Cook's Chat
The tasteful chef: Chris Borges
By GraceAnn Walden

When you are the executive chef of a company called Taste, you’d better have lots.

Taste Catering’s executive chef, Chris Borges, 35, was born in New Orleans, lives on the edge of Noe Valley and Glen Park with his wife, Sheila, and their 3-month-old baby, Nola. He was on track to be a pediatrician, you know, biology major at Stanford – the whole enchilada.

And then he started going to the farmers’ market.


“I saw these peppers, red, yellow and heirloom tomatoes … it opened my mind,” Borges explains.

When he dropped out of college, he says his parents were supportive. Later they told him that they had had qualms.

Borges stayed around Palo Alto, cooked for frat houses and did catering.

Hoping to learn more, he enrolled in the California Culinary Academy (CCA) in San Francisco. That was 15 years ago, under the previous owners. He also got a job at Roti, a terrific, (now closed) restaurant on Steuart Street.

“After two months, I left the CCA, when I could get most of my money back. I didn’t need to know how to make galantines.” (Galantines are a dated dish in which meat, eggs and other ingredients are stuffed in a poultry skin, and usually served at catered affairs – think cruise ship food.)

Borges learned tons while working at Roti. Talk about jumping into the fire. After trailing for several days, he was thrown on the sauté station (six gas jets and three deep fryers).

Did he ever think in the beginning that not every dish he prepared was spot-on?

“I doubt I nailed it every time, and I did get a lot of burns,” he says.

Even worse was working the large fireplace and rotisserie in the dining room.

“The almond wood burns at 600 degrees. On that station, the hair on your arms burns off almost immediately, and then you start sweating like a pig.”

Later Borges moved to Infusion Bar & Restaurant (also now closed), which was on 2nd Street in SOMA.

“I went from sous chef to the executive chef in four and a half years,” he explains.
A headhunter approached him about a job at Taste Catering in 2002, and he took it. In 2005, he was promoted to executive chef.

“What struck me about Taste was the level of professionalism,” he says.

Borges and I are having this conversation in what we would both describe as a “wacky restaurant.” Owner Jack Wang has three Spices restaurants: one in Oakland and two in San Francisco. We met at Spices II, on 6th near Clement Street, Borges’s choice. Decoding the menu is an adventure in itself. The menu says the food is Szechwan “Trenz.” But reading it, you find that there is also a bit of Hong Kong, and a bit of Taiwan, as well as some Szechwan in the dishes. I surmised that maybe trenz, means trends.

Because Spices II is open noon to midnight, and the decor is eclectic and youthful, my thoughts were that owner Wang was partly going for the club crowd.

Spices II is a restaurant that I want to keep going back to, not because everything was perfect, but because there are many new combinations and flavors to explore. An intriguing taste that appears all over the menu is “numbing,” which is used to describe various items. Language difficulties derailed further questions about the numbing properties.

We tried the crab snowed with fried garlic – a whole, segmented, fried Dungeness crab “snowed” in at least a cup of minced and browned garlic. The dish was not successful because the crab was cooked too long, and the browned garlic was bitter.

Borges is crazy about the cumin lamb dish, a very beautiful combination of flavors and textures.

We had two of the numbing dishes and they were a revelation. Borges tucked into the pig’s ear in numbing red oil, which was crunchy and flavorful with shards of green onion and cilantro. For me, always a liver lover, but never a fan of pork liver, the pork liver with numbing red oil, green onion shreds and cilantro sprigs was like eating velvet with a zing of spice. I dream of that dish.

Back to Borges’ story, he tells me what he likes about catering.

“There are so many slackers in the business, I was pleased to find that the people at Taste were a little older, very dedicated, and matched my intensity.”
At Taste, they do about 500 events a year and gross $8 million.

These days, Borges cooks about 25 percent of the time. He says it is the dilemma of every executive chef. “I am first and foremost a cook – I don’t want to lose that,” he says with feeling.

Taste Catering: 3450 3rd St., #4D (at Arthur Ave./Cargo Way); 415-550-6464; www.tastecatering.com
Spices II: 291 6th Ave. (at Clement); daily noon - midnight; 415-752-8885; www.eatspices.com

E-mail: graceann@northsidesf.com