Chef Jack Riebel
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Who is the chef who opened the greatest number of restaurants in the Twin Cities in the 2010’s? I think it might be chef Jack Riebel, with Butcher & the Boar, Il Foro, Half-Time Rec, and St. Paul dominator The Lexington. He’s about to open an airport restaurant, The Cook & The Ox, and he’s cooked at some of the Twin Cities’ most esteemed, legendary, and straight out wonderful restaurants—he was the sous chef at Goodfellow’s for a decade (back when people were sous chefs for a decade) and led Twin Cities legend La Belle Vie during the years when founding chef Tim McKee and co-owner Josh Thoma were opening the tapas bar Solera.
Riebel did all this from a background as a blue-collar 15-year-old high school drop-out—and he has an all-Minnesota reputation as the rootin’ tootin’ scrapper with a heart of gold. When I looked in our photo archive and found this silly picture I had to laugh—he always plays up his scrappy Popeye-the-sailorman superhero side. But he's always been known for his fine cooking too, Riebel’s the guy who can create a sauce that brings tears of joy to your eyes, and then he'll climb up on the stove to clean out the hood and tell a profane, hilarious story that brings tears of laughter to your eyes, then he'll climb down from that and help you find a new job. That's his reputation in kitchens all over town. So it’s not an exaggeration to say that when he posted on his own Facebook page on Monday that he was in a fight for his life following a cancer diagnosis, the news raced through the industry like a gallon of vinegar poured right on a hot grill—right in your eyes, bringing tears.
I have been talking to Riebel on and off for twenty years, he's always honest and open, and he wanted to get the story out, in an organized way, before gossip and speculation overran his restaurant-family First, let’s talk about the cancer, which is either a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full situation, depending on your mood. Despite what you may have heard, it isn’t pancreatic cancer. Riebel has cancer of the neuroendocrine system, which can result in cancerous tumors forming in any number of organs. This cancer is what Aretha Franklin had, and Steve Jobs as well. (Disambiguation here between neuroendocrine cancer and pancreatic cancer, if you need it.) As of right now, he does not have a tumor.
Riebel was feeling lousy all last winter with various GI issues, and his doctor kept telling him: Lay off that chef lifestyle! Drink less and live right. His doctor was wrong. Today his doctor wishes they'd taken Riebel more seriously and had gotten cancer imaging scans six months ago, because when he got one in June it already had metastasized within his liver. Around the Fourth of July weekend he got all the tests, got a port put in, and started chemotherapy. Since then he has felt, alternately, sick as a dog and basically okay. He has stepped back in his kitchen duties, and is mainly supervising while his sous chef takes on more leadership. He’ll be in full on chemotherapy through the fall, and, hopefully, healing through the holidays. After that lies the unknown. Just like it does for all of us reading this!
“Aretha Franklin had the same cancer, and lived about 10 years with it,” Riebel told me. “But everyone has been asking, they see I’m not in the kitchen, and it’s time for me to share where I am. It’s a rare, rare cancer, there’s no cure, but I’m hopeful. Sometimes you get the short stick, and I got it. But it’s not terminal, and right now I want to keep my business going. People are worried I’m dying, but that’s not what I’m doing. I’d rather fight the fight, and fixate on that. I’ve been fearless my whole career—there’s a difference between being scared and being afraid. I am scared, but I’m not afraid. When I look back at all my efforts for charity,” Riebel is a tireless volunteer at charity events big and small, “I’ve given a lot. If The Lex is my legacy, I am good with that. I hope it can live on with or without me, and I can be thankful for that. I never did my work thinking of the legacy you leave behind, that’s not why you do the work. When you’re a chef you’re only ever as good as your last plate, but you do the work well because you have to have a purpose. Whether you’re making a burger or a dish with a hundred steps. When I think about the good things that have been said of my career, I think of being nominated by the James Beard Foundation for Butcher & the Boar, I think of cooking for Gorbachev, and I think of Steven Brown who said I had the most integrity of any chef he ever met. Steven also called me a raconteur, and called the things I say Riebelisms. I say things again and again, redundant for the sake of authenticity, if you know what I mean. Someone should write them all down.”
Because that's what I do, write things down, I reached out to a bunch of his former kitchen running buddies, and assembled some. I got in touch with chefs Jim Christiansen, Shawn Smalley, Mike DeCamp, Tyge Nelson, Mike Brown, Bill Fairbanks, and Joe Rolle.
So, here you go Jack: Riebelisms! (Or at least the ones marginally fit for a family publication.) Number one? “I taught you everything you know—not everything I know.” That one was cited by half a dozen cooks. Not far behind in popularity, and this you must picture delivered during some kind of kitchen-chaos: “How’s your last day going?” and: "I may not hit bottom, but I'll bang the hell out of the sides." For cooks on-the-line: “This dish has more steps than the IDS.” And: “You know what they call a cook without tongs? A dishwasher.” "I'm in the weeds and there's ass clowns everywhere." As a general quality check, regarding seafood: “If it smells like fish, skip the dish.” On plating: “Don’t be so stingy. If it’s on the menu, we should give it to them.” On everything: "What the fuck is second place?" and "That guy, he's a real Richard." A few personal ones: From Mike DeCamp, who has a very on-trend pirate beard, delivered as fond greeting: “Hey, monkey face.” From Mike Brown; “Mike I’m just trying to cook good food and teach anyone who will shut up and listen.” Bill Fairbanks: "They broke the mold with you, kid." Joe Rolle: "Hey lunch box, show me what you got." To the Travail crew: “Dude, I’m fucking old school. All you young bucks do it differently. Not a bad thing. I’m just saying.” (“If you have a 30 minute conversation with Jack, in that 30 minutes he will for sure say he’s old school. You will for sure talk about other restaurants, and he will have explained step-by-step how it cash flows, and how each dish works, he’s like a walking talking storybook on how restaurants function,” Mike Brown of Travail told me.) Of the general chaos one might find cooking off-site for a charity event: “Can you believe that shit? I don’t care, my shit’s on point.” The eternal: “I just want to fucking cook good food, and anyone who will shut up and listen can come along for the ride.”
The last major Riebelism was brought up by every chef I talked to, and takes a little explaining. Warning: It is not for the prim. “Take a whiff of my pant leg.” What could this possibly mean? Imagine a wildly busy night on the line, when things seem on the edge of veering into calamity for six hours running, but, in the end, you did it, you pulled it out of the weeds, you served 200 people dinner and did it well. In that instance, the phrase refers to the way one has sweated one’s balls straight off, and they have become integrated into the material of the pants. "Take a whiff of my pant leg" here means; you can smell the disaster and survival upon me. Similarly, yet oppositely, the phrase may refer to the way one has emerged unscathed from a harrowing cooking experience in which others can be reasonably anticipated to have sweated off their balls, but in the end, the narrator emerged blithely sweat-free and bearing a surprisingly fresh and pleasant odor. Thus “Take a whiff of my pant leg” can mean one has narrowly averted succumbing to disaster, or it can mean one has easily sailed through what others experienced as disaster, and either way it makes people in a stressed out kitchen laugh.
Chef, here’s hoping that on the other side of this, many pant legs, infinite pant legs, may be whiffed.
Of course, the Twin Cities food community wants to know what they can do. Another Riebelism I elected to save for right here has instructions embedded right in it. Riebel has long been known for supporting all the new restaurants in town, and greeting the owners with: “Great meal, chef. I gotta have you over to The Lex. Let me know when you want to come in and I’ll cook for ya.” Riebel says the main thing he would like you to do in this difficult time is to support The Lex! He’ll be there as much as he can, and especially at the beginning of service Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Grab a seat in the bar. He might swing through. You can also send good thoughts to his wife, Kathryne Cramer, wine steward at Borough, who is the chef’s rock.
“I could live another awesome five or ten years,” Riebel told me. “All I know is, I don’t get the choice to live forever. No one does. And as a chef I always say, it doesn’t matter what you did ten years ago, it matters what you do now. That’s truer for me than it’s ever been.”
And it matters what we do now. So, family, rally. It's time to show your love to the ones you love—in kitchens and everywhere.
