Q&A: Chef Justin Sutherland

We talked with Minnesota’s next celebrity chef about his Top Chef experience, his signature beard, and his brother's socially conscious streetwear brand.

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The barber at Heimie’s Haberdashery knows Justin Sutherland’s order. The slender chef with the topiary beard glides into the throwback St. Paul shop, has a quick back-and-forth with the fellas in the clothier up front, and makes his way into the barber chair without uttering a single instruction. He flicks his black ball cap aside, eases back in the vintage chair, and lets the barber do his thing.

It’s a Friday in the merciless depths of February, and we’ve tagged along for Sutherland’s appointment because it seems like a beard trim might be the only way to get the ascendant chef to stay put long enough for a meaningful conversation. Last night, for instance, the Apple Valley native showed up at his original restaurant, Handsome Hog, in St. Paul’s Lowertown, where he watched himself on Bravo’s 16th season of Top Chef, which we know now he didn’t win. 

When he’s not there or competing in TV cooking shows (he won a 2018 episode of Food Network’s Iron Chef), the 34-year-old may be taking his cooking talents on the road—like a recent week-long stint in Atlanta during the Super Bowl. On top of all that, as of January, Sutherland became the co-managing partner of the Madison Restaurant Group, whose growing portfolio includes Ox Cart Ale House (in Lowertown), Gray Duck Tavern (downtown St. Paul), and Eagle Street Grille (Lowertown again) to name a few.

As the barber goes about his own meticulous work, I ask the chef about all this. But first, his beard.

You sort of lead with the beard.

I am contractually not allowed to shave. I think we took an insurance policy out on it.

When was the last time you were baby-faced?

I don’t remember. I mean, I’ve been dating my girlfriend for three-and-a-half years, and she’s never seen me without it. I kept it pretty tight until about four years ago when I decided to let it go.

Why?

I used to grow out my hair every winter. Then, about five years ago, I started to grow it out and realized it was only growing on the sides. It wasn’t growing on top anymore! So, I switched to the beard.

And your career took off as soon as you did.

Maybe it’s a Samson thing?

We now know that, despite making it pretty far, you and your Samson beard didn’t win Top Chef. Who did?

 Uhhhh . . . we all had to sign a $1 million nondisclosure, and they let you know that they will sue the heck out of you for saying anything. I would have an e-mail from NBC within 10 seconds. I mean, they have a team of people who follow all of your social media and your top 10 followers.

At the beginning of the show, you were pretty quiet. And then, in like the third episode, you dropped all your corn, and someone on your team asked you if you were “still good on corn.” You lost it, yelling, “I’m not good on corn. That was all the corn and it’s on the floor.” You came alive.

That’s very true. It’s interesting how they develop the story lines. I mean, everybody has to get some story line and screen time. And you kind of realize that the people they are showcasing at the beginning aren’t going to be around very long.

Corn debacle aside, I feel like you really arrived when you held a team meeting in the hot tub. 

Sometimes you forget you’re wearing a mic. There was an amazing hot tub in the house—nobody had been in it yet. They told us we needed to have a team meeting when we got back to the house, and we had extra money left in our budget. So we were quietly like, “Let’s buy some caviar and champagne, and have our meeting in the hot tub.” And then the producer came up and was like, “We heard about your hot tub thing. We’re going to film it.” And we were, “Aww, fuck! The mics!”

You forgot you were in the reality TV bubble. What’s it like in there?

No watches. No calendars. They wouldn’t tell us what time it was. We had, like, prison check marks above our beds to help us figure out what day it was.

Seriously?

We got one phone call a week for 10 minutes. And that was from a pre-approved call list. Or, like, I brought my clippers to trim my beard and they took them away because you have to get supervised haircuts in order to keep continuity.

Crazy. All right, a pillar of each episode is the contestants frantically buying ingredients at Whole Foods stores that always seem to be full of regular shoppers. Are they?

Some are regular. But half the people are like Top Chef heads who are basically camped out there, like, “Are they going to show up today?”

Wait, "Top Chef heads" exist?

Absolutely. I mean, the amount of people I’ve had to block on social media is, like, wow. Stalkers. The amount of people who love you and hate you is about 50/50. There are people in this country who hate me.

These shows change people’s lives in major ways. How are you going to let it change yours?

I’ve had offers in Chicago and L.A. and New York to move and open stuff, but it’s important for me to stay at home.

But even staying here, you are going to be something other than just a regular chef now.

It’s difficult. I still try to be there three days a week, and I try to cook on the line once a week. But every time I’m in there now I have to stop and take a picture with, like, every table in the dining room. Just last night somebody’s kid who wants to be a chef brought their chef coat in because they wanted me to autograph it.

How often do you break down a hog these days?

At least once a month. It’s my Zen. I put my headphones in—it’s almost like Nip/Tuck.

What was your plan before all this?

To be a trial lawyer.

When did that change?

I graduated right in the middle of the big subprime mortgage boom. Everybody was selling mortgages, and making money being horrible. I spent six months sitting in an office doing the mortgage thing, but I realized I was never going to be able to spend my time sitting in an office like that. My dad said, “You’ve always loved to cook.” So, I moved to Atlanta for culinary school, stayed down there for a little over four years, and helped open a couple restaurants. When I moved back my goal was to work for Russell Klein at Meritage, which is what I did.

So, how do you go from there to, just a few years later, Top Chef?

Very strangely. I spent four years at Meritage, and then Russell sent me over to open Brasserie Zentral. And after that first year, I had this quarter-life crisis thing hit me. I was feeling sort of accomplished, but on the other hand, was making no money, and making no personal name for myself. And that coupled with a few other life things—from breakups to car crashes—culminated in me leaving Zentral, selling all my shit, and buying a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.

Seriously? 

I found a little beach in Montezuma and lived there for six months. I read all the cookbooks I’d always wanted to read. I wrote a lot. And it was lying in a hammock that I wrote the business plan to Handsome Hog. Finally, I called my dad and said, “I’m ready to come home! I figured everything out.”

Four years later, it certainly looks like you did. What are your TV prospects like now? Are you officially retired from cooking competition shows?

At least anybody else’s cooking competition. I mean, you do Iron Chef, and then you do Top Chef, and then, what, like Guy’s Grocery Games? Not to knock Guy’s, but there’s a hierarchy to the things you do. You don’t run for city council when you’ve already been mayor.

You always wear a hat. And the one you’ve worn often on television is black with white lettering that says, “In Diversity We Trust.”

It’s actually my younger brother’s clothing company, Hybrid Nation. He started it at Carleton, and it’s evolved into a socially conscious streetwear brand. The thought is that we’re all hybrids regardless of where we came from—we’re all pieces of a lot of things and that’s what makes us, us.

How did the tagline come to be?

It kinda sprung up after the last presidential election. Certain hats were carrying a lot of weight, so we wanted to create a hat that carried a lot of weight in a positive direction. We brainstormed what tagline was going to define the future of that company and be the base of what I was going to build my brand on. And after the Iron Chef episode aired, we sold out of them in three hours.

You mention your brand. What is your brand?

I get asked that question a lot, and every time I do, I have to look more and more internally.

Looking at your Instagram (@jsnaps1084), it paints a pretty fascinating portrait of how your life is changing right now.

That’s funny because I actually just went back through and thought, “If somebody really wanted to analyze where things have gone, my account tells a good story.”

Suddenly @jsnaps1084 is at Vikings games with comedian Nick Swardson and is buddies with Timberwolves star Karl-Anthony Towns. What’s that like?

It’s weird. I mean, I try to keep it all in perspective. But at the end of the day, it’s cool. I try and stay very humble about it and realize that this could still all go away tomorrow. And I’d be back cooking on the line. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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