Erik Waldkirch wants to help raise the bar at Bar Keough. The recently-hired executive chef at the bar/restaurant at 247 Cooper Street is working with manager Chris Hawkins, bartender/cook Colleen Couch, and the staff to “add a level of greatness to Memphis, food wise.”
This isn’t about “me coming in guns blazing,” Waldkirch says. “We’re all meeting each other where we are, and growing together.”
Waldkirch, 54, is impressed with owner Kevin Keough. “I really like his attitude. I really like his outlook on some things,” says Waldkirch. “I told him, ‘Hey, look. If I can come here and make a difference, help push more food out of here, get you on the map a little bit more, then let’s just do it.’”
Growing up with his German parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Waldkirch ate a lot of latkes and other potato and sauerkraut dishes. But he was particularly fascinated with his mother’s bread-making skills. “I’d sit in front of the oven and watch bread bake. And I’d learn how to bake bread from her.
“It was just a thing for me. I was a very visual kind of hands-on type of person. It was more interesting to me to go learn how to tie a fishing knot than to go read a book. Let’s go build something.”
As a latchkey kid, Waldkirch “built” what he wanted to eat. Like making a sandwich “out of condiments.”
When he was 15, Waldkirch got his first job loading and unloading trucks at a big catering company. “I was always in and out of the kitchen. Maybe in a year or so they started having me do things like peeling potatoes.” And he always kept an eye on what the chefs were cooking.
After a year of college, Waldkirch moved to Silverthorne, Colorado, where he got a job in the lodge restaurant at Keystone Ski Resort. “I was pretty much clueless when it came to working in a restaurant,” he says. “They put me in this pantry. So, I started doing cold food stuff.”
Later, while working at The Accomac Inn in York, Pennsylvania, Waldkirch noticed that the chefs had gone to prestigious culinary schools. So, he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in New York. “I went there with so many questions, and a lack of awareness of so much.”
But, he says, “I actually loved being in a school that made sense to me.” And, he adds, “My interest in what I was doing really drove my ability to learn. I was talking to the chefs and I was interested in what they were talking about. And I wanted to learn more.”
Waldkirch got to “observe and assist” when he staged at the now-closed Lespinasse in the St. Regis Hotel in New York. “The rubber started hitting the road just watching bones fly, doing stuff that was being built on 1,000-degree flat tops in one-quart copper saucepans at light speed.”
When he worked under a French chef for the first time at Old Drovers Inn in upstate New York, his cooking career “really started to take hold.” He then moved to Chicago, where he worked at the Four Seasons restaurant.
Waldkirch moved to Memphis, where his ex-wife is from, 24 years ago. He was a chef at Caritas Village before opening up his own catering business, Maximillian’s, and then becoming executive chef at The Half Shell.
He moved to Bar Keough a month ago. “These are food people,” he says. “So there’s building excitement. Lots of conversations about food are happening.”
Couch develops a menu around the music she features every other week at “Mixtape Mondays.” She and Waldkirch recently featured New Orleans-themed food, including duck gumbo, jambalaya, and beignets with Bananas Foster cream.
Waldkirch also did the food for Bar Keough’s recent Oktoberfest. Harking back to his childhood, the fare included potato pancakes with apple cranberry compote as well as bratwurst with German potato salad and braised red cabbage.
He wants Bar Keough to offer food that will delight the customers. “Once the door opens, that’s showtime: great service, great appearance, great specials, attention to customers, attention to details.”
