Unlikely Sources: Graham Elliot

He's best known being a chef, restauranteur, and TV personality, but there's a '90s post-hardcore band member still living inside of him.

Graham Elliot at the Napa Valley Expo, May 26, 2018. Napa, CA.

Welcome to the latest edition of Unlikely Sources, a recurring feature where I invite creatives from different walks of public life who are not typically associated with their love of hardcore to choose and discuss three songs that have some personal meaning to them. This month, I’m speaking with Graham Elliot.

As a chef and restauranteur, Graham has been awarded two Michelin stars and at least three James Beard Award nominations. (In the culinary world, that’s a big deal.) He’s also made a name for himself on television, most notably as a judge on both MasterChef and Top Chef. But long before that, he was a ‘90s hardcore kid who, at one point, sang and played guitar for a Virginia band called The Aura of Onassis—a truly ‘90s band name if I ever heard one. Among the many bands he has fed at his restaurants over the year, he’s a respected name in our community. But this is the first time he’s ever spoken in detail about the way his life in punk still survives in the way he works today.

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Graham, singing for his band The Aura of Onassis in 1996.

My first memory of you was on Top Chef Masters, when you were a contestant. I remember being like, “Who’s the guy with the Jawbreaker tattoo?” [laughs] And then trying to figure out a little bit after that. Where were you at that point in your life?

GRAHAM: So that would have been 2008 or the beginning of 2009. I had just opened my own restaurant, Graham Elliot—the eponymous kind of name—in Chicago. Television just seemed like this amazing way to get across your ideas and beliefs and style, as well as to say, “Hey, look at me” [laughs]. As a chef, to be able to do that was a no-brainer. So Top Chef asked me if I wanted to come on. This was a charity season, for actual chefs that were already there and not up-and-coming, and I decided to do it. Most of the tattoos I have, a lot of them are music-related, but the one that most people saw was the Jawbreaker one.

Were people blowing you up after that? Like, “Who are you, man?”

GRAHAM: Yeah. It’s funny because on Top Chef it was this one-off season, but then doing MasterChef, [I went] from 600,000 viewers to 4 million, and you’re on every week. So that’s where I think a lot of people saw it. And if you look at Twitter, you get instant street cred because it’s kind of hard to ever talk shit about Jawbreaker [laughs].

Where were you in terms of the punk-to-chef pipeline when Top Chef happened?

GRAHAM: Very firmly in chef-land. But there’s this joke that all chefs are failed rock stars. And I was in a band. I was the singer-guitarist in our little band [The Aura of Onassis], and I was working as a dishwasher and prep cook, and I decided I loved cooking. I love the kind of pirate ship atmosphere of the restaurant world. So music was going to be the hobby and cooking would kind of be the life journey. I made that split in ‘94 or ‘95, when I started culinary school and went from there. Working with my hands was the main goal, but realizing that food was this beautiful way to connect with people and be a craftsman, be an artist, work with the seasons—that was it, you know?

It’s interesting that the three songs you chose are all from that specific era—let’s say, between 1995 and 1997—and so I’m curious how much of that is nostalgia for you, the music you were listening to when you started working in kitchens.

GRAHAM: I think nostalgia is a huge thing for me, in life in general, because my dad was in the Navy and we moved every two years. I went to twelve schools and three high schools. This was before Facebook or anything else, so say that you and I lived in the Philippines and knew each other in sixth grade, and were best friends, and then your dad moved and you might never see that person again—you almost wonder if it was real, if it happened. And if you do that enough times, I think you try to grasp onto certain moments.

In 1994, I moved from Southern Maryland, where we would go to shows in D.C.—you know, the 9:30 Club, the Black Cat, all your Dischord bands and everything—to Virginia Beach. I think that point in my life was where there was this huge shift. I think I’ve always been drawn more towards the melodic, anthemic, you know, “emo” type of sound, if you will—and obviously, there’s been a million bands and records since then that are inspiring—but [when I chose these songs], I really tried to boil it down like a sauce.

TEXAS IS THE REASON “If It’s Here When We Get Back, It’s Ours” (S/T 7”, 1995)

I think it’s interesting that two of the three songs you chose are, I would say, the most quote-unquote “hardcore” songs of the respective artist.

GRAHAM: True. I remember reading an interview with Davey [von Bohlen, of the Promise Ring] where he mentioned how they gave “E. Texas Ave.” to the Texas is the Reason split because it was their “hard song,” and how you guys did “Blue Boy,” which was this nice pretty one, and he was like, “Aw, man!”

True story [laughs]. So what is it about “If It’s Here” that made you want to talk about it?

GRAHAM: Not to share too much, but I moved from Hawaii in January of ‘92 to Southern Maryland. It was the worst experience ever, right in the middle of high school. By the end of ‘93, I had to get checked into the hospital for depression and… life got really dark. From there I moved to Virginia Beach, and it was like, OK, things are better. I met new friends and we listened to certain music, and a lot of it was more going down the pop punk vein—you have Lagwagon, your Fat Wreck Chords bands. Like, I remember going to see Face to Face and Ten Foot Pole and NOFX at the Nsect Club in 1994.

So I was already getting into all these bands, when all of the sudden, it’s not just this new CD that came out, but a seven-inch. This is what bands that don’t have enough money or aren’t on big labels—they put this out themselves. It’s like a cool baseball card, a collector’s thing. My friend Richard Owens, who ended being the drummer in the band we tried to do, brought over the Texas seven-inch, and I thought, “This is really poppy. The singer kind of sounds like a hardcore Richard Marx” [laughs]. If you put them side by side, I swear there are similarities! But I loved it. And it wasn’t just screaming hardcore. I had friends that were Krishna [kids], and listening to a lot of that really hardcore stuff, but no, it was guys from those bands that started this, and I thought, “Wow. I don’t have to be super angry to play that kind of music. It’s OK to play this kind of thing.”

But this song has a mosh part! [laughs]

GRAHAM: I think I read an interview with Dave Grohl about drums once and they were like, “The best drummers are the ones where you can actually sing along with the drums,” and I was like, go listen to “If It’s Here”! If you can still sing along to all those different little fills and parts 30 years later, you did something right. But that’s my story with that one. That just set off this idea that you can do really cool [melodic] kind of stuff and still be in the scene. The scene was everything.

I mean, on a personal level, that feels really good to hear because that was sort of the idea. Like, that song specifically, I think we saw it as a fulcrum between our hardcore lives and what we were trying to do with this band in the future. That’s why it has a mosh part. It was very much about staking our claim, letting you know, this is where we’re from. But we’re also going to try to go other places, and hopefully that will come through in a two-minute song.

GRAHAM: Isn’t it amazing how much you can get out of that time? Like, you know better than anyone, but you used to be able to play a show for seven dollars and get seven different bands, and it’s everything from ska to punk to Texas to Snapcase or whatever, and it’s just this weird thing so that right when you get to your mosh part, you’ve got someone doing windmills next to the person crying into their backpack [laughs]. It’s like, you’re able to hit all these genres like a great chef doing fusion-inspired stuff.

THE PROMISE RING “E. Texas Ave.” (The Promise Ring/Texas is the Reason Split 7”, 1996)

The split with the Promise Ring came out in late ‘96, early ‘97. Where were you at that point?

GRAHAM: I was still living in Virginia Beach, going to culinary school, going to shows all the time. I’m listening to what I consider punk, and my brother, who is five years older—you know, always the cool music brother—was like, “Oh, if you like punk now, you’ve got to listen to this band.” And it was Jawbreaker’s 24-Hour Revenge Therapy. At first I was like, this doesn’t sound punk, it’s not fast or anything [laughs]. But then as you get more into it, and you get into the lyrics, it’s like, this is the coolest thing ever. I saw the Texas and Promise Ring tour in February of 1997 at Twisters in Richmond, and I remember it was awesome, and then the next week, you’d see Fun Size, and then Inquisition, and then Avail is playing… and it’s just so cool. It’s fun when you’re in it, but then 30 years later, you realize you’re a part of something very special. For a lot of reasons, but a lot of it is just community.

That’s the thing. I still feel like so many people miss the point when we’re talking about connecting the dots between Texas or Promise Ring or Sunny Day or whoever, because the part that always gets lost in the telling is that the connective tissue was always hardcore. It wasn’t because we were playing more melodic music. It was because Dan from Sunny Day played in a straightedge band called Resolution with my friend Ron [Guardipee]. It was because I watched the Promise Ring sing along to every word on the Gorilla Biscuits album by heart in a parking lot once. Dan from the Promise Ring has Shelter and Iceburn tattoos! I was like, these are my people. We come from the same place.

GRAHAM: I went to eleventh grade in Virginia and a kid had an Iceburn shirt, and I remember asking, “Who is that?” And they told me I had to listen to that, so again, Revelation Records is a thing. 

So why did “E. Texas Ave.” make it onto your list?

GRAHAM: I love a soft/hard song. That pretty picking at the beginning and then it gets really harsh and then it gets pretty again. It was the one that everyone in our little circle just thought was amazing. I was going to show this to you. [He lifts up his sleeve, shows me a tattoo of the vintage microphone found on the insert of the Promise Ring’s Falsetto Keeps Time seven-inch.] The old mic. I was probably 20 when I got that. But yeah, I remember just thinking that was the coolest record—even the photo, the mailbox and everything. It was just different from what a lot of bands were doing and I really connected with it. It was like finding these little bits and hearing that, and almost getting closer and closer to what I think I wanted [my band] to sound like.

I don’t know what this says about you, but even though this is technically the Promise Ring’s most “hardcore” song, it also starts with a lyric about cakes and sweets.

GRAHAM: [Laughs] Exactly! Like, “hanging your hat in Hartford”? I don’t know what that means!

But the things you’re describing—the cover of the record, the lyrics, even the vintage mic—these are all super nostalgic things.

GRAHAM: And not to get too psychological, but I think moving around and having things like that to look back on, you don’t have anything tangible to really hold onto. But when you watch an old black-and-white movie from the ‘50s and you’re like, “Look at that guys suit, and the hat, and the car.” There’s that Americana, there’s that romance, there’s the windswept skies of Nebraska and driving around with a pretty girl. You have no clue if it ever existed, or if it does now, but it pulls at the heartstrings. Christie Front Drive’s album had wheatfields on it. It’s just a whole different feel than other bands, I guess.

CHRISTIE FRONT DRIVE - “Now I Do” (Christie Front Drive, 1996)

Before we talk about Christie Front Drive, what did the Aura of Onassis sound like?

GRAHAM: Umm, probably I would say a mix between Jawbreaker and Christie Front Drive. I remember someone passing around a video that had Bouncing Souls on it, and maybe Doc Hopper, but it was a couple of live shows on VHS, and one of the bands was Christie Front Drive. And I just remember them playing and they spin around at the same time, the band, and I was like, “This is amazing. They’re choreographing their show and this is so cool!” [laughs]. But immediately, hearing it, I thought this is what I try to sound like when I play.

But what’s funny, if you listen to certain bands and you’re drawn to their lyrics and not so much the music, Christie Front Drive is the opposite. I don’t know anything that he’s singing because it’s all so muddled; it’s like he’s singing with his mouth closed. You just have no idea. You’re kind of coming up with the lyrics yourself. 

It’s funny you say that because when I was thinking about this song, I wrote a bunch of notes, and I actually first went to the internet—unsuccessfully, I should add—because I was like, “Wait, does anyone know the lyrics?” [laughs]. But the first note I wrote was, “The Sigur Ros of hardcore.”

GRAHAM: No way [laughs]. I mean, I think it’s so unique and you have to give credit. I’ve always been told as a musician or as a chef that the hardest thing to do—and the goal in life—is to find your own voice. Where someone tastes your food and goes, “Ah, Graham did that.” As opposed to, “Oh, it’s Italian.” Which is like, great, that encompasses a lot [laughs]. So if you go back and listen to certain things, like, the Get Up Kids’ early stuff sounds very much like Samiam, with these different guitar breakdown parts. Or Jimmy Eat World, whose Static Prevails ended up being my whole summer of ‘97, that very much had a Christie Front Drive influence. But when you go back and listen to Christie Front Drive, I don’t think it sounds like anyone. I just thought that was the coolest thing to do something so way off the grid.

I’m surprised there aren’t a lot more public punks in the chef world because it seems like the kitchen is the place where so many hardcore kids went to work when we couldn’t tour or when we weren’t on tour. It would seem to follow that many of them would continue the path.

GRAHAM: I think if you’re a hardcore person, and you’re in a kitchen—dishwashing and then cooking—it’s like, a lot of people have authority issues in the scene [laughs]. So to have the military-style kitchen brigade with a chef, sous chef, and chef de cuisine, and you’re pretty much getting yelled at by each one of those as you try to move, you’re only going to do it as long as you can hold your breath. And then you’re like, “I’m out of here.”

I love the kitchen, but it’s such a long slog dedicating yourself to being a chef or achieving something. Maybe now you don’t need to raise $2 million anymore to open your own restaurant with fine china and a wine list and glassware. You can say, “I’m going to open it for $20,000 in this truck or in this back alley where it’s just me and a dishwasher, and we get to cook and serve everything and play our own music.” That’s what I think people want to do now. It’s like saying you don’t need to have this massive infrastructure as a band to go on tour—no. Just throw it in the van and go.

Do you still feel connected to the community?

GRAHAM: I do. But I feel like, for me, it’s about being able to go and still be a part of the community, but more as a fan of the music, and then doing food and having the same kind of anti-establishment approach to it. Or even being able to reach out to a band that’s coming to town and saying, “Come in for dinner. This is what I know how to do, so let me share it with you.” It’s not like I abandoned something then went and started just listening to polka for the last 20 years and that’s all I do now [laughs]. You will always have that with you.

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