From Mom’s Kitchen To Zinc’s

Chef Alex Blifford was 8 or 9 years old when his mom gave him a simple set of directions over the phone, delivered on one of her 10-minute breaks at work.

One: Preheat the oven. Two: Get out a baking sheet or two. Three: Season that chicken in the fridge lightly, and stick it in the oven once it’s gotten warm enough to cook it just right.

Even then, he remembers being flooded with a specific kind of feeling. Not joy exactly, but definitely satisfaction, a sense that he had done something just right.

He didn’t know then that it would lead to a career cooking for other people, of watching with pride as they cleaned their plates. He just knew that if he didn’t lend that extra hand at home, his mom would have to start the entire process herself at 7 or 8 p.m. She was raising him alone and working multiple jobs to make ends meet; he knew this was something straightforward that he could do to help.

Blifford, now the chef de cuisine at Zinc New Haven on Chapel Street, recounted that story on a recent episode of WNHH radio’s ​“Kitchen Sync.” Reflecting on the experiences that had led him to cook professionally, Blifford consistently came back to one big catalyst: his mom, who taught him what to do, and then cheered him on as he blossomed.

“Every kid has their own fantasies of what they want to do when they grow up, but I became a chef out of necessity,” he said during the episode. ​“My mother … pretty much taught me how to cook over the phone.”

“When she was home, that’s where I spent a lot of my time with her,” he added. ​“Helping her peel potatoes and just do general things.”

But the necessity that pushed him to cook ​“very simple, comfort food types of things” for them to share in the kitchen and at the dinner table — eggplant two or three different ways, lasagne, chicken and pasta — soon turned into work. Having secured work in the food court at the Westbrook Outlets when he was 15, he snapped into action when a cook quit and he had the chance to assemble meals.

It wasn’t glamorous work — ​“if you ever go behind the scenes at a food court, there’s not actually very much cooking that takes place,” he’s quick to say — but it gave him a glimpse into what he wanted to do. And it landed him a ​“real” job in cooking at Chip’s Pub III, where he could build on that foundation in a kitchen that was larger than a closet.

At the pub, Blifford got his first taste of what he calls real restaurant experience — and it wasn’t the romantic career that was advertised on cooking shows and glossy pamphlets for culinary school. Surrounded by several high-school friends in the pub’s steamy, frenetic Clinton kitchen, Blifford chopped vegetables, breaded cutlets, made dressings from recipe cards, and learned that a lot of being a chef was … not cooking. Instead, it meant taking out trash, washing hundreds of dishes, and cleaning the floors. It wasn’t chic. But he felt like he was onto something good.

“It got to the point where I realized that I was really good at what I did,” he said. ​“It was a natural skill, it was something that just came very easily to me. But I was very limited. Working at a pub, you’re only gonna make certain things. You’re only gonna be able to expose yourself to certain things. And you’re only gonna, to be perfectly honest, make a certain amount of money. So it became a necessity that I had to go to school.”

But culinary school was expensive. So Blifford continued to work before making the plunge — through which, like his mom, he would continue to hold down a full-time job — and it led him in 1999 to a newly-opened Zinc, still shiny and new in its Chapel Street home.

An Elm City Cooking Lesson

Blifford had known that he wanted to be a professional chef before coming to Zinc for the first time. But he credits an initial four-month stint there with confirming his suspicions that working in a kitchen, from the first chop to the last dirty dish of the evening, was for him.

“The exposure was what pretty much changed the course of my career,” he said. ​“It was the ingredients, it was the recipes, the presentation, it was the overall food knowledge of the people that I had been surrounded with. I hadn’t experienced anything like that. I hadn’t thought about how much there was out there that I really didn’t know.”

At 18, he was suddenly surrounded by professionals who had been in the field for 15 to 20 years. ​“They were just incredibly articulate, and knowledgable, experienced, and had seen and done so much that it was kind of daunting. To be surrounded by these people … you’re just trembling,” he said. ​“But they were also so fostering and understanding that it was inspiring at the same time as nervous as it made you.”

Blifford was determined to become one of those people — one of the cooks who had so inspired him. Still working 50 to 60 hours a week back at Chip’s Pub III, he enrolled in school. He wasn’t doing it completely alone: His mom, his biggest advocate, role model, and very first taste-tester, was entering school at the same time. They were already living apart — Blifford had been out of the house since turning 18 — but that didn’t mean they couldn’t cheer each other on.

“My mother was going to college at the same time, so we kind of were rocks for each other, as much as you can possibly be,” he said. ​“You kind of just cheer each other on from the sidelines, the opposite sidelines, and you just let each other take care of their business. I’ll see you on the other end.”

That didn’t mean it was any easier, though. Even after jobs in kitchens that ranged from grungy to gourmet, it wasn’t what he expected. For the first two months, he saw more of his books than he saw of the school’s pristine test kitchen, juggling his studying with restaurant shifts where everything he had read, absorbing like a culinarily-inclined but exhausted sponge — took a backseat to being a snappy line cook.

“It was extremely difficult,” he said. ​“I envy the 18-year-old kid who can still live with his parents and wants to go to culinary school, because that’s the best situation to start out with. You’re going to work just as hard as you would at a normal college, and you’re not going to make any money.”

He, however, was making money — grinding hard at Chip’s, and then burning the midnight oil studying — and landed a job at Branford’s dearly-departed Mango’s a year after he made it to the other side of the culinary school divide. It was what he’d been hoping for: health insurance, vacation days on holidays, perks that ​“made you enjoy your life” again.

But then in 2008, Mango’s collapsed with the U.S. economy. Blifford found himself on unemployment, scrounging around for positions. He wasn’t intending on going back to any of his old haunts, and was terrified of ​“taking a step back” after sacrificing almost 18 years — and, he estimates, thousands of hours — in hot kitchens, over textbooks, and in prepping for professors. There was an ad for a position at Zinc in the paper. The rest, little did he know, would be culinary history.

At Zinc, A Homecoming

The position at Zinc, by Blifford’s own estimation, ​“was just a job.” But he took it, and the longer he worked there, the less he looked back. He says that’s because he sees being a chef for exactly what it is — a holistic, baffling position that is equal parts messy, maddening, and joyful, where you can’t ever forget the place from which you started.

“Being a chef can be very romantic,” he said. ​“You are an artisan. I make something with my hands every single day, and not a lot of people can say that. You can directly see the result of what you’re doing, and people enjoy it. People remember it, and that’s nice…. One of the best things about my job is that I love it. I’ve always loved what I do, and I’m able to make a living doing it.

“But on the other side, I’ve been working in restaurants for 18 years. I take out the trash. I clean the floors. You’re like: ​‘oh, you’re a chef at a really nice restaurant. You take out the trash? You clean the floors? You wash dishes?’ Absolutely! These things still need to be done. A lot of people … they don’t expect that there’s hard, backbreaking work that goes along with all of it.”

He added that there’s a specific rush he gets from that backbreaking work — because it often includes, in its mess of full trash bags and crumb-filled dinner dishes, a fair amount of brainstorming, working with colleagues, looking ahead to Connecticut’s seasonal foods, and figuring out how to put a personal spin on things that other restaurants may have tried out, with varying degrees of success.

“The ability to be free on a daily basis with what you want to do, what you’re feeling like that day, what influences you’ve encountered … it keeps you fresh. It keeps you coming back wanting to do it every single day. I try to come to the table with that kind of open mindset — that nothing’s really too far outside of the box.”

To listen to Blifford’s interview on WNHH’s ​“Kitchen Sync,” click on or download the audio above or check out the ​“WNHH Arts Mix” podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes.