Chef John Shields
Coastal Ventures, Baltimore, MA

Chef Participant: Cooking for Solutions Conference 2006

Chef John Shields, Culinary Ambassador of the Chesapeake Bay, is a nationally acclaimed expert in regional American coastal cuisine. His career began informally when, at a very early age, he worked with his grandmother Gertie Cleary in a church hall kitchen. They fixed businessmen's luncheons and parish fund-raising dinners for dozens to hundreds of guests. Grandmom was the perfect teacher.

"I remember as a small boy in Baltimore my grandmother's excitement with each approaching season and the treasures it offered for the table," John says. "We would marvel at the first asparagus of the spring, breathe in the sweet, musky fragrance of ripe Eastern Shore melons, and laugh at the antics of feisty blue crabs as they escaped from overflowing bushel baskets. When my grandmother prepared the food, be it vine-ripened tomatoes or fresh-from-the-bay rockfish, I was always aware of the quiet reverence she felt for these prized gifts."

John's illustrious professional career began by accident. After studying at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, this Baltimore native moved to Cape Cod with aspirations of becoming a rock star, and played the piano in bars. Then one day an injured friend asked John to work his shift in the kitchen of a popular Cape Cod inn. Little did John know that his first day, spent making 36 pie shells, would evolve into many years as a restaurant chef/owner, author, and host of national public television series.

In the 1980s, John moved to Northern California, where he joined the New American Food revolution. He was first executive chef at A La Carte, a highly regarded French restaurant in Berkeley. But he missed the food of his youth, so he opened his own restaurant, named it for his grandmother, and began to introduce San Francisco Bay area residents to the wonderful regional American fare of the Chesapeake Bay. Gertie's Chesapeake Bay Café was located in Berkeley's famous "gourmet ghetto," where soon-to-be stars such as Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman and Jeremiah Tower were reinventing American cooking. Gertie's quickly gained enormous popularity, and California magazine hailed it as "a shining star in the culinary constellation of Northern California restaurants."

Nearly two decades, and many, many crab cakes, later, John made his way back to Baltimore, where he now lives. He owns and operates an award-winning restaurant, Gertrude's at the Baltimore Museum of Art -- still paying homage to his grandmother, though a little more formally.

John is the author of three cookbooks on the cuisine of Chesapeake Bay: The Chesapeake Bay Cookbook (Addison-Wesley, 1990); The Chesapeake Bay Crab Cookbook (Addison-Wesley, 1992); and Chesapeake Bay Cooking with John Shields (Broadway Books, 1998). In 1998 public television stations across the country began airing John's series "Chesapeake Bay Cooking," based on the book. For the series, John hit the road, interviewing folks around the Chesapeake region and showing how they prepared their favorite regional dishes. The series was so popular it ran for years.
John's second series, "Coastal Cooking with John Shields," currently being shown nationwide on the Public Broadcasting System, follows a similar format with interviews and on location episodes filmed in some of the most spectacular coastal regions of the United States. The companion cookbook, "Coastal Cooking with John Shields" (Broadway Books, 2004) contains 125 recipes from the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf Coasts and Hawaii.

John's writings have appeared in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Coastal Living, Southern Living, and Esquire. He is a frequent guest chef on radio and television, and he teaches classes in American coastal cooking at private culinary arts institutions around the country.

Currently, he writes a column for the monthly magazine, Baltimore eats, and the quarterly, Edible Chesapeake. He is an active member of many community organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group dedicated to protecting the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding wetlands. He's also active in a variety of professional organizations, including the International Association of Culinary Professionals, Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance, Slow Food, and the Chefs' Collaborative, which promotes sustainable agriculture through use of indigenous foods and local suppliers.

And by the way ... he still wants to be a rock star

Restaurant (s)
Coastal Ventures
- Chef John Shields
Baltimore, Maryland
www.johnshields.com

Chef Recipe(s):
Catfish Po Boys with Apple-Fennel Slaw