Working Kitchens
Photography: Timothy Thimmes
Park City is known for its world-class restaurants, celebrity chefs and swanky events centered around haute cuisine. But while the professional world of Park City food service is bustling, what’s happening at home? Meet three Park City home cooks and take a peek into their own working kitchens.
The Eclectic Cook
Izzy Semrau is colorful, vibrant and full of fun. So is her kitchen. A menagerie of fanciful contemporary teapots contrasts with painted vintage food tins against honed black granite and stainless steel. The “beat up” cabinets, painted aquamarine, have pulls that are actually antique doorknobs. She keeps a delightful jumble of bright kitchen utensils, gadgets, and multiple sets of brilliant colored china and glassware in full view. “I don’t want to hide a thing,” Izzy says.
When Izzy and her husband Mike moved to Park City from Atlanta four years ago for an “outdoors lifestyle change,” they bought a Rossi Hill house for the view and completely renovated the interior. Izzy worked with designer Sheri Russell to create a uniquely eclectic kitchen that is functional and durable. “I’m tough on my kitchen,“ says Izzy.
Izzy made her first pie at 9 years old to impress a boyfriend and has been cooking ever since. As a child growing up in an ethnic Detroit neighborhood, she watched neighbors cook native dishes and became skillful at cooking ethnic cuisine. She cooks every day and everything — from apple pie to zucchini carpaccio. “Cooking is my passion,” she says.
“It satisfies my soul.” She pores over food magazines and cookbooks for new ideas and trends. In Atlanta, Izzy owned The Heaping Bowl restaurant and came up with recipes to dazzle her patrons. Her son is now a restaurant consultant there, and she helps him develop menu items — such as stuffed gourmet burgers — testing them in her own kitchen.
With a cerebral approach to cooking, Izzy “thinks things through,” creating recipes, restaurant ideas and taste combinations in her head. She likes to take basic ingredients and invent endless variations. “I can just see it,” she says about her knack for composing a new recipe.
At one point in her career, Izzy worked for Cuisinart and Le Creuset, demonstrating equipment and sharing her love of cooking with others. She has recently started teaching classes in Italian and Thai cuisine and even a grilling class for men. She encourages her students to give up their food fears and inhibitions and plunge in, approximating measurements and altering recipes.
Izzy’s joy is not in the party but in the preparation. The process of creating each meal is what she loves the most. She admits to sneaking a little dash of red chili pepper into many an unsuspecting dish. She says it keeps things interesting.
The Comfort Cook
My kitchen makes me happy. Surrounded by things I love — blue and white china, Utah antiques, quilts and needlework — working in the kitchen of my restored 1885 miner’s cottage is a joyful experience. On sunny mornings, the light dances through the blue stained glass and scatters rainbows across the breakfast table. And on winter afternoons, passing skiers wave through the window as I roll out crust for chicken potpie.
A plate sent as a wedding gift from a relative in the Netherlands started my longtime relationship with blue and white china. Maybe it was the Dutch in me that was so drawn to the beauty of the color and the patterns. Over the years, my collection has gotten a little out of hand — it covers the walls, is stacked on open shelves, hangs from beams and balances on ledges above the windows.
I didn’t start out with an interest in cooking, but a visit to my husband’s grandmother’s house made me want to learn. Anyone who walked into her farmhouse kitchen felt cared for and nourished and experienced the joy and contentment she shared through her cooking. I still make many of the recipes she shared with me, especially pans of hot, fragrant rolls at Thanksgiving. Collecting old recipes has become a passion — especially recipes passed down in families or printed in old cookbooks. Every Easter I serve Eggs Goldenrod, a luncheon dish that I found in a depression-era cookbook. (My daughters always assumed everyone ate Eggs Goldenrod on Easter morning and were shocked to eventually discover that it was not a tradition at everyone’s house.)
I cook simple, comforting food — beef stew, Waldorf salad, pork chops and applesauce, macaroni and cheese, tomato soup, chocolate pudding — using low tech equipment, traditional methods and local ingredients from the Farmers Market when they are available. And I love to bake — cakes, pies, popovers, muffins, cobblers, breads and cookies of all kinds.
With a seamstress’s interest in textiles, I have collected stacks of vintage embroidered kitchen linens that I use and enjoy every day. Patchwork quilts are thrown over the kitchen chairs to make them more inviting, and homemade potholders are plentiful. Supper for my daughter’s volleyball team, annual Christmas cookie parties, boisterous family dinners, or a simple cup of tea with a friend — my kitchen is a warm and welcoming place that I hope leaves lasting memories with my family and friends.
The Historic Cook
Surrounded by windows that face a wooded bend in the Weber River, David Krajeski’s kitchen evokes his passion for the history of the American West. Massive rough-hewn beams span the high ceilings, and a river rock fireplace is ablaze. Butcher block countertops, rustic cabinets of varied styles, rich textures of metal, stone and leather, and vintage Western memorabilia all, as David says, “give it a history.”
Known for their nationally recognized interior design and award-winning historic preservation efforts, David and his wife JoAnn have owned Park City Design Coalition since 1972. Their stunning commercial and residential projects have pleased high profile clients for years. But when they built their home on 20 acres outside of Peoa five years ago, David says he “did it the way I wanted to see it done.” The kitchen became “a living space, not just a utility space” with a functional layout that “makes cooking easy.” The enormous center island, with its double canopy of copper pots and utensils, “allows guests to be part of the preparation of the meal.”
David’s meals usually involve elk, pheasant, moose, venison or duck. His interest in cooking came as a result of hunting wild game and wanting to create “memorable meals” to celebrate the bounty of the hunt. Vice-president of the Park City Historical Society, David enjoys the “historic aspect” of the hunt and embraces Native American traditions of respect for wildlife. After years of experimentation, he has become an expert on how to handle and cook wild game. David says game is often overcooked, over-marinated and over-spiced. Influenced by his Polish grandmother — also a cook — he has developed a variety of recipes using techniques that retain the succulence of the meat. Often he adds unusual or little-used ingredients, like juniper berries, to complement the taste of the game.
JoAnn collaborates with David on menu planning and the preparation of side dishes to accompany the game. She also designs mem-orable tablescapes from a collection of antique pewter, Waterford crystal and china with scenes of the hunt. The Krajeskis’ guests are always entranced by the spectacular setting and the beauty of the table, and pleasantly surprised at their first taste of hearty bear bourguignon.
Tina Lewis’s kitchen is so low tech that she doesn’t have a microwave oven or an electric mixer. Enjoying simple pleasures, she also makes quilts entirely by hand.
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