When he was 6 years old, Ben Chavez used metal squares, circles, and triangles to create art in Montessori school. When he was 40, he used square and oval flatbread to create his “Barbecue Burnt End” and “Mediterranean” flatbreads at Terrace at the River Inn restaurant.
Whether it’s numbers, objects, art, or food, Chavez, who is chef de cuisine with the River Inn property in Harbor Town, has always been good at combining “ingredients.”
His stepfather was the cook in the family because Chavez’s mother worked long hours as a server in a restaurant. Chavez didn’t want to be a chef, but he liked to observe the cooking process. He liked to “see how it started and how it ended.”
He became more fascinated with cooking after his grandmother, who had Mexican roots, moved in with them and began making tortillas from scratch and other culinary items. “I saw a whole different side of cooking.”
Chavez, who worked in telecommunication jobs, didn’t get into cooking until he was 30. “That’s when I was sort of figuring out how to cook.”
His parents gave him a Crock-Pot. “I didn’t know what to use it for.”
He came up with chili after he went online to find out what he could cook in it. “After looking at a bunch of different cooks’ recipes, I arrived at my own.”
Chavez learned to cook by “trial and error.” Like “trying to cook a steak correctly. Cooking a pork chop right. Buying what was cheap and figuring out how to cook it.”
After he got furloughed from his job as merchandising coordinator for Levi Strauss during Covid, Chavez began painting and customizing shoes. “You put cold water in a bucket, spray paint the water, dip the shoe in, and it would create a design on the shoe.”
Chavez, who also painted his own designs on shoes, sold them for $200 and up.
His wife then discovered some of his old recipes. “She had been cleaning the house or whatever and found a bunch of old notebooks I had dating back into my 20s. I had been writing down recipes or writing down food I had liked and enjoyed or experienced.”
Looking up online culinary schools he could attend, Chavez’s wife discovered the online Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Chavez said he’d give it a shot. “And then sort of ran with it.”
In 2021, they moved to Ripley, Tennessee, to live in a house his dad had just rehabbed. Chavez applied and got a job cooking “just very Southern old school” fare at the Old Town Hall & Cafe in Covington, Tennessee. “I worked there for free for the first 90 days.”
But, he adds, “I was getting my foot in the door.”
He created “secret dinners” at the restaurant after it closed at night. He sold tickets to the three- or four-course dinners, but he wouldn’t reveal beforehand what the menu consisted of. “I had a lot of fun. That was me learning the craft.”
After Old Town Hall, Chavez moved to The Cellar Restaurant and Prohibition Bar next door. From there, he went to Brownsville, Tennessee’s Serendipity Bar & Grill, where he “moved the menu forward. Made some changes.”
He was working at Guy Fieri’s Tunica Kitchen & Bar at Horseshoe Casino when he landed a job at Paulette’s, which includes Terrace, also located in the River Inn.
Shortly after he landed the job, Chavez and food and beverage manager Daniel Clark went to work changing the Terrace menu. Instead of serving steaks, Chavez suggested they concentrate on “good food that came relatively quickly and could be shared.”
They kept the cheese balls, French fries, and beef and lamb sliders, but they went to flatbread pizzas, which were faster and less heavy. Chavez created the Barbecue Burnt End Flatbread and Mediterranean Flatbread. “We just add the ingredients and build it like a pizza.”
Summing up his culinary career so far, Chavez, who now lives in Memphis, says, “I’m very shocked I was able to move this forward this fast.”
But, he adds, “You force yourself to rise to the occasion.”