I'm Francis Lamb and this is the splendid table from APL.

So there's an old joke among restaurant cooks about cooking at home.

The first step of every recipe is to get your shoes out of the oven.

I guess that's a joke really about the kind of closet space that line cooks usually

have at home, but obviously it is a testament to how seldom they really make food at home.

And for the chefs who do, so often it's just miniaturizing what they do in the restaurant.

You know, I had a chef friend tell me that he lost his job in the pandemic and when he

was trying to make dinner at home, his wife walked in horrified to see him basting four

spears of asparagus with a half a pound of butter.

But the chef Gavin Cason is one of the rare chefs I know who truly, authentically loves

home cooking.

I don't just mean cooking at home.

I mean, he loves the kind of cooking that doesn't require two prep cooks to get you set

up and two more dishwashers to get your life back together afterwards.

And I guess I shouldn't have come as a real shock because one thing I know that Gavin

is how much family and the idea of home matter to him.

So he was like all-world chef Daniel Belouis, star Prodejé in New York, but instead of

following the expected path of opening a fine dining temple, he and his family decided

to go back home to Minneapolis where his kids can be co-starched to their relatives and

where he could serve his grandmother's pot roast to a community who would get it.

He's the chef owner of Spoon and Stable, Demi, Belcore Bakery, and Mara in the Twin

Cities and is the author of a new cookbook called No Surprise at Home.

...