After serving as executive chef at Chicago's Viand Bar & Kitchen, Jay Denham returned to his native Kentucky to take the helm of BLU Italian Mediterranean Grille, which features Italian, French and Spanish cuisine with a contemporary twist in Louisville's downtown. Denham tells R&I that fresher, affordable ingredients from around the world would be just the welcome-home present he needs.
What product do you wish existed? It would be nice to get high-quality ingredients quickly without having to pay extreme freights from across the world. Maybe having some standardized warehouses that always had speciality items at affordable prices would be helpful. But I like using local products and it would be great to have some sort of middleman who could put together a group of chefs and farmers in a particular area. They could decide what would be raised for use by those chefs in the group. It would help out the farmers by allowing them to offer their products at a better price point and to move it faster.
Anything else? I would love it if someone designed a restaurant that planned things around the kitchen, as opposed to making the kitchen an afterthought. Things would flow better if the kitchen were built around the menu. The biggest complaint of most chefs is that kitchen appliances are placed in awkward locations because of different architectural structures that are in place.
