Check Out Ryan Brazeal’s Story

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Brazeal.

Ryan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
When I was about twenty-three years old, it dawned on me one day that I would need to make a decision about what I would do for a career. I didn’t go to college, so I didn’t have the formal pressure to decide on a traditional route to pursue. 

I’ve always been something of a night owl, so when a neighbor told me about going to work at three in the afternoon and getting off at midnight, it didn’t seem like such a bad deal. I went and got a job at a hotel working in the room service kitchen to see if I enjoyed cooking. I wasn’t particularly gifted at the job, but I liked it enough to make a decision to pursue culinary arts. The next semester, I applied at the local community college and spent the next three years working towards an associate degree on my day off. This rigorous schedule set the groundwork for the discipline I need to make it in the big city. When I graduated, I moved to New York City and got a job at the first restaurant I applied to, an upscale corner cafe in an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood. 

I was well out of my league, but I put my head down and, when I felt I was ready, moved to a spot at an amazing Japanese restaurant that was opening a new location by Central Park. For the next couple of years, I spent every waking moment cooking. When I wasn’t working the requisite seventy-five-hour weeks, I was staging at any place that would let me. Eventually, I took an actual chef position back at the first restaurant where I had worked in Brooklyn. After I felt I had paid my dues and was ready to take the next step in my career, I made the move back home to Kansas City and opened Novel Restaurant. 

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The best and worst parts of the restaurant business are the uncertainty of what each new day will bring. It is amazing because it allows you to be creative and flexible and pushes you to be the best that you can be. It is invigorating and instantly gratifying to send joy out into the world over and over, day after day. The flip side is the adversity that you face. Whether it is equipment breaking down, deliveries not showing up, or the long hours away from your friends and family. 

On any given day, the restaurant can be a well-oiled machine flowing like synchronized ballerinas or a symphony of chaos. It is that kind of balance between creative freedom and problem-solving and the discipline to keep going when it feels like everything is testing you to see how much you can take before you crumble that some people thrive in, and some people choose to leave behind for other pastures. I chose to tough it out, and Novel Restaurant will be eleven years old this year and going strong. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe you can tell us more about your work next?
Having a fine dining restaurant means you can never let your guard down. There is always fresh competition, so we have to always step back and evaluate the way we do things and ask if the decisions we made in the past are still the right ones for the present. 

Every day I have to sit down and just go through the physical menu and choose whether to keep running a dish or to change it up. There are a lot of factors that I take into consideration, including what is available locally, what is in season, and what I am excited about at the moment. After that I will sit down with my kitchen team and talk to them about their opinions and make sure that the changes make sense in a practical and conceptual manner. Then it’s time to start cooking! We will usually work on a new dish for a few weeks before it makes it onto the menu if it makes it at all. 

One of the caveats is that the new dish has to fit into the natural progression of the overall menu and has to be equally good, if not better, than its predecessor. As the years go by, it gets harder and harder to improve the quality and execution of the individual dishes. We have a few that are so popular that they are considered signatures. Even those dishes get subtle tweaks and improvements as we learn and grow. I work very hard to promote a culture of personal growth and positivity, which is why when people come back again and again over the years, they see so many familiar faces. 

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those just starting.
When I was just starting out, all I knew was that someday, I wanted to open my restaurant and be my own boss. I worked really hard learning all the cooking techniques and traveling to eat as much as I could. There were missteps at times. I took a job at a celebrity restaurant to be around glamorous foodies and stars, but the style of cuisine was something that I didn’t necessarily want to cook in my own place. 

I certainly learned a lot there, but I also kind of felt my time would have been better spent working somewhere closer to my goal of my vision. Down the road, I had an opportunity to be a chef at a renowned seafood restaurant where all the different fish came in fresh off the boats every day, and the preparations were simple and elegant. 

I know I would have loved working there, but I also realized that I could never fully utilize those skills in the landlocked Midwest. There is so much as a restauranteur that is so specific to each individual place that you couldn’t possibly learn without trial and error. On any given day, I have to act as an accountant, plumber, therapist, or dishwasher. It is vital to know all aspects of the job and how to perform all of them. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.novelkc.com
• Instagram: @novel_kc
• Facebook: Novel Restaurant
• Twitter: @novelkc
• Yelp: Novel Restaurant

Image Credits
Anna Petrow