Jonathan Hughes began his cooking career when he was only 4 years old.
“I got left home one day with my sister, I got up for breakfast and decided I wanted to eat some eggs,” he said. “I’d seen my mother do it a couple times and so I decided I was going to do it.
“I scrambled two eggs and got the ball rolling.”
Since then, the MSU alumnus, 32, has expanded his repertoire of foods quite substantially.
He’s now the executive chef at Evergreen Grill, 327 Abbott Road, where he started July 9.
But Hughes made the move from MSU’s campus to the restaurant across the street in a roundabout way.
He graduated from MSU in 1997 with a food science degree, and then moved to Las Vegas for a year.
During that time, Hughes decided he wanted to go to culinary school, so he moved to Hyde Park, N.Y., to attend the Culinary Institute of America.
“I investigated a lot of schools,” he said. “I decided to cut the middle man out - I didn’t want to go to second best.”
The culinary program at the institute lasts for 21 months, with a four-month externship, Hughes said.
He did the externship at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and worked at the Common Grill in Chelsea, Mich., before returning back to school to graduate in September 2000.
But it was his green and white heart that made him return to East Lansing.
“After graduation, I hung out in New York for a couple of weeks and had some job offers there,” he said. “But I decided I would come back to my alma mater - I am a die-hard Spartan.”
Joe DeRose, co-partner of Evergreen Grill, said it was Hughes’ level of professionalism that made him stand out as an executive chef.
He called Hughes “knowledgeable and mature.”
“There are chefs much older than him that didn’t exude that maturity and confidence he did,” DeRose said. “He is not only an asset to us, but an asset to the community.”
But Hughes said it wasn’t as easy getting a job after graduation as he thought it might be.
“I found it was a lot harder,” he conceded. “People would ask me, ‘Are you going to leave?’ ‘How long are you going to stay?’ ‘Are you going to come in and take over my kitchen?’”
He also said the fact that he had worked at so many different places made it difficult to get a job.
But now that he’s found a home at the Evergreen Grill - considered a fine-dining restaurant where the menu offers American Midwestern cuisine - old friends are glad to have him back in East Lansing.
“Our faculty and staff have very fond memories of Jonathan,” said Mark Uebersax, chairman of the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. “He has very special quality characteristics and is a very sensitive and personable individual.
“He worked very hard as a food science major and we are delighted to see him do this.”
Uebersax said, however, that it is not common for a food scientist to become a chef.
If a person has an interest in preparation and handling of food from a culinary standpoint, then they have a strong advantage: A chef with a food science background has a more in-depth career, he said.
Hughes said as the executive chef, he oversees the food preparation, handling and storing, along with the restaurant’s owners, DeRose and Mary Welsh.
Hughes said, while his favorite food is mom-and-pop diner food - such as pot roast and mashed potatoes - he also thoroughly enjoys the food he cooks at Evergreen Grill, especially the vegetable cannelloni.
“I’ve seen that at a lot of restaurants, it gets to the point that it is more like a close-knit family, serving people out of your home every day,” he said. “That is how I see this place, the whole place is my house, I just happen to be in the kitchen.”
Hughes said while he has only been executive chef for a few weeks, he says he already has ideas for good change for Evergreen Grill.
Yet, don’t expect any sudden alterations just yet.
“I thought when I graduated I was ready to take on the world, hands down, I thought it can’t be that hard to be a chef,” he said. “But now I realize, there are some things I want to change but I can’t change them overnight - it is a slow gradual process.”
Shannon Murphy can be reached at murphy78@msu.edu.
