He started in the kitchen as a dishwasher, when he was 14. At 15, he became a cook, and at 16 a restaurant manager. At 25 or so, he began to think of himself as a chef. Now, at 45, he is an accomplished chef who is soon to be a restaurateur. You could say he did everything the old-fashioned way, but Ed Rogers would probably just call it his way.
Sitting in the intimate dining room at Raphael's in Little Italy on a crisp spring day, he reminisced about the early days in his career, and about his plans for the near future, which include a new restaurant venture in Mount Vernon.
"I'm from North Carolina," he said. "I came to Baltimore when I was 13 years old," following the footsteps of his mother, who had moved north and gotten a job at Goucher College. "I came from a family that didn't have a lot . . ." Mr. Rogers said, and he wanted more out of life: "You want your own little piece of the pie."
He laughs when he recalls how he graduated from dishwasher to chef at the International House of Pancakes on Reisterstown Road. "It's one of those stories people don't believe," he said. "One day the cook walked out, and I'm the cook. Suddenly, at the age of 15, I'm learning how to cook pancakes."
That was the beginning of a career in which Mr. Rogers has made stops at the old Chesapeake Restaurant on Charles Street, at the Pimlico on Park Heights Avenue and at the Belvedere, at Peter Angelos' Shane's, at the Market Restaurant (which later became Dominique's), at Classic Catering, and at Ethel's Place. Those were the places where he got his education as a chef. "I was lucky," he said, "I found chefs who were willing to teach me."
He also found employers who appreciated what he learned. "The man's a genius," said Louis Battistone, a local architect who, with his wife, owned the Market Restaurant in 1987 and 1988. "Give him some sticks, bark, mud, and a few spices and he can come up some wonderful dish. One day he was walking around our restaurant and he was carrying an octopus so long it was dragging on the ground. I said, 'What are you going to do with that?' And he said, 'I don't know, but I had to have it.' " The giant octopus became part of a delicious salad.
However, it was during his stint at Gianni's, the former upscale Italian eatery in the Pratt Street Pavilion of Harborplace, that Mr. Rogers got what he called his tag as an Italian chef.
"I got that label, I don't even try to get rid of it now," he said. And he laughs again. "It amazes people, they want to meet the chef who cooked their dinner, and a black guy comes out of the kitchen!"
He concedes that race has sometimes been an issue in his career, but he says he never let it bother him. "When you're working your way up, you find out one of the reasons you're not going to be a chef [at a particular place] is because of your color." Mr. Rogers' solution was to go someplace else.
He and Raphael's owners, Michele and Rob Spector and Debbie and Luigi DiFalco (grandchildren and their spouses of original owner Raphael Nini) faced a certain amount of skepticism when they were opening the restaurant on South High Street two years ago. "You open up a small restaurant and already you're behind the eight ball," Mr. Rogers said. "People are saying, 'It won't work, a black chef at this Italian restaurant.' Well, guess what? It worked very well."
It's worked so well, in fact, that some nights Mr. Rogers and his crew turn out 100 meals -- not bad for a restaurant that has only 10 tables in the dining room. (There are four more in the bar downstairs.)
"There probably aren't six people in the city who'd have done what he did for this place," said Rob Spector. "He hung out here for 10 months before we opened, he worked in that too-small kitchen, he put up with me, who didn't know anything about the restaurant business." Mr. Spector joked that Mr. Rogers even taught him "some things I didn't want to know. He taught me I had to be firm with my employees and not allow them to get the upper hand."
"Firm but fair," Mr. Rogers interjected, before heading into the kitchen to complete the "prep" work for the evening. "Firm but fair."
In the tiny kitchen at Raphael's, where there's barely room for two people to pass between the huge old Vulcan 10-burner stove and the prep tables, Mr. Rogers works with a dishwasher and his two chief assistants, Shirley Jones, 30, a South Carolina native, and Tina Mansfield, 25, who is from Baltimore. "When they came here, neither had any skills that they could market -- so they learned."
That's one aspect of Mr. Rogers people may not realize at first, said Mr. Battistone. "The man's a teacher. He's always teaching."
"If you see someone who's hungry, and they want to learn, why not teach them?" Mr. Rogers said.
When Mr. Rogers asked another assistant, Theresa White, "Do you want to learn to cook?" she initially said no, "because you're going to holler at me just like you do the others."
That's right, he told her: "I'm not going to treat you any differently."
Now Ms. White is learning to cook (she proudly boasts she makes the best Caesar salad in Little Italy) and Ms. Jones is Mr. Rogers' primary backup; she is in charge on his rare nights off.
Like most chefs, he finds it hard to be out of the kitchen. "But I am very comfortable with the two young ladies in the kitchen," he says. "They only know one way to cook, and that's my way."
Mr. Rogers "way" is "cook to order." He did it at Gianni's, where people said it couldn't be done for 350 people a night, he does it at Raphael's, where the size of the kitchen makes it tricky, and he will do it when he begins spending time at the new place, in the location of the old Grille 58 in the former Society Hill bed and breakfast on West Biddle Street. The bed and breakfast is now the Abacrombie Badger, and the new restaurant -- the first one Mr. Rogers has owned -- will be called Tesso Tana, or Badger's Den. He expects it to open around May 1. Mr. Rogers says the menu will be Italian, somewhat more upscale than the traditional Little Italy style, and may include a few ventures into other cuisines as specials.
Cooking to order means "everything's fresh," Mr. Rogers says. Except for stocks and "red gravies," the tomato sauces endemic to Italian cooking, virtually nothing is made ahead. If a customer orders a shrimp dish, Mr. Rogers pulls six raw shrimp out of the cooler.
For chicken Raphael (a popular dish of thin slices of chicken breast light floured and sauteed with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, capers, shallots, toasted pine nuts, and a touch of vermouth and butter) he goes to the cooler and comes back with raw chicken breasts.
Suckling pig goes into the oven the afternoon of the evening it will be served. Minestrone is made on the spot, with fresh vegetables cut up and lightly simmered in the broth just before it goes into the bowl.
"If you keep it simple, it works," Mr. Rogers says. "You do things you know you can do very well. People say, that kitchen is too small to do this menu. I don't care how big your kitchen is, if you don't want to work hard it doesn't work. If you do, it does."
Here are recipes for one of the dishes Mr. Rogers was serving one recent evening at Raphael's.
Salmon Gabriella
Serves 1
1 6-ounce fillet of salmon
1 tablespoon roasted red pepper, in thin strips (see note)
2 ounces (about 3 tablespoons) crab meat
1 teaspoon toasted pine nuts
1 pat cold unsalted butter
1/4 cup yellow pepper sauce (recipe follows)
3 half-sheets frozen phyllo dough, thawed
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon butter, melted
Heat the oven to 375 degrees.
Whisk together the egg yolk and the cream until blended; set aside.
Lay the three half-sheets of phyllo dough on a table or counter. Place the butter, the roasted pepper strips, the crab meat and the pine nuts in the center.
Place the fillet, skin side up, on top of the other ingredients. Using a pastry brush, paint the long edges of the phyllo dough and fold them over the salmon. Paint the end and fold them up, to form a packet. Turn the packet over and place it on a baking sheet. Paint the top with melted butter, to keep the phyllo from drying out.
Put the baking sheet in the oven and cook 8 to 10 minutes, or until nicely browned. To serve, place a pool of yellow pepper sauce on plate, place salmon packet in center.
Note: You can roast your own peppers, or buy them in a jar in the canned vegetable, Italian food, or gourmet food sections of most grocery stores.
Yellow Pepper Sauce
Makes about 1 cup
2 medium yellow peppers
1 cup chicken stock, low-sodium commercial or homemade
dash of garlic
dash of shallots, chopped
1 teaspoon olive oil
splash of white wine
1 teaspoon unsalted butter (optional)
Remove ribs and seeds from peppers and cut peppers into chunks. Put olive oil in saucepan or saute pan and add peppers and saute over medium-low heat until peppers turn a rich, bronze-yellow. Add garlic, shallots, and white wine. Reduce to a thick, sauce-like consistency.
Put peppers and liquid in blender or food processor and puree. Strain (to remove the peel), pressing puree through strainer with the back of a spoon or the bottom of a ladle. Put sauce back in saucepan and, if desired, finish with 1 teaspoon butter, whisked in until it disappears.
The yellow pepper sauce can also be used as a pasta sauce. (If you use water instead of chicken stock, it can be a vegetarian entree.) To serve four, double the recipe. Prepare the sauce and keep warm. Saute or steam 2 to 3 cups fresh vegetables such as broccoli florets, julienne strips of carrot and green and yellow squash, or asparagus tips, until tender-crisp. Cook pasta according to package directions until al dente. Toss cooked pasta with vegetables and yellow pepper sauce. Serve immediately.
You can also make the pepper sauce with red or orange peppers.