Chef Profile: Patricia Williams
Eat & Chef Will Kill You
Photo: David Phelps
The Chef: Patricia Williams, Executive Chef at Nios, formerly District, at The Muse New York in Manhattan. Her first job was plating desserts for Barry Wine at The Quilted Giraffe.
The Toolbox: Williams uses a heavy-duty Irwin carpenter’s box with two trays. “This is the first place where I’ve had a box,” she says. “Before, I only used a knife roll.”
The Tools: A microplaner, pastry tips, whisks, miniature tart trays, larding needles, spoons. “I love spoons,” she says. “Slotted spoons, big spoons, small spoons, wooden spoons. It has to feel good in your hand.”
The Analysis: Before I interviewed Williams, a female bartender told me, “It’s the first restaurant I’ve worked where I’m not terrified of the chef.” Certainly, Williams’ appearance—it’s easy to see that she was a professional ballet dancer in her previous career—often fools people, albeit unintentionally, but her toolbox reveals everything.
This is one chef who likes to play, to experiment, and to see where a particular tool will take her. “I don’t have a lot of toys, but I love gadgets,” she says. “Gadgets and tools are different.” Occasionally, a particular tool—she considers everything in the kitchen to be a tool, from a plate to a sample of Pectinex, a substance that she used to clarify apple juice overnight—will inspire a dish. She offers a truffle and wine pairing, which was inspired by a gently sculpted china plate with three sections.
She relies on several different knives, but has learned to carry them with her after her favorite knife, a Japanese carbon knife, recently grew legs. “I became sentimental about that knife because the chef at my first job had given it to me. Now I keep my new knives locked up.”
While of course there is no shortage of executive chefs—male and female—who establish order on their lines through volume and an overabundance of four-letter words, Williams is different. But all you have to do to know she means business is to read her scrawled warning on a box of Christopher Norman truffles in the walk-in:
Eat & Chef will kill you.
