Serenidad Chef Deborah VanTreces Second Restaurant in Historic Cascade Heights Now Open
Having been trained in classical French cooking techniques, she could have focused on any cuisine. However, she decided to focus on the dishes at the heart of her upbringing. As she traveled to different places, she also realized that the soul of a country is defined by the soul of its cuisine. With that in mind, she wants to celebrate the food that tells those age- old stories. “I understand my version of soul food was often going against tradition,” she says. “But I believe traditions were meant to be used as a foundation to build on. And as we evolve, so should our traditions.” In the beginning, she received strong push-back and faced lots of obstacles, from the assumption that soul food was all that she could make to the idea that soul food or comfort food was simply unimpressive, not to mention the false narrative that soul food was deadly to one’s health. The negative sentiments surrounding comfort cuisine were irrational. In her opinion, it is more challenging technically to make less-heralded ingredients—like hog intestines—taste as good as
Since she was young, her family created magic on the dinner table from paltry ingredients. The biggest feast was on Thanksgiving when all her family gathered and shared their best dishes. That tradition continued even when she grew up and moved away from home, as she would spend hours on the phone with her mother to discuss their menus and recipes. Fast forward to current times, Chef VanTrece is still working on menus and recipes—only now they are in the context of a restaurant group. For her, it is an exercise to balance her sensibility and creativity. She follows some basic rules, such as seasonality, ingredient combination, pricing, and considers the needs of those with special diets such as vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, the gluten-free, and others for an inclusive menu. After that, “comes the time for fun. This is when I really get to utilize all my knowledge from living, traveling, and reading to create something a little different but still familiar,” she says. “This is how I put a little of myself and my story in each dish.”
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