Chef Kelly Whitaker spent 10 years in fine-dining restaurants in Italy and Los Angeles before coming to Colorado in 2008.
Whitaker opened his first restaurant, Basta, a pizzeria and Italian restaurant, in Boulder in early 2010. He followed it in 2014 with Cart-Driver, a pizza joint and oyster bar inspired by the casual roadside spots in Italy’s Campania region, where Naples is located, that sold pizza and fried sardines. (He thought oysters were more suited to the American palate.)
Whitaker is the Colorado leader of the conservationist group Chefs Collaborative, as well as a member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Blue Ribbon Task Force.
He discussed his restaurants and the Denver food scene with Nation’s Restaurant News.
What were your thoughts behind opening Basta?
Before I switched over to French fine dining in Los Angeles, I went to hospitality school in Switzerland, and my first real cooking job was in Italy, in Campania. I was working at a little place that was considered fine dining for the area, but when I got off work I would eat at places that were like Basta, and that’s really where the love of pizza came from.
I wasn’t in the heart of the city of Naples. If you’re in Naples, all the traditional pizzerias offer two to three pizzas — very simple — and they don’t offer any other entrées. I was north of Naples, and in a town like [the one I was in], you’d have a fish on your menu and pasta and other things that went along with the pizza.
So in the beginning, when I opened Basta, it was called Pizzeria Basta, and I dropped the “Pizzeria” after, like, three years because there was an explosion [in Boulder] of regular pizzerias, and people just didn’t get why we were cooking small plates and all these other dishes that were more complex, even though that’s what pizza places are like in smaller towns in Campania. But we’re not in Campania; we’re in Boulder.
Was it hard to open a restaurant in early 2010, when the economy was so depressed?
It was my first venture, and it was during the recession in a ridiculous location. So I was thinking to myself, “We need something that’s going to last.” And in Campania, through many, many wars and many things that have happened to places like Naples over time, these little pizzerias stood their ground.
I had done a consulting job while working at Providence [a fine-dining restaurant] in L.A., consulting for a family from Naples, making pizza for them during the day, and for family meal at Providence I would bring in pizza sometimes, and I got this reputation for messing around with wood-fired pizza.
So when I came back here [to Boulder], I already had some pizza experience from L.A., not from Campania, and that’s how we chose this concept. And “basta” means “enough,” and that was the idea of simplicity: Three touches to the plate, four touches to the plate, and stop. Let’s not add that fifth element. It’s just not necessary if you have the right three or four components. Coming from the multicourse menus at Providence, it was really hard to discipline myself and keep it simple, but I think that discipline is what really made us stand out over time.
How did Boulder respond to Basta?
What Bobby Stuckey’s done at Frasca really paved the way for us. He had done such a good job at training guests in Boulder that we were just going to share that. And, actually, Bobby was one of our first patrons. They were closing down for a remodel right after we opened, and literally their reservationist said, “We’re closed. There’s this great spot out in the middle of nowhere. Go eat there.” For Boulder, that was like an Oprah bump.
And nobody was doing wood-fired pizza in Boulder at the time, but right after we opened, five wood-fired pizza places opened, including Pizzeria Locale [Bobby Stuckey’s wood-fired pizza place], which pushed us to cook more plates. We said, “Let them do that, and let’s just cook and show Boulder hospitality at an incredibly high level.” So we just started taking care of people.
A lot of the things we do are definitely with a backbone of fine dining. My partner, Alan [Henkin], was a sommelier at Frasca for four years, and then he was at [the now closed] CityZen in [Washington,] D.C., with Eric Ziebold running cheese trolleys, and my whole background was in fine dining.
You’re big on local and sustainable sourcing. Was it harder to do that in Colorado than in Los Angeles?
That was my first thought when I opened in January. I was like, “Oh my god, there’s nothing here.” But right away we found a lot of producers of meats and cheeses. We’re still trying to answer the question of how [our food] relates to Colorado. I don’t think it’s been defined, and I think our group is going to be one of the groups that help define that over the next couple of years.
But our conversation did go to preserving. We’ve got to extend the seasons here through preservation or have a real focus on grains.
The area does have grain.
Yeah, and in the United States, even the great pizza places bring in Italian flour, and that just didn’t make any sense to us whatsoever. Before I even opened Basta, I went to Giusto’s in San Francisco because they were making flour like Italian 00 flour. We opened with their flour, and then we found Central Milling in Utah, and they were having a whole other conversation about grain. We’ve never used Italian flour or olive oil [ours comes from California]. We’ve always stayed to using what’s domestic, and we still preach that.
All of these conversations are becoming hot topics now: fermentation, pickling, grains.
So most of your ingredients are domestic?
We just did an economic impact study with Chefs Collaborative, and less than 2 percent of the food we use is non-domestic.
We’re getting Calabrian chiles from Calabria [in Italy], and we are actually changing that. We’re going to start using Colorado chiles, and at Cart-Driver we already make our own hot sauces. We’re also looking at doing our own chile flake and chile powders.
Tell me about Cart-Driver.
Cart-Driver’s such a simple space. It’s pizza and oysters, but it takes skill to do both things: To source the oysters really well and set up those programs. Cart-Driver, I think, has the top oyster program in Colorado, because I visited every [oyster] farm on the East Coast and West Coast, and we overnight oysters one day out of the water. But the little details we do there became so important, like house kimchi and hot sauces and little fermented cabbages and stuff. So we’re starting to build a pantry there. At Basta we’ve been doing it for quite some time.
You’re on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Blue Ribbon Task Force. What does that entail?
We get together every once in awhile and sign on to be leaders and spokespersons for them as they tell everyone what’s going on with seafood and our oceans. And we only serve seafood with the green rating [the top sustainability ranking]. That’s an easy part. We also look for off-species to use, like canned sardines, which are incredibly sustainable. We’re making a statement with what we put on the menu. It not only informs the guest, but the task force combined has been able to shift big companies like Walmart and Costco, and expose things like what’s happening with the shrimp market. That [influence] also comes through when we say, look, we’re not going to buy those things [that aren’t sustainable]. So it has an overall impact. It’s good for guests to be educated, but we’re really trying to shift purchasing and practices of much larger operations.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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