Talkin’ Turkey with Brian Moran

By Catherine McGarry Miller

Chef Brian Moran makes everything oh-so-simple and delicious. Moran’s recipe for a perfect turkey dinner? Buy your bird fresh from the butcher. Lavish it with aromatic vegetables (carrots, celery and onions), adorn it with sage and thyme, sprinkle on a bit of salt and a generous grind of black pepper. Bake until the thermometer reads 170 degrees, et voila! Dinner!

Balance is his byword. As a chef, Moran juggles flavors, textures, seasonings and customers’ needs. As a man of 46, he has created a harmonic blend of career, family, community service and recreation.

Moran has been under the radar for much of his career in Milwaukee. As Executive Chef for the Milwaukee Club for 15 years, he was cherished by members and respected within the culinary community, but little known to the public. Now he’s stepping onto center stage, as chef for the St. Paul Fish Co. at the Milwaukee Public Market and teaching cooking classes for the Market’s Traffic Jam series.

The Green Bay native has always had a passion for cooking. The fifth of eleven children, he marvels at his mother’s cookery and credits his parents’ strict but fair upbringing with his success. “I loved my mom’s cooking and still do,” he says. “She had German parents so I found that cuisine likable and easy to learn. The smells and aromas of her kitchen stay with me.”

From his mother, he learned to love hearty comfort foods and to use lots of fresh vegetables to stretch a dish and a dollar.

After high school, Moran went straight into the business. He washed dishes, bussed tables, bartended and even operated a fork lift in a giant freezer for eight hours a night. Seeing a chef’s tall white hat in the kitchen at work one night flipped a switch in his head: cooking was the career for him. He worked in restaurants while attending Fox Valley Technical College’s culinary arts program. His breadth of experience in the food industry created professional opportunities upon graduation, first in Green Bay and later in Milwaukee, where he moved in the mid-1980s.

Moran has worked with some of Milwaukee’s top toques: Edouard Becker of the English Room, caterer Scott Shully, Sanford’s Sandy D’Amato and Jerry Malinowski of the Wisconsin Club. When he took the Milwaukee Club executive chef position in the late 1980s, the glove fit so well he wore it for the next decade and a half. The daily breakfast, lunch and dinner service kept him very busy, but weekends off were a plus for this devoted family man.

“Club chefs work under the discerning eye of members who travel all over the world and eat at high-end restaurants so they expect a lot,” Moran explains. “I think I met their expectations.” He brought the club’s menu into the 20th century and beyond with lighter, healthier adaptations of traditional favorites – like substituting salmon for corned beef in hash. He also became renowned for his soups and seafood savvy.

Recently Moran left the club to establish his own business, Cooking with Chef Brian, a personal chef, catering and consulting firm. Though successful, he came on board the St. Paul Fish Company at the behest of owner Tim Collins. “I had heard about the [public market] concept five years ago and I said to myself I wanted to be involved, and sure enough it happened,” Moran recalls.

Business is already brisk at St. Paul’s 36-foot deli cases chock full of dozens of varieties of seafood flown in daily. The two-tiered “lobster spa” has capacity for 1,000 of the highly-craved crustaceans. “We buy fish whole and hand cut all our own. Since it’s handled less, it’s healthier. Not many fish markets do that,” Moran enthuses.

Moran’s imprint on the business is the extensive menu of soups, sandwiches, salads and entrees, including daily fish fries with house-made sides. His cooking classes at the market are already selling out. As a culinary instructor at Waukesha County Technical College, the classes are a way to build the business, expose people to the market and “to teach people how to cook good food.”

Perhaps Chef Brian’s greatest message is to use a light hand with food and use the flavors of a recipe’s ingredients to season a dish. “Taste first before adding salt,” he advises his students in a class on making tuna cakes. He uses the natural saltiness of the tuna and capers in his recipe to season the dish instead.

The subtlety of this chef’s skill shines in his gumbo, perky without delivering a sucker punch, and his clam chowder, a gentle blend of tender clams, slightly firm celery and potatoes in a light cream. His salads are moistened, not flooded with dressing. His recipe for success is also simple: “Eat well and listen to Ray Charles every day.” VS