Brad Miller

How did you learn to break down an animal so young?

[Laughing] Well, from necessity. My dad said hey, we gotta get this done today. OK. Let’s do it. Alright cut here, cut here, cut here. It’s actually really simple. People think butchery and all those kinds of things are hard but it’s not. Once you learn how to do it once, you’ll know how to do it forever.

If you just think about how similar we are to animals… once you learn once, you can break down anything. Here’s the loins, kinda the same in every animal. Here’s the legs, etcetera. Just have a sharp knife. The right knife, and have a sharp knife. Pig skin is hard to get through.

What was it like working in a butcher shop at fifteen, right?

Well I was there way before fifteen, but when I started working in there for real, I didn’t… love it [laughing]. To me at the time, you want to go out and hang out with your friends. I was playing football at the time. You didn’t think, oh, I really want to get into butchery or hope I can make this my craft one day. You just think about how you need to get all this meat cut up in time so you can get out of there.

But learning how to do things the right way and how to do them fast totally paid off for me later in life. That’s what being a chef is completely about.

Describe yourself

I’m a chef who wants to make good food and have fun. That’s it. Plain and simple. I don’t have this diatribe or long winded speech about what I like and don’t like.

And have people enjoyed it?

Yeah, hopefully they enjoy it also. When you become a chef, that’s what you want. It’s like any craft. There’s so many other jobs or ways to make money that are less stressful and have an easier lifestyle, but the reason I chose this is because I enjoy creating food and I have fun doing it. I want to make sure my whole staff and crew is having a blast doing it too.

I see that with you and your guys here. Some places you go in and it’s just a routine. Click click click start to finish.

It’s like I tell my cooks, we can have a blast here, we can have a blast after work together, but when it’s time to crunch we crunch. Heads down, we focus. Put out the best product we can. But I’m not a pan thrower. I’m not a yeller. Sometimes you have to I guess but you can still have fun and enjoy coming to work everyday and put out a phenomenal product without being a jerk.

What do you think is the real surprise for the customer eating at Ox & Son?

The real surprise here seems to be that it’s not this big, heavy menu. They think “Ox & Son,” he’s a butcher’s son so it’s going to be meat-heavy… but we have a gluten-free menu. We have a vegetarian menu. We have fresh oysters, uni, mussels, Japanese hamachi. I mean, we have a major balance here, but the name makes some people think they’re going to come here and get a 48 oz. steak, which we don’t even have. We have one steak on the menu.

We have pig cheeks, we have a hangar steak, and a burger. We have chicken fried duck confit. It’s heavier but when you’re done you don’t feel like you’re weighed down. I think people have a misconception about what we’re trying to do. We actually have more fish products than meat, but we have a nice balance of each.

That burger looks good.

I didn’t know there was going to be this resurgence of burgers but I put it on here because I love a restaurant that has a really good burger. I don’t care if it’s a nice place or not, if you have a really good burger I’m there.

And now it’s “a thing,” everybody has a burger on their menu. I thought I’d be cool for a second, but I guess not [laughing]. I guess everybody enjoys a good burger. And we don’t make a penny off of it. It cost so much to make and whatever, but it’s one of those things I wanted to have on the menu so people can still enjoy a really good piece of meat.

People don’t think of burger as a good piece of meat, they think of it as a cheap cut. What we do here is a really good short rib prime chuck. We grind it, we do everything here. A burger patty can be like a prime steak. When you look at it that way, you’ll never look at a burger the same way, especially here.

What is a typical family meal here?

In the beginning it was ordering pizzas [laughing], because we didn’t have time for anything else. Our general manager would get everybody Jack in a Box. It sucks to say that, but at first we just didn’t have time. But now we’re getting better. The other day we had the chocolate bacon… bourbon… cake. It was a cake we made with eggs and sausage over it. That’s a little extravagant [laughing]. The other day we did coconut rice with leftover pig cheeks scraps we made into a vadouvan curry and poured it over rice.

Sometimes what I’ll do for the guys is make a bunch of really nice grilled cheese with some of the most expensive cheeses we have. I’m talking grilled cheese I’m flame throwing with 2 year aged white cheddar, raclette cheese in the middle, fig jam, just real quick. Lots of stews.

The other day we had all this salmon belly leftover, which is delicious, so I cured it, made a miso rub and I smoked it in the back and we had cured miso salmon belly over rice with a miso sauce I made. Something I threw together real quick but it gives everybody a chance to sit down and digress for a minute.

Family meals are really important, I think a lot of chefs forget that. You need to take your cooks out of being stressed, sit down, eat, recharge, have a joke or two… then get back into it. It’s like anything else you do for a living, just take 15 minutes out and you realize whatever’s going on isn’t that bad.

That’s cool. So you have a smoker out back back, in the parking lot?

So what we do is… we’re not supposed to, we’re not allowed to have one. See what you’re finding out here? He’s finding out the little things. We’re not allowed to have a smoker, of course, so it’s hidden. But what we do is pull it out, smoke things, then bring it back in and say I don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s illegal.