Sit-down dinners have just come to the Disgruntled Chef, on Friday and Saturday evenings only, and downtown Gardiner won’t know what hit it. Formerly known as Julian’s Provisions, the Main Street eatery was already an early-morning destination for the cognoscenti who wanted an outstanding cup of coffee and a scone, some perfect avocado toast or a serving of special baked oatmeal on their way up to the Gunks for a hike. However, “I didn’t come up here to cook breakfast,” says James Frank, who runs the place with his wife, Danielle Goodreau.
The Hudson Valley was an unlikely place to land for the couple, both of whom were culinary superstars in their native Richmond – where he was better-known as Chef J Frank, and they were frequently featured in Virginia Living magazine. “COVID drove us north,” he explains, noting offhandedly that Goodreau lost her job with a caterer when the pandemic brought public events to a halt and that he had to leave his own position as a private chef for a wealthy elderly couple.
Delve a little deeper, though, and you’ll find out why ending up spending 96 hours a week, in Frank’s estimation, at an outpost in rural Ulster County could turn a guy “disgruntled.” The nickname was bestowed – as a “term of endearment,” Frank says – by their sous chef, Paul LaMarche. Among the three of them, they have more than a century’s work of culinary experience.
The Richmond caterer for whom Goodreau had been working as executive chef, A Sharper Palate, was owned by six-time World Champion Pitmaster Tuffy Stone, with whom she developed the menus for Cool Smoke: The Art of Great Barbecue (2018). It was through Stone that the pair met in 2016, and all three got a rare invitation that year to prepare barbecue at the James Beard House in New York City.
But if your mental image of Southern cookery is a lot of deep-fried stuff, barbecue sauce and red-eye gravy, that’s not what these folks brought upstate with them. Goodreau got her basic training at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts before going to work at the C-House restaurant in Chicago. In San Francisco, she mastered New American cuisine at the Alembic Bar and the Ram’s Gate Winery before returning to her hometown, recruited by Stone to serve as executive chef at Rancho T, where Frank was serving as a consultant. Later she divided her time between Tazza Kitchen and A Sharper Palate.
“I apprenticed under a Swiss chef, and then moved to Europe,” Frank recounts of his own career arc. He continued an apprenticeship in Austria, spent several years as assistant chef at a restaurant just outside of Munich, and then took a position at Hintlesham Hall Hotel in England. “I was there for six or seven months and wanted to stay, but I had no green card, so I came home, at age 30.” He worked for a while at the Indian Creek Country Club in Florida; returned to Virginia for “a couple of years” at the Inn at Little Washington; did a stint in Manhattan as a freelance caterer.
Back in Richmond, he was hired in 1991 as executive chef at the Berkeley Hotel, where he spent four years before being recruited to become the private chef to Sydney and Frances Lewis, who had made a fortune running a successful chain of catalog showroom stores, Best Products Co. Inc. Accepting that offer was “the best thing I ever did,” Frank says. He stayed on for nearly a quarter-century, working in a home where he was surrounded by the Lewises’ fabulous art collection, and helmed the kitchen at many a philanthropic gala. On the side, he started up some small enterprises of his own, including a gourmet donut shop, Dixie Donuts.
It was in 2018 that Frank and Goudreau first came to Gardiner, for a New Year’s Eve party at a farm owned by Alex Dzieduszycki, founder of Terra Chips and Alexia Foods, whom Frank had befriended during his years in Europe. On a second visit, they noted the availability of the former Schiro’s Grocery at 125 Main Street, which had been the Village Market and Bakery for about ten years before Carl Zatz took over in 2014, adding sit-down dining. The Village Market and Eatery shut down in November 2019, and Zatz hadn’t yet found a buyer when the pandemic struck. With no immediate prospects in Richmond, Frank and Goudreau moved north and opened Julian’s Provisions with Dzieduszycki as a partner in September 2020, focusing on takeout.
“This is our ‘millionaire’ location,” Frank says wryly of the couple’s unexpected, adversity-driven relocation after long careers with high visibility in the Richmond high-end food business. “It’s a labor of love. The food speaks for itself.”
Frank and Goodreau bought out Dzieduszycki’s interest a year later, establishing The Disgruntled Chef as the new name for the business in late 2022 and closing down briefly that winter for remodeling. They removed some interior walls that had been installed to facilitate social distancing and opened the space up for more tables, now seating 32 indoors and 15 in the sidewalk café area. “We reopened in February with a new look.”
The menu originally featured products from Dzieduszycki’s company Julian’s Recipe – notably Belgian pastry waffles as a basis for a number of breakfast specialties – and quickly developed a following. The selection of lunch dishes is equally enticing, especially the gourmet sandwiches. Order a tuna melt here, and you’ll get it on fabulous sourdough bread, and topped with arugula, for example. “We give comfort foods a little different twist. We want people to know there are other things out there besides a ham-and-cheese – to take them out of their comfort zone,” says Frank.
Prepared foods to take home became a big draw during the pandemic shutdown period, and continue their popularity: seasonal entrées from many world cuisines, housemade soups, deli salads that far transcend the ordinary. We especially recommend the crunchy three-bean salad, which features white cannellini beans, fresh string beans and sugar pea pods, rather than the usual mushy kidney beans and garbanzos.
The baked goods, mostly made here, are exquisite. They sell whole rotisserie chickens made with a special proprietary spice-rub blend and smoke their own pastrami-cured salmon in-house. They also churn their own ice cream, in a wide variety of flavors from mundane to wildly imaginative. We brought home a pint of the Orange Creamsicle, and it’s gloriously rich and creamy. Even the offerings not created on-site are top-quality and nearly all local, including eggs from Brookside Farm, meats from Full Moon Farm and yogurt from Willow Pond Sheep Farm.
While dinner entrées have been available for takeout from the get-go, with special full-meal packages by special order for holidays, a “friends and family” gathering on Friday evening, August 18 was the first time that the Disgruntled Chef has hosted a sit-down dinner with table service. Henceforward, the market will be closed for breakfast on Fridays and Saturdays only, opening at 11 a.m. for lunch, closing at 4 p.m. to prep for dinner and reopening from 5 to 8 p.m. “We always wanted to do dinner,” Frank says.
What will the evening offerings be like, exactly? As of presstime, technical problems with the website were making it impossible to view the full menu, but past dinner specialties have included such items as braised short ribs, crabcakes, mushroom lasagna and a variety of risottos. The Disgruntled Chef Facebook group is teasing chicken wings with Korean barbecue sauce, cashews, scallions and bleu cheese as one option. Visit www.facebook.com/disgruntledchef for updates.
The Disgruntled Chef is located at 125 Main Street (Route 44/55) in Gardiner, right across the street from the post office. Call (833) 592-3353 for dinner reservations and more information. Regular market hours will remain 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays, with the kitchen closing at 4 p.m.
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