NOVEMBER 2024 16 with Chef Matt Carter, owner of Fat Ox 6316 N. Scottsdale Road • ilovefatox.com In the Kitchen A Phoenix native and Arcadia High graduate, Chef Matt Carter knew he found his calling from the first moment he stepped foot in a restaurant kitchen. His culinary skills have been honed over the years thanks to iconic chefs and worldwide travels – skills that can be found in each of his three Valley restaurants. Give us a little insight into your upbringing. I was born and raised in Phoenix. My maternal grandfather came here during WWII to finish bomber pilot school in Litchfield and then met my grandmother. After that he opened an air conditioning company – which was a pretty good move in the 1940s. After the Vietnam War, my father came here and was in the clothing industry. He and my mom ran a store until they separated and then her and I moved to Flagstaff. Dad opened a clothing store on 44th and Camelback in the mid-80s and that’s when I came back to finish high school. I graduated from Arcadia High in 1988. Near my father’s store was a restaurant called The Eggery and the gentleman that owned that had a location in San Diego. After high school, I moved there for the summer and asked him if I could have a job washing dishes. By the end of the summer, I was flipping eggs. I fell in love with it. What happened next? I came back to Arizona and went to Arizona State – for two days. I went, ‘I’m out of here – I don’t want to be in a classroom, I think this kitchen thing is my thing!’ I was very ignorant. I had no idea what I was doing [ laughs ]. I was never the best student – don’t give me a project and say ‘Okay, you have three months to do this.’ In a restaurant, you know what to do every second. There’s no, ‘Oh, what should I do today?’ I’m good with time management and work well under pressure, so this was a better fit for me. What about culinary school? I was originally in the first graduating class of Scottsdale Culinary Institute but I got into trouble and was bumped a semester. I was 18 and partying too much [ laughs ]. I was still not fully focused on the food thing. Restaurants, environment and camaraderie I understood, but the food piece took me many more years before it clicked. After graduation, where did you work? I bounced around in hotels, I worked at Houston’s, I went back to San Diego and worked at a hotel there. Around 1990, I was back in Phoenix and I got a job at a restaurant called La Chaumière in Old Town Scottsdale. I walked into the kitchen and knew I was home. It was a French bistro where they were making everything from scratch. The chef was yelling at me within five minutes of me walking in the door so I knew I was in the right place. I was a punk kid and needed someone to tell me what to do. Nine months later, I moved to Paris. What was that experience like? I had no plan other than ‘I’m going to learn how to make French food.’ I didn’t know you needed a visa, but I lived there for two years. It was a great experience but nothing that changed my culinary career. My skill level didn’t improve much. I worked at some decent bistros short- term. Once they figured out I was illegal and had no paperwork they were like, ‘You have to go.’ You worked for Christopher Gross when you came back to the States. Yes! I was there for six years – and that’s where I learned everything I know about food and the restaurant business. I started at the bottom there and worked my way up to chef de cuisine. I always joke that I would still be there today if the restaurant still existed. I called Chris as he was getting ready to do a dinner event in LA at Paramount Studios and he asked if I wanted to come out with him and meet some of the other chefs. Chris introduced me to Thomas Keller from The French Laundry and in that conversation, Keller mentioned he was losing a top employee and wanted to know if I wanted to do a stage [a temporary position in another chef’s kitchen]. A week later I moved to Napa and became the poissonnier [fish chef] for nine months. Where did that lead you? I ended up back in Phoenix and decided I was going to go back to ASU. I called Chef Michael DeMaria and asked if I could line cook for him, so I did that and went to ASU; that lasted about three months and at the same time, Michael was opening a new restaurant and I was saying to myself, ‘Okay, what am I doing? I’m a cook, I need to be in a kitchen. I’m a chef, I need to be in charge.’ Michael offered me the executive chef position at his new place. I did that for about two years and then started to feel that itch to go again. Michael was approached by a gentleman named Terry Ellisor. He opened MercBar on Camelback in the mid-90s and I worked across the street. We’d spent a good amount of time together – I would go to his bar and he would come to the restaurant. Terry wanted to open a restaurant and hired me to be the chef…at Zinc Bistro, which opened a year later. Zinc did so well that you branched out to Mission? When we first opened Zinc, the Westin hadn’t been built yet, Scottsdale Quarter was still Dial Corporation. Everybody thought we were nuts going that far north because everything was happening in the Biltmore area. It started to grow, we hit our stride, and Terry and I started talking about a new concept. We wanted to stay in the French zone until a chef named Douglas Rodriguez introduced me to Latin cuisine that wasn’t Sonoran Mexican food. He blew my mind. Douglas had a caja china – a box used for roasting pigs. We bonded over our love of pork [ laughs ], so I started cooking pigs – birthdays, weddings, events, I’m coming over to cook a pig. I started making my own tortillas and salsas and realized that our area hadn’t seen the Mexico City version of street tacos. Terry and I decided on a pork taco place, which we opened as Mission in Old Town Scottsdale. We had the name Mission before we had the space right next to the Old Adobe Mission in Scottsdale, so it was serendipitous. As we started the design process, we realized this was going to be more than a taco shop. How do I bring in some of these cuisines and make them different than the 15 other restaurants right next to us? We wanted to be as different as possible but still make it recognizable to customers. A lady posted a write-up about our steamed clam dish, almejas . It plays off of a Peruvian dish that’s made with shrimp and a pepper called aji amarillo . She wrote that she ‘wanted to take a bath’ in it and I swear that changed our whole thing. That was our defining moment. How did Fax Ox come to life? We started talking to restaurant owner Mark Drinkwater [whose father was Mayor Herb Drinkwater] who was interested in partnering in a restaurant. At that time, I was ready to start working on my Italian concept – I’d gotten to the finish line a few times on some locations, had plans and restaurant designs ready. I wanted Italian, Mark was in steakhouses, and that was the merging for Fat Ox. A friend of my father’s called and said

17 NOVEMBER 2024 he bought the corner at Scottsdale and Lincoln and asked if we wanted to check out the space that was once the Quilted Bear. So Terry, Mark and I took a look and opened Fat Ox in 2017. The point of me wanting to open an Italian restaurant was just so I could make pasta. I had been selling pasta at Zinc for years but there’s only so much you can sell at a French bistro. When you’re doing French food, there’s nothing else. Learning about Latin cuisine spurred Mission, and spending a week with Chef Roberto Donna introduced me to Italian cuisine. What is the inspiration behind the food? Zinc is classic French bistro. If you go, you have to have oysters, the onion soup, pâté, steamed mussels…French food is really sauce-based. Our menu from the beginning was based on the availability of great product in Arizona. At the time, I had to drive to the airport twice a week to pick up fish and produce. It’s different these days! We do big lunches at Zinc. We just put a tarte flambée with multiple variations – one with smoked salmon and crème fraiche, fromage blanc and caviar – on the menu, which is a riff-off of Wolfgang Puck’s first pizza. Latin food is more vegetable based – charred vegetables, salsas, chimichurri – with varying amounts of chilis. We probably have 30 different chilis on our menu. We have a duck confit empanada that’s served with foie gras and a habanero glaze – it’s more of a Mexico City variation. I have my own version of guacamole with three different chilis. Italian is a little lighter – I’d call it the middle ground between French and Latin. It’s more vegetable based but we use a lot of olive oil at Fat Ox. We use a lot of butter, too [ laughs ]. We make all the pasta here fresh every day. It’s the heart and soul of the restaurant. We’re traditional Italian dining – starting with antipasti, then going to pasta and a protein at the end. It’s meant to be a shared, communal-type meal. What accolades have you garnered in your tenure as chef? I just won Food Pioneer from the Arizona Restaurant Association this past spring, which was awesome. I was very proud to get that. I won Best Chef in Scottsdale. We’ve been in a lot of magazines and I won a Rising Star Chef award back in 2004. You can win awards, but if your customers aren’t happy, what’s the point? I’m here to run a business, take care of my staff, keep the customers happy. Some of my employees have been with me for more than 15 years. Rochelle Daniel worked at Zinc for eight years, left, came back and opened Fat Ox and now she’s got a restaurant in Flagstaff called Atria. It’s a small circle in the business, and those things are important to me – the fact that one day these guys might go to open their own place. That’s a testament to what I do. I’m the leader but I probably spend more time teaching and mentoring my team. Do you have a mentor or a chef you look up to? Hands down, Christopher Gross. Chris is a taskmaster – he scared the crap out of me, and this was the older days too – things don’t work like that in a kitchen anymore. There’s no yelling, screaming, pot throwing. Not that I don’t do those things now, but it happens a lot less. Kitchens were pretty rough and tumble back then. He was an intimidating force. Chris hosted a wine dinner where these chefs from all over the country came and cooked. They were cooking food that I had never seen. That night changed my life. I started coming in early, learning as much as I could, and a year later I was chef de cuisine. Chris taught me customer relations, money, building a menu, costs. It wasn’t just food – it was everything that went with it. If you could cook for anyone, who would it be? My grandparents. They knew about my beginnings in this career, but didn’t get to see me follow through. I’d love to show them Zinc, Mission, Fat Ox, the expansion, just on a pride level for myself to say, ‘I know you thought I was crazy when I moved to Paris with a thousand dollars in my pocket and had no idea what I was doing, but it worked!’ Where’s your favorite spot in the Valley to eat? Richardson’s. It’s been open since the early 90s. It’s New Mexico cuisine. Back in the day, it was the only place that served food late night, so all the chefs would go there at the end of their shifts. I’ve got a million memories there. I love it. What’s next for Chef Matt Carter? We’re looking at possibly doing another Mission. I have four or five other concepts in mind. Our business partner Terry passed a few years ago and we’ve spent time picking up the pieces from that. He did a third of the business that Brian [Raab, Carter’s business partner] and I never did, so I’ve been learning books, payroll, things that he took care of. I want to open Carter’s Dash, which will be a more casual, take home type thing, so that’s on the radar. I’ve also been on a pizza kick for the last year so I have a concept for that called Black Tomato. I’m going to do a test run for Spring Training in a spot next to Mission – it will be sandwiches and pizza. I’ve also been itching to do something Asian again, so that’s on the list. We have a couple projects we’re working on but I can’t talk about them yet!