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The Grunge Gourmet
Spazzo Funk Monkeys musician also Social Club's head chef
Article taken from the February 24, 1999 Rapid City Journal (Food Section)
Steve Talley doesn't look like a man who spends most of his time in the kitchen.
With his ling ponytail, flannel shirt and youthful face, the 29-yearold Talley appears every inch the musician. And while he does play bass, most recently in a funk/jazz/reggae band called Spazzo Funk Monkeys, Talley is also the head chef at the Deadwood Social Club restaurant.
Talley is what you might call an accidental cook. After graduating from high school in Sturgis, he tried his hand at a variety of professions, including auto and aircraft repair. Through it all he worked in restaurants to help make ends meet.
One night at a Red Lobster in Sioux Falls, a cook walked out. Talley, a busboy, jumped right in.
"It came very naturally," he recalls of his induction into professional cooking.
After mastering the various stages of food preparation, he was transferred to a Red Lobster in Rapid City. Talley was uncomfortable, though, with the idea of cooking for a living, particularly from an economic perspective. He moved to Seattle, but found himself drawn back to the Hills -- and to food.
Talley cooked at the Midnight Star for two years, then took another sabbatical to travel with a band. On his return to the Black Hills, he got a job at the Bay Leaf Cafe in Spearfish. While there he took on a part-time job with the Social Club.
When the Social Club's head chef made a precipitate departure, owners asked Talley to take his place.
As the former chef preferred to keep his recipes a secret, Talley was faced with a menu full of unknowns. for each item, he created his own recipe, preserving the name of a dish while subtly reinventing it to fit his sense of good taste.
Making things taste good is a skill he learned at a young age. While sharing a house with his father, Talley quickly grew sick of the staples of bachelor's diet, most of which came in boxes and bags. It was his efforts to resurrect those mass-produced meals that taught him about seasonings, one of the many culinary innovations that have yet to penetrated the land of flash-freezing.
It is in part because he is self-taught that Talley downplays his abilities as a chef.
"I know what I like and what I think is good." Talley says. His idea of a really good chef, though, is someone who has an encyclopedia knowledge of the techniques, terms and properties of every kind of food imaginable. And while Talley admits that he does know "a bunch of fancy words," he has a healthy respect for his more experienced peers.
Cooking school is a possibility for the future, but in the meantime, Talley is continuing to teach himself. When the local high school French club wanted an authentic French meal, he devoured cookbooks about traditional French cuisine. His goal was not to duplicate recipes exactly but to get a feeling for the essence of that cooking tradition, and then
make it his own.
If there is one objection Talley has to the cooking establishment, it is the tendency to be inflexible with food. "With some cooks," he says, "their whole philosophy is to caramelize everything." The problem, he says, is that not everything tastes good "mushy and burnt."
Talley is also a big believer in texture. "If you take texture out of a meal, it's basically what Gerber does for babies," he says.
Mixing textures and matching the technique to the flavor of the food are hallmarks of Talley's cooking. His soups are chock full of un-mushy vegetables. A nest of fried angel-hair pasta provides a delightful contrast to the rich basil cream sauce and succulent seafood that adorn it. Salads are dark with romaine, red pepper and black olives, and dressings are gutsy. It is apparent from the outset that all of the ingredients are fresh, and the dishes are prepared by hand.
The Social Club's menu is predominantly pasta, which suits Talley just fine. "I like noodles," he says. But he resists being limited by the title like "northern Italian," saying that the menu is Mediterranean in a more general sense. This allows for the inclusion of items such as his signature hummus appetizer, which is good enough for even the self-effacing Talley to boast about.
He also makes "the best fried chicken and mashed potatoes in the world, possibly the universe." he claims. The recipe, alas, is a secret.
While cooking came easily to Talley, he has confronted the difficulty of interesting people in the concept of a good meal. Most visitors to Deadwood don't have a lot of time for things that don't light up and spit our money. Casinos that make money on gambling can provide food cheaply, as do the restaurants that specialize in a quick turnaround time for hungry gamblers.
In the summer, says Talley, nearly a third of the people who approach the restaurant leave after discovering that they don't serve hamburgers.
It's Talley's hope that gradually the eating public will become more open-minded about food. He is working on making changes to the Social Club's menu, introducing some items that may be shocking to the fast-food conditioned palate.
But while he enjoys splashy trends like the "Floribbean" cooking of a few years ago, in which spices and tropical fruits were paired with more traditional foods, he plans to stick with the basic principle of making meals that taste good.
If Talley does make it to cooking school, it won't be so that he can be hemmed-in by hundreds of rules.
"People learn music theory so that they can talk about music," he says. Mastering the language of food will help him to communicate with - and learn from - his fellow chefs. He would also like to travel, expanding his repertoire through firsthand experience of the culinary world.