Guests come to Tu Tu' Tun for both the food and the experience. How do you think about creating a meal that complements the lodge's setting on the Rogue River and leaves a lasting impression?

The river kind of does the work for us, so I just try not to get in the way. You're sitting right on a bend of the Rogue with the light coming down, and the food should feel like it belongs there.

Something I always tell our guests is that what you read is what you get. The menu is simple on purpose. The ingredient is the star, and our job is to highlight it, not bury it by reshaping everything and overcomplicating it. I want people to feel at home with what we're doing but still walk away with something new. If a dish turns into a core memory, where they think about it later, or they see it somewhere else and it takes them right back to that night on the river, then we did our job.

As executive chef, how do you balance honoring the lodge's culinary legacy while introducing your own ideas and evolving the dining program for today's travelers?

People have been calling this place a second home since 1970. Fishermen, artists, families that keep coming back for generations. I never wanted to touch that part. The warmth and the no-pretense thing is really the whole point, and I'll protect that over anything I put on a plate.

The biggest change was the dining room itself. It used to be communal, everyone at big tables with lazy susans and no say in what you ate or who you sat next to. We turned it into a real restaurant. Now we do breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout the season; you eat as much or as little as you want, and you sit with whoever you came with. It's your holiday, so it should be your call.

The cooking changed too. We built a real seasonal program around these local farms, the river and live fire, and a wine list that leans hard into Oregon. That's the whole approach with sourcing. We use as much of Oregon as we possibly can, and when we can't get something here, we go find the best version of it anywhere, whether that's truffles from Provence, caviar, or prosciutto from Italy.

We also built a bar program I'm really proud of. Every syrup is made in-house with local produce; we ferment locally foraged spruce for our Old Fashioned, and the kitchen and the bar are tied right together. People will drive hours for a good meal now, and when they get here I want them to feel that we're going for it. So the standard's higher than it used to be, but the feeling at the table is the same one this lodge has always had.

Has hiring or sourcing been a challenge because of TTTL's remote location, and how do you handle these operationally if so?

It's both, and it's still hard. We just work through it with the core team we've got and make it happen. Produce is in a good place now because of the relationships we built with local farmers. From summer into fall, we're getting about 90% of our produce from the farmers market.

Dry goods were the real headache. The quality we wanted just isn't out here, so for a while we were buying pallets at a time up in Portland and paying a freight company to haul it all the way down. We did that enough that the wholesaler started paying attention, and eventually I got them to commit to driving down here themselves. The one thing I asked for in return was that every local restaurant gets the same access at the same price we do. I want everyone out here to be able to get a better product for a better price. If we can give something back to the community and help the other restaurants and the food trucks, that means a lot to me.

On staff, I've been lucky. When I came to Oregon, one of my sous chefs who had just left my last kitchen to be with his family reached out because he wanted in. Another one did the same thing a month later. Both of them cooked with me in New York, came out to L.A. when I moved, and now they're here with me in Oregon. For our third season, one of my execs wanted to come be part of it too. I love that people are drawn to what we're building. The local workforce is thin, so I want this to be a place where we train people up and show them that cooking can take you all kinds of places.

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