Other kids used to joke about Guy Sockrider’s name. They said, “Are you riding your socks?”
Well, Sockrider has been riding his socks pretty heavily since he became the new executive chef at Paulette’s Restaurant at the River Inn of Harbor Town a little over a month ago. “I have not left Mud Island since I came here,” he says. “And I live nine-tenths of a mile from the restaurant.”
Actually, he did leave at least once.“I left and went to Whole Foods and got lost. I want to see the city, but it’s going to be awhile.”
During his career, Sockrider has worked with noted chefs, including Paul Prudhomme and Roger Vergé.
Asked what originally enticed him about cooking, Sockrider says, “I think it’s the art of it. The fact that you’re making something that people love. That’s one of the biggest thrills I have. Walking through the dining room and watching guests take the first bite of food.”
His philosophy is, “I’m only as good as the last plate I serve. And I love to come out and see the look on guests’ faces the first time they eat something they never have before.”
In addition to the best service, Sockrider believes a restaurant should provide the “very best in food, very best in china, the very best in glassware.”
Sockrider, who is planning a completely new look for Paulette’s dining room, also is overhauling the kitchen. He’s already created special dinners, including a Charles Dickens-inspired Christmas Eve dinner.
Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Sockrider’s love of cooking began as a child, but if he was anybody else, it might have ended there.
When he was 4 years old, his grandmother took him out to the chicken coop, where he watched her wring a chicken’s neck.“She picked it up, gave it a swing, and blood was everywhere.”
It was horrifying, Sockrider says. “But my grandmother used to make the best chicken and dumplings.”
He began working in his first restaurant, Churchill’s, in Omaha, Nebraska, when he was 14. “My mother introduced me to the chef, who was a semi-retired chef from the SS France they had brought in. This was back in the day when chefs were really brutal.”
The chef “was very difficult and hard to work with, but I learned tremendous things from him.”
Sockrider then landed a job at Le Perroquet in Chicago. “I washed dishes and cooked. Did a lot of prep. Moved up. By the time I finished high school, I was sous-chef.”
He then met Roger Vergé, who was a guest chef at the restaurant. “At the end of the night after we finished the very formal dinner, he said, ‘Would you like to come home with me and work?’ And I was on a plane the next day.”
Sockrider became assistant to the chef saucier at Verge’s Le Moulin des Mougins restaurant in France. “I was the first American to ever work the line of one of Vergé’s restaurants.”
Having Vergé observe him on the line when he was auditioning to be the restaurant’s chef saucier was pretty scary. “He stood next to me, watched me, and didn’t say a word the entire time through the service. I was terrified.”
Vergé finally showed some emotion when Sockrider was through. “He grabbed me, hugged me, and told me I was chef saucier.”
Sockrider only stayed at the restaurant for 13 months. “I got deported because I didn’t have the correct paperwork.”
He moved back to the United States, where he became Paul Prudhomme’s executive sous-chef at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. “He was a gem. I knew nothing about Cajun or Creole cuisine.”
But Prudhomme was supportive. “He saw my enthusiasm. He taught me so many things, it was unbelievable.”
He taught him “the way to blacken a fish, the way to buy the very best produce that you can to make the very best dish that you can.”
When Prudhomme left Commander’s Palace, so did Sockrider, who took a job as executive chef at the Plimsoll Club, a “very formal” French restaurant at the World Trade Center in New Orleans.
From 1996 to 2004, Sockrider worked at the now-closed Top of the Cove, a “very highly rated” restaurant in San Diego, California, before moving back to Nebraska. “My grandmother was the only member of my family that was still alive. After my mother passed, I went back to Omaha to take care of her.”
While in Omaha, Sockrider worked as a professor for the Institute for the Culinary Arts.
But he and his wife weren’t planning on staying in Omaha forever. “I told my wife that when grandma passed, we’d go anywhere in the world. And she chose New Orleans.”
Sockrider worked at Muriel’s restaurant until he became corporate chef for three restaurants owned by Tommy Andrade.
Then tragedy struck. “My wife was crossing Canal Street in a torrential rain storm.”
She was hit by a streetcar and killed instantly, Sockrider says.
He took a couple of years off before going to work as a private chef for “a very high net worth family” in California. “I enjoyed that very much, but I missed the fire in the kitchen and the excitement of the line.”
He also missed the South, so he was intrigued when he heard about the opening for an executive chef at Paulette’s. “I looked at the dining room and thought it was very formal looking. But I ate in the restaurant and I was not impressed. The style of the food, the quality of the food, I realized, was just not that good.”
Sockrider has now worked just about every single day “updating and improving the quality of the food. Instead of using frozen fish, we use fresh fish.”
He adds, “The quality of the sauces and soups are all made from scratch now.”
Filet Paulette’s, one of the restaurant’s signature items, was “good when I first started, but I did a lot of research and spoke to the ownership of the hotel, spoke to past employees of Paulette’s, and found out the real recipe. A week and a half ago we started doing the original recipe from Paulette’s.”
He didn’t stop with the steak. “I’ve created a Paulette’s Heritage Week [January 13th to 19th], where I’m doing a prix fixe menu of all the old dishes of Paulette’s.”
Sockrider also is featuring a weekly prix fixe menu Tuesday through Saturday in addition to the regular menu.
He still serves Paulette’s iconic popovers with strawberry butter, but, he says, “We’ve improved the popovers quite a bit. They were quite flat when I first started, but now they look like popovers.”
Sockrider is planning special dinners at Paulette’s. He recently held a Veuve Clicquot champagne six-course dinner, which was “quite a successful event,” he says. “They were all hugging and kissing me on their way out of the door.”
His upcoming New Year’s Eve dinner was inspired by Auguste Escoffier — “the greatest chef that ever lived. The menu is designed to be very similar to the menu that he created at the Hotel Savoy in London in 1899. I had to reduce it. That menu was like 12 courses.”
As for future plans, Sockrider says, “My primary goal right now is to find some farms I can work with directly. That’s important to me so I can get the freshest and best quality products.”
The dining room is “very classical looking,” but he “wants to change it to a more formal setting.”
All in all, Sockrider says, “I just believe that people need to be treated well. And when you go out and spend a lot of money at a restaurant it means you need the best of service and best of food.”
And there’s more. “My big dream is Sunday brunch. And to have a jazz band walk through the dining room.”