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The subject of this week’s cover story, Mark Mavrantonis, executive chef at Fulton’s on the River, is a nice guy and a helluva storyteller, but if you read some of his writings without meeting him first, I wouldn’t blame you for being a little nervous. In 2003, after leaving the San Francisco-based seafood chain McCormick & Schmick’s, he fueled up on coffee, sat down at the keyboard, and pounded out the frustrations built up over years working in the corporate galleys. The chapters I read are illuminating, angry, raw, hilarious, and not for the easily offended–the foaming little cousin to Kitchen Confidential.
Some of Mavrantonis’s stories aren’t appropriate for a family blog, but at the restaurant he hands out a gentler version of his oyster manifesto, a distillation of his chief passion and an excellent primer on the bivalves.
