Casey Lane

Describe yourself. What’s your philosophy about cooking? What has always intrigued me with various things in life is essentially how things are done, where things came from. I was always the little annoying kid that asked ‘why’ constantly.
Cooking is very much the same thing. I was enamored by the process because I loved the end result as so many of us do and just sitting there looking at it, wondering, ‘Where did this come from? How did this get made? Why does someone know how to do this and I don’t know how to do it?’ which kind of leads into cooking through technique, cooking through a craft. That has everything to do with the way I design food, design menus, and constantly stay inspired as a cook and as a chef and all the other aspects of running a restaurant. It has everything to do with that search for the craft, why things were done a certain way, how things have gotten better and worse throughout time and just kind of learning to marry a bunch of different ideas and philosophies into what I end up considering my own.

What exactly is “cooking by technique?” Cooking by technique is exactly what it sounds like, learning to actually cook. It would be comparable to laying down a base for understanding how to play guitar. You need to learn the scales, you need to learn the chords, and then what you do with those is your own interpretation. If you just learn a song, it’s like learning a recipe or like learning a dish, all you know is that. You don’t understand where it came from or how it came about or how to use it to innovate in your own direction.
I think that cooking through technique is exactly that. It’s understanding as many species of fish as you can. Understanding the texture, the fat profile, the way the skin crisps, the way the skin will never crisp, how you need to handle it and then being able to evolve your own cooking by really letting the food tell you what to do with it.

[To bar manager John Coltharp] What’s up with these ice cubes? We use big ice here and really, it’s getting back to the past more than it is the future. When bartending came into fruition in the 1800’s and when they finally had ice available around the 1860’s or 1870’s, they’d be taking big ol’ chunks of ice, hacking it up and shaking with a big cube because its easier than breaking it up into little pieces. They were getting great dilution control and amazing texture to a drink. Not over diluted, not under diluted, and that’s what we do here.
We have multiple sizes of ice for our glass. One cube in our rocks glass, one long cube in our collins glass, and we shake with one cube too. We use R.O. (reverse osmosis) water so it’s a hundred percent beautifully filtered, nearly tasteless, almost completely lacking in minerals so we get a lot of clarity out of the ice and it’s a very dense, hard style of ice. It’s a little more clear and it’s very pretty in the glass, which we love as well because the aesthetic is part of this. To us, it’s so much about function over form, but thankfully we get great form out of it as well.

[Back to Casey Lane] Where are you from, originally? Originally El Paso, Texas. I grew up in-between there with my parents and my other set of grandparents who have some large ranch properties out in New Mexico. On one of the ranches, I mean, I grew up with 30, 40 head of bison and herds of cattle and chicken and eggs and fresh produce and everything. My mom’s family, they are the ones who lived in El Paso, and who I was raised by for a good portion of my life, they’re the ones who were all born in France and ended up making food a large part of my life from a young age. I was just a kid coming home and having chocolate croissants made, you know, not Pillsbury cookies like everyone else gets. That really captured my awe of ‘How did this happen? How did you do this? Why does no one else know how to do this?’
So between the two, it’s funny because maybe being a chef was never what I was suppose to do, especially if you ask anyone in my family. They all come from different backgrounds that would be supposedly more successful [he chuckles], but at the end of it, I can definitely see where those thoughts came from and why I decided to walk the path I have.

How’d you end up in Los Angeles? I was cooking around Portland, right before I started Clarklewis, and I really lost all hope in food, thinking I might as well go work for a country club and make a good amount of money and not really push boundaries because no one out there was legitimately pushing boundaries. Everyone out there was running their mouths and not backing it up with anything behind closed doors. Then I started at Clarklewis and I saw the concept and I saw the people and I saw the food and I saw what was going on. I thought, ‘Wow you guys are going for broke. At the end of the day, you guys aren’t running a successful business, but you’re running a great restaurant.’
It really inspired me to get back into it, to try and marry those two; be a successful business and a great restaurant, which is a very, very difficult thing to do, especially in a small market like Portland.
A gentleman named Daniel Mattern, he now runs a restaurant called Cooks County, he started out through Campanile, was chef de cuisine there and AOC and Lucques, he worked with Nancy Silverton, he worked with Mark Peel, he worked with Suzanne Goin and he ended up coming up to Clarklewis to be the executive chef for a little while.
Things ended up not working out the way they wanted to, so he moved back down to LA and he was talking about opening a restaurant. I really liked working with him, I really believed in his food. It was during the second great depression or whatever, 2008 or 2009, and I thought, ‘Man I gotta get out of here. If I’m going to continue doing this I’m going to have to find a market that can support this.’ We talked about doing a restaurant together, and though that kind of fell through, I still had this ambition to come do this. So I started searching for jobs and then landed in L.A. with a Craigslist ad, the way all food endeavors start, and ended up kind of making this happen.

How did you get the name The Parish? Sifting through and throwing darts. [He laughs] It was half that, I got to be honest. We went through a lot of different names and when someone said ‘The Parish’ we all though ‘yeah, I like that.’ It’s almost too much, it’s almost one of those names where you say ‘you guys really tried, but it’s not quite there.’ We all liked the term at the end of the day because it’s a very exalted term. It’s something that feels and sounds just a little bit important and concrete without having to be so of the moment or so chic, so to speak. We really enjoyed that, we enjoyed the way that it looked and from there it just kind of ended up matching.
England was run by the church and by the parishes; and you have downtown Los Angeles with it’s various parts of the city from the historical, to the fashion district, to the diamond district. We thought of it in those terms and it just seemed to be the one that stuck in everyone’s mind because we didn’t hate it. Seriously, anything you sit with for too long you begin to hate, it’s like a marriage.
Do you consider The Parish a church? No [he laughs and shakes his head]. If you want to interpret it that way, it’s what we hope for, to be the gathering place for this district of Los Angeles, but other than that…

Which kitchen tool could you not live without? A mortar and pestle is a very simple answer… maybe a cleaver and a mallet for butchery.
We do everything by hand, so even the most difficult cuts, short of sawing bone marrow in half, we do by hand. We don’t have bandsaws, we don’t… well, very rarely we use food processors of any kind, so we do everything on a mortar and pestle and we do everything with a cleaver and a mallet. We take down steers, we take down pigs, everything with a cleaver and a mallet. They did it for a very long time that way and you just have to know the process behind it and get a little bit better than just running something through a bandsaw.

When and how did cooking capture you? I don’t know. It’s just one of those things that happens, right? It’s like when you know you’re in love with someone, it just kind of happens and you question why and you’re not sure what’s going on, but you know it’s where you are and where you’re headed.
That’s really all that I can explain of it. Maybe it started cooking with my grandfather when I was 6 and seeing him just making simple pasta and me asking, ‘How did you do that? Why do you know a lot about finance and other things, but you also know how to do this?’
I like eating, I like going out, I like drinking, I like all of it, so I think food was an easy capture on me.

How do you see the future of the culinary world? I don’t know, it’s so hard to tell. I thought it would have peaked five years ago and it seems to not have. It seems to keep pushing, keep going. It seems to be on more people’s radar. More people are going to ‘the middle of the road’ restaurants, and I mean that not in quality but price point and experience, and elevating the bar for everyone. Restaurants like Son of a Gun, Animal, The Parish, Pizzeria Mozza, places where the price point isn’t unattainable for most people, they’re putting out a quality of food and product that’s up there with the best in the industry. What you get there is expectations pushed, you get quality pushed, you get everything, you know?
So this is all affecting fine dining, right? If I can get an amazing meal for fifty dollars, you’re telling me you want a hundred and ten? That had better really blow me away. We knew that was happening, but what nobody really expected is what you’re seeing happen even at your lower end restaurants, they’re having to elevate their game in terms of where their product comes from and what they’re putting on the table, and not just in terms of a health, but in their flavor profiles and in the sourcing of their products.

What kind of music do you listen to when you cook? Oh man. We listen to a lot of ‘Watch the Throne’ by Jay-Z and Kanye. It goes from that to odd things like Chopin, it goes to Rolling Stones, it goes to me in a strange mood and I put on country music that no one wants to listen to, like Alabama radio that ends up playing Alan Jackson all day. It’s everything. I don’t take music very seriously, so we all look at it as a very playful thing inside the kitchen and everyone gets their little time on the radio and we all just laugh at it and keep working.

How do you make sure your product is superior all the time? We can’t ensure it but we strive for it every single day. One of the most important things I teach all the cooks is sifting through your greens, picking through your greens because in a batch of purple fur mustard greens or micro citrus greens or anything, there’s ones in there that aren’t ideal and if you can go down to the detail of sifting through your greens and making sure nothing hits the plate that should not be hitting the plate, then when things become more obvious and on a larger scale it’s easier to grasp.
A lot of it is just a careful selection process and attention to detail and just showing up. I was never the kid who was out drinking too late the night before. I was always the one saying ‘I’m going to go and I’m going to have fun, I’m going to be responsible, I’m going to show up to work the next day and I’m going to show up earlier and I’m going to work later. I’m going to make sure that I always represent myself, represent the business, represent what I care about to its fullest.’ Otherwise, why am I doing this? So I was definitely kind of the boring kid.

What does the term ‘grassroots’ means to you? It means do things right, be a little patient, make sure that you’re following a path that’s building a foundation. Not trying to skip steps. Not running through or getting four scenes ahead of where you should be, but just making sure that you’re laying something down in an organic way that is always going to give you something to fall back on. Sometimes if you skip too many steps, when you fall, you’re going to fall back four steps instead of just falling back to the step you were on before.
You see so many chefs that make you wonder, “Who is he? Where did he even come from? Why is he called a chef?’ But everyone knows his name. When that time ends he’s gone and you don’t know where he went. But you see the people who built properly, and even if they have a misstep somewhere, you still know who and where they are because of everything else that they’ve laid down. I think it’s important to tell myself that constantly, especially in Los Angeles because people really want you to skip steps here. You can move fast, but make sure that you’re steady.

Who has influenced you the most, chef-wise? I couldn’t even tell you. I really couldn’t even tell you. So much of what I do is reading, gathering, literally looking around and being a sponge for everything I can take in from everyone. I definitely go in spurts where, you know, I’m in awe of Blue Hill and everything that they can do. Then I will go in spurts where I’m in awe of Paul Bertolli and what he used to do at Oliveto, which was the slight lineage of what Clarklewis ended up coming from and what was taught there and captured there. Just everything that I’ve absorbed.
Everyone’s got something that they do better than other people. Being a sponge and not having an ego to think that you can’t learn anything is what creates progress. I don’t think that Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, I don’t think he’s ever looked the other way at a great idea that Reebok had. He figured out why they did it, how they did it, adopted it and turned it into something that he could use for his benefit. I think that’s an important quality to have, especially as a cook, because things are always changing. Everything is always evolving, it’s always moving. Just being adaptable and being excited about the adaptation, being excited about the learning is a huge part of why I’ve been able to do what I do and why the food tastes the way that it does.