Wednesday, June 18, 7:00 p.m.
Members $85, guests $110

It’s never easy to walk into an existing restaurant as the new chef. There are staff relationships to build, customer expectations to live up to (or change), owners to please, and various things to prove to yourself. When your forebears are renowned chefs, such as James Boyce, and Alessandro Stratta, and you have the weight of five Mobil stars to carry, the task is even more difficult.

Clearly it wasn’t too much for Bradford Thompson to handle. He’d been preparing for just such a task for his entire professional career. A native of Connecticut, Thompson graduated from the University of Rochester and, against his parents’ better judgment, got a job cooking at Max on Main in Hartford. Ostensibly it was to pay off his student loans, but Thompson liked the hands-on, rewarding nature of the work. He left the restaurant and the East Coast to work with Vincent Guérithault at Vincent’s on Camelback in Phoenix, where he began to master classic French cuisine. The sunshine was a good thing, and he moved to Mary Elaine’s as sous-chef to Alessandro Stratta—you could call it his food finishing school.

After three years with Stratta, it was time to move on. Thompson joined Daniel Boulud’s brigade at Restaurant Daniel in New York, and he was integral in opening Café Boulud with Andrew Carmellini and db bistro moderne with Jean-François Bruel. But when word got to him that Mary Elaine’s was looking for a chef, “How could I not be interested?” he told Desert Living magazine. After four years with Boulud, his four-star education complete, Thompson was chosen as the next chef of Mary Elaine’s. His return has been heralded like a homecoming.

We’re about to give him another sort of homecoming, a warm welcome back to New York City and the Beard House. He’s cooked in Beard’s kitchen many times, but this is the first time he’s the star of the show. We’re expecting nothing less than a five-star performance.