58 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM For a chef who’s earned multiple Michelin stars, Joseph Humphrey’s first foray into a professional kitchen wasn’t particularly auspicious. His mom and dad worried that their “skate punk” son lacked direction, so Joseph’s dad found the 15-year-old a job at a Whataburger restaurant in their hometown of Tallahassee, Florida. “It was kind of life-changing,” recalls the new executive chef at Oak + Violet in Menlo Park of his time at the burger chain. “These were some of the hardestworking people I've ever met. Everybody hung out together. It was a family.” In those early days, the kitchen camaraderie appealed more to Joseph than the fast-food cuisine. But as the years passed, he cobbled together a stellar culinary education, working his way into increasingly prestigious restaurants, studying cookbooks and experimenting with recipes from back issues of Gourmet magazine. By the time Joseph made his way from the Sunshine State to the Golden State (with a stop in New Orleans), he’d graduated from burgerflipper to oyster-shucker and salad-maker at San Francisco’s acclaimed One Market restaurant. “It wasn't until I came out here, at One Market, that it became about the food,” he says. “Everything before that was the environment, the people and the sense of hospitality.” In the Bay Area, Joseph’s culinary imagination and his career both blossomed, thanks to some {food coloring}
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