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Little Poutine

I started Little Poutine with Sebastian Elie-York, my longtime friend and roommate at the time. It was a passion project born of friendship, a love of hospitality, and a curiosity about what could happen around a dinner table.

Our guest chefs were line cooks in some of the world’s best restaurants. They had extraordinary skill and ideas of their own. But early in their careers, inside kitchens where every movement had its place, those ideas often had to wait. We wanted to give them a table.

We were lucky enough to work with chefs from Blue Hill at Stone Barns, The French Laundry, Jungsik, and many more. At Little Poutine, they could follow an instinct, try something they had been thinking about, and build an evening around food that felt like theirs.

The spirit was closer to a jazz band: people who knew their craft well enough to improvise together. Our job was to bring them into the same room and give them the support to see where it could go.

For two years, we built a new concept every month. Little Poutine found a home in small Brooklyn apartments, Manhattan high-rises, and bed-and-breakfasts. Each space gave the evening a different shape.

Around the chefs, we brought together a community of artists, calligraphers, florists, and hospitality experts. People made the tableware, arranged the flowers, lettered the menus. Sometimes, they built the table itself. That care belonged as much to the evening as anything on the plate.

The ambition was always the same: to give our chefs the best night they’d had since culinary school, and our guests an evening they were reluctant to leave.

I cared about the food, of course. But I cared just as much about the ease that comes when someone else has thought of the small things. You can settle in. You can be yourself. The conversation has time to go somewhere.

My favorite measure of success was how difficult it was to say goodnight. The plates were empty. The candles were low. And somehow, everyone still had one more thing to tell each other.