to find out what worked right, but I’ll never tell you that I didn’t steal those pizza doughs.
One thing we do in my restaurants which I think is critically important: we use recipes. When we find the way that we like it, we don’t have cooks throwing it in by hand. That’s ego. Honestly, I have been called a genius for presenting somebody with something that I took from Gourmet the previous month. Your obligation is not to serve new food, it’s not to serve cutting-edge food, it’s not to serve the most interesting food. If you’re not serving great food, none of those things matter.
You do restaurant consulting on the side. What advice do you offer unprofitable businesses?
The most important thing in food is execution. Your menu could look fantastic, but if you can’t execute it, you’re on the wrong path. If you make the absolute best meat loaf anyone has ever had, they will be lined up around the block to come into your restaurant and eat your meat loaf. If you make a mediocre torsion du foie gras, you’ll die. Who cares? Base what you do on what you do well. Period.
Your customers are your business partners. You need to keep your partners happy. Too few chefs understand that your customers are the people that you need to be listening to in order to make a successful restaurant.
What occupies your time besides your restaurants?
I’ve got a lovely wife and a seven-year-old daughter. My wife works, so I have the honor of being a dad. My other interests lie in the realms of spiritual, emotional and psychological growth—mysteries of the universe, mysteries of the mind. For many years, I’ve been in what’s called the Grof Transpersonal Training, which was set up by a guy named Stanislav Grof, who was a psychiatrist from Prague. He was the pioneer of LSD psychotherapy in this country in the late ’60s, and then when that became illegal, he pioneered and developed something called Holotropic Breathwork, which is an emotional psycho-spiritual release technique, using deep breathing and evocative music.
Is there a relationship between your spiritual work and your culinary work?
I think and hope that the spiritual and emotional work that I’ve done gets into my food. But it’s not a conscious choice—maybe it should be, but it’s not. You open a door and you follow a road. It’s never the wrong door and it’s never the wrong road. I wanted to open a Mexican restaurant. I don’t start looking at the possible downsides. I just say, “Let’s do it.” And so far—God, so far, knock on wood—we still have our restaurants.
A week after my conversation with Blau, I returned to Fireworks with a few friends. Together we ate and giggled on the brick-top patio, feasting on oven-roasted pears and multiberry mojitos. That evening, the July humidity was syncopated with breezes. The sky, meanwhile, was streaked mauve and lilac. Our food was tasty, fresh, consistent, but for me, the experience was as memorable as the meal itself. All the while, shoving bits of Neapolitan-style pizza into my mouth, I thought of Blau—of his nontraditional path to chefdom, of his refreshingly straightforward culinary philosophy—and I smiled, nearly choking on thin crust. This ain’t your average evening.•
