After a year as the demo kitchen chef at Society Fair, Larry Blevins talks about his life at the stove.
Photo by Vina Sananikone
By Ariel Yong
A woman sits at the bar and holds her iPhone in the air. It’s on camera mode, but the subject she’s trying to capture is moving too fast. She moves her phone around, snaps a few quick pictures, but they’re all blurry. No Instagram filter can fix that. The subject finally stops moving and click. She got it. She places the iPhone back on the table and returns to her charcuterie plate and glass of wine.
The woman is trying to take a picture of Larry Blevins, the chef at Society Fair in Alexandria. It’s Friday evening, and he’s teaching the two-hour, three-course food and wine Demo Kitchen dinner for 10 guests. Even with the ubiquity of exhibition-style restaurant kitchens, most chefs don’t cook—and chat—in front of the people eating their food, especially in a city that Movoto Real Estate ranked the third snobbiest in America earlier this summer.
He moves quickly and efficiently in the wine-bar-turned-kitchen, which is why taking a picture of him is not as easy as one might think. For a self-described “butter-hound,” Blevins is extremely slender with a narrow face covered with a bushy, but trimmed, beard. He wears a small black beret and a matching black apron over his black and white Houndstooth pants.
He’s stylish. He’s theatrical. And in an era where culinary competitions and celebrity chefs are all the rage, Blevins has created his own show, where the kitchen—”the center of everything,” he says—is the stage and he’s the star. “If you could get behind the stove, you had power over everybody,” Blevins says. “You had the floor. Everybody paid attention to you. You got all the compliments and the praise.”
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Ginger Walker, Blevins mother, left his father when Blevins was four years old. The two lived in Louisiana and bonded over their time in the kitchen, where Blevins fell in love with whisking eggs and mixing biscuits.
Eating out on their budget—Walker joined the Army and earned $800 a month— was difficult, so the pair could only afford to eat at restaurants once a month. Inspired by the dishes on restaurant menus, Blevins and his mom would recreate the dishes at home, taking notes at the restaurant “if something looked extra appealing,” Blevins says.
One dish he remembers in particular is the Southwestern egg rolls from Chili’s, which the chef says, “looked so good on the commercial.” After eating the eggrolls in the restaurant a few times, Blevins said it took three or four tries to perfect the fried pouches of black beans, Monterrey jack cheese, chicken and pico de gallo in his home kitchen with his mother. Instead of using a deep fryer with automatic temperature settings, the two relied on flour balls to check the temperature of the oil. And even though he now has professional fryers with thermometers at Society Fair, Blevins still drops balls of flour into the hot oil to see how long it takes the sizzling clumps to brown.
“It reassures me that my oil is where I want it to be,” Blevins says.
Relief is exactly what Blevins finds in the kitchen and especially did during a rough time as a teenager. When he was about 17 years old, Blevins ran away from his mother. Drugs and “a very bad crowd,” says Blevins, kept him away for many weeks. When he realized he wanted to change his lifestyle, Blevins returned home, specifically on a Sunday morning when he knew his mother would be cooking breakfast in the kitchen. He told her that he had skipped school for weeks. His mother listened to every word he said while the two were in the kitchen. “If you want to talk about something taboo,” Belvins says, “you can talk about it in the kitchen.”
It was only after their sacred time cooking in the kitchen was over that Walker yelled at her son.
In an effort to start over, the mother-son pair moved to Georgia where Blevins spent years working odd jobs bartending, selling cars and working in construction. Time passed and the jobs changed, but one thing always remained—his attraction to the kitchen. Blevins cooked to relieve stress. So he thought, why not make it a profession?
Walker was eventually stationed in Virginia and Blevins followed. He enrolled in L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Maryland when he was 28 years old. He worked at Acadiana in D.C. as a line cook during his school externship and also as a fry cook at 901 Restaurant & Bar. Veteran chefs in D.C. told him it was going to take a few years before he could become a sous chef. Unhappy with this prospect, Blevins left Acadiana to work at Society Fair in December 2012.
After only a couple months of experience under his belt, Blevins’ boss, Chef Dan Fisher, left for an 11 day vacation, leaving a man who once couldn’t afford to eat out in restaurants in charge of the establishment. According to Blevins, everything that could go wrong went wrong. A piece of equipment broke on the first day. Repairs cost the restaurant “more money than [they] should have spent,” Blevins says.
Blevins’ last day in charge was a Thursday, which is steak night at Society Fair and it was one of the most successful. Blevins recalls cooking more than 50 steaks that night.
“I remember leaving that day going ‘I survived. I survived the boss being gone, and I took on one of the busiest days.’”
And this is when Blevins realized he could do it. He was going to become a chef. But not only would he become a chef cooking in the back, unseen and unheard from his customers, but he would also find his way to the front of the house.
One year ago, in the middle of last August, Blevins started hosting the Demo Kitchen.
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“Tomatoes are magical,” Blevins tells the audience, who nods along in between mouthfuls of cured meats. He explains that tomatoes can be used to help heal burns as he prepares the fruit for his shrimp dish. Blevins starts on Louis XVI sauteed shrimp. The iPhones come back out when he does the saute flip—a trick Blevins recommends practicing with beans or rice before trying seafood—and the audience claps when he sets the pan ablaze, sending bright flames soaring to the ceiling. The smoky haze fills the wine bar and kitchen.
“As long as the batteries in your smoke detector don’t work, it won’t be an issue,” Blevins says with a smile.
Blevins does not stop talking throughout the demonstration. Watching Blevins is like observing organized chaos. He flips a serrated knife over in his hands and slices bread. Then he turns the temperature up on the stove because “it’s going a little slow” for him. He whoops and hollers as he incorporates butter into the shrimp’s pan, making it sizzle and pop. He runs the saute pan over to the bar and shows the audience the searing shrimp, smoke quickly rising up from the pan as the heat and the smell of hot, buttery seafood hit the audience in the face. The iPhones return for more social media-worthy pictures.
“My mom likes the thickly cut onions,” Blevins tells the guests, while cutting the vegetable for a braised pork hock. “I like the thinner ones. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your onions. They’re very versatile.”
Not only is Walker’s presence remembered during the Demo Kitchen, but Blevins also pays tribute to his mother on the restaurant’s menu with her gumbo recipe. Although he’s graduated from recreating Chili’s menu items to running an acclaimed kitchen in a restaurant-centric neighborhood, Blevins still remembers his humble beginnings and the woman who made it all possible.
“She wanted me to go to college and do big things,” Blevins says. “But when I told her I was cooking, she knows how much I love it. She knows what we can do in the kitchen. My mom is Society Fair’s biggest fan.”