Meet Kyle Schutte

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kyle Schutte. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kyle below.

Kyle, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
Creativity is in my DNA. It is something that has always plagued me. From when I was young I was drawing, building things with Legos, telling stories, making little films, painting. If there was a way to entertain and express myself by creating something, I was doing it. When I enrolled in college I majored in psychology and for the first two years of school I had no creative outlet and I began to feel as if a major part of myself was being neglected. When I decided to leave academics and pursue cooking as an art as well as a career I didn’t realize that this would ultimately mean putting pressure on myself to push myself creatively. The first couple years of cooking in restaurants and going to culinary school was not much different than the college studies I had abandoned. It was all about learning the craft and technique. Building a foundation by mimicing what others before me had done. Soon enough as I began to grasp the concepts of cooking fundamentals and flavor pairings that pesky creativity began to pop up at unexpected times. I found myself somewhat confidently making out of the box suggestions at work and school driven mostly by curiosity. Because I was a hard working line cook and driven student by bosses and instructors were very supportive in my desire to wonder from the traveled path. As I continued on as a sous and eventually executive chef I found myself pushing my curiosity and creativity perhaps beyond my current skill level which forced me to progress. The more I pushed to be creative the more I learned and the more I learned the more creative I wanted to be so the more I pushed. This self-propelling cycle is what continues to push me to this day. The pitfall to all this is that the more I became known for creativity in my kitchens the more people expected me to be creative and the more pressure I felt to outpace myself. This has at times inevitably lead to pressure-induced writers block, which in turn lead to me trying to force creativity, which to be honest isn’t really creativity at all. What I have learned is that it is pointless to try and force creativity. Don’t concern yourself with what others are doing. If something interests you, pursue it. If it doesn’t, don’t. Do not be concerned with what is in vogue or what is played out. Do you. Follow your interests and block out the rest. Ignore other trends and perhaps you will become a trendsetter. And when all else fails, I clear my head with a good run. Making my body focus on a physical stress almost always frees my mind to solve the puzzles that have been stumping me.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
After pursuing a degree in psychology for 3 years I began to feel that the creative side of my life had vanished and I needed to reclaim it. Although I loved the study of psychology, I no longer had the drive to pursue a degree in something that would trap me behind a desk or in a chair. I didn’t know what to do, I had no plan and I was starting to freak out. This is when I went on what ended up being a life changing spur of the moment trip to Maui. One night while on the island I ate dinner at a seaside steakhouse whose signature dessert was a homemade ice cream sandwich. When I bit into that dessert I was transported to a better time when my dad would take me for an ice cream sandwich after a little league game. It was right then and there I saw the potential of food. While the chef was able to be creative, they were also taking a page from my psychology books by connecting with a diner’s past to better the present.

When I returned from the trip I dropped out of school and began cooking. I was 21 years old and behind the 8 ball. 5 years later I had climbed my way through culinary school while working full time, done 2 years as a sous chef at one of Atlanta’s best restaurants and was opening a new restaurant in Charlotte as the executive chef. Since then I have gained a reputation for refined, contemporary, locally-driven, innovative food that leads the way in culinary trends and plays with diner’s expectations. My unique culinary point of view that great food should be fun yet sophisticated, innovative yet familiar and humane yet accessible has allowed my out of the box flavor combinations and artistic plating style to be far more approachable than many of my contemporaries.

Since 2009 I have opened 7 restaurants as the executive chef or culinary director where I have overseen all creative, logistic and financial aspects of the culinary operations.

I am currently Executive Chef at Detroit’s celebrated Wright & Company.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three things that worked in my favor over my career are my work ethic, my analytical nature and the drive to always push for innovation.

As far as work ethic goes, I have never allowed anyone, including my superiors, to out work me. This is more a secret competition between me and literlaly everyone around me. I made sure I was the first to arrive, the last to leave and always picked up extra tasks when mine were completed. As a line cook my chefs had to tell me to stop coming in off the clock, as a sous my executive chef would force me to take vacations and now as a 40 year old executive chef myself I work circles around the 20 somethings on my crew.

I have always been analytical. This is a gift and a curse. I am tirelessly evaluating my own performance, my crew’s performance and my restaurant’s performance. This has literally lead to many sleepless nights. I think it’s extremely important to have honest conversations with myself about what I can and should be doing better, more efficiently, more effectively or just differently. I also think being fare and forgiving to myself is important and unfortunately something that doesn’t come as easily.

Because I get bored I am always trying to push myself with new ingredients, techniques, flavors, and so much more. This is a natural curiosity and drive to create rather than repeat. This is also perhaps the thing that has held me back in many ways as restaurant guests and owners are not always comfortable with new or intellectual food.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
There are several projects I would be very excited to collaborate on. The first is a pop up series. I am looking for bartenders, visual artists and musicians to collaborate on pop up dinners where we combine food, drink, art and sound.

I am looking for a food writer to collaborate with on a podcast. I think the juxtaposition of these two perspectives would be really interesting.

I am also looking for a video production team so make some really compelling video content.

Anyone who is interested in discussing these projects can contact me through my website www.KyleSchutte.com or through my social media @ChefKyleSchutte

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