THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406020034
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL RUEHLMANN, SPECIAL TO FLAVOR
DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: Long
Focused.
{REST} Center that. Draw a neat border around it. Frame it, hang it and keep it dusted.
``I'm very disciplined around here,'' he said, seated at a table in his Coastal Grill on North Great Neck Road in Virginia Beach, several hours before opening.
It was the scene of furious activity, as Bryan's off-duty staff engaged in a floor-to-ceiling scrubdown. In the Army, this kind of intensive, after-hours team scouring is called, without joy, a ``G.I. party.'' At the Coastal Grill it's voluntary, but it takes place every few weeks.
A visitor observed that the establishment seemed just about spotless before the work got started.
``In the military you learn to do a job 100 percent,'' said Bryan, formerly Sgt. Bryan, army recon instructor. ``You don't stop before the job is done. And you clean up after.''
So the Coastal Grill sparkles. Ping! Seventeen crisp tables bedecked with gleaming glassware.
Potted geraniums at the entry, ice-white walls, neat ranks of bottles at the bar.
But beauty isn't the only virtue of the Coastal Grill. The food happens to be good, too. Perfect pan-fried rainbow trout, fresh salmon fillets, tender tuna turned in butter.
``We don't cut corners,'' said Bryan.
They square them.
If Bryan, 37, graduated from the grinder under drill instructors at Fort Jackson, he has also studied with top Culinary Institute of America emeriti and multi-star chefs on both coasts.
``Jerry Bryan's no prima donna,'' reports Charlie Sears of The Max in Portsmouth, where Bryan served as executive chef several years back. Bryan, he says, ``came up through the ranks.''
``He's a perfectionist. Jerry could take a tennis shoe and one of my old hairpieces and a pile of leaves and turn it into a terrific dish. And it would be pretty.''
\ SIMPLE AND ELEGANT\ The fare at the Coastal Grill is elegant but not precious. It remains robustly supportive of the blunt nouns emblazoned across the bright green awning outside: ``BEEF-FISH-PORK-VEAL-LAMB.'' Grilled New York strip, roast chicken, duck in green peppercorn sauce.
Baked goat cheese with bell peppers and bread.
White chocolate mousse sandwich.
Deceptively simple.
``Anybody can wow you with foie gras, caviar and truffles,'' says Jimmy Sneed, formerly of Windows in Urbanna, now chef-owner of The Frog and the Redneck in Richmond. ``They can goof it up and still impress you, because you aren't real familiar with what you're eating. But when you do food that everybody knows, like poached fish with acorn squash, that's very difficult to produce perfectly - and that is what Jerry does.''
Sneed's mentor is Washington-based Jean-Louis Palladin, the youngest chef in history to earn two Michelin stars. On a whim, Sneed once took him out to eat at the Coastal Grill. Now Palladin willingly drives two hours to dine there.
``Jerry's real laid-back, an arm-around-you, back-slapping kind of guy,'' says Sneed. ``His staff wears shorts in the kitchen. But Jerry has a very analytical mind; Jerry worries about the little things, the details.
``That's focused.''
The style is the man. Seated at a table while workers boiled about him, the freckled, fatless 6-footer lounged in bluejeans and a tropical shirt. But those casual togs were immaculate, and his sandy hair was crisply cut at an inspection-correct quarter-inch on the sides; unornamental spectacles gave Bryan the look of a bookish recruit on furlough.
``In the heat of the battle,'' he drawled wryly, ``we maintain our standards.''
The meat salesman's son has a certifiable sense of humor. It goes back to being the third kid in a working family of four children, born in Norfolk, raised in Virginia Beach. Bryan graduated from Cox High in 1976 without a distinguished academic record, but his band uniform was always carefully pressed.
``He was happy and pleasant,'' remembers his mom, Betty Bryan, 64. ``But picky. Finicky.''
And accustomed to fresh produce grown on the family's 5-acre farm. He's still a freshness freak. It pays off on the plates of his customers.
\ ARMY DAYS\ Bryan enlisted in the Army because going into the Navy after growing up in Hampton Roads seemed redundant. He met his future wife, Barbara, at air-traffic control school, Fort Rucker, Ala. She now is a civilian controller at Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport; he went on to become a jump-trained, survival-schooled infantry Pathfinder.
He ate snakes and bugs. Protein, great. Flavor, not great.
``I enjoyed the camaraderie,'' Bryan recalls. ``I was with some exceptional, dedicated, incredibly able, exceptionally focused guys.''
He was a trooper-of-the-month, then an instructor. Bryan finished out his enlistment as an E-5, married, attended college at Virginia Tech and wound up in the cooking business after a summer stint as a waiter at The Quarterdeck restaurant in Virginia Beach. Culinary martinet Tommy Seay was his boss there.
Seay's legendary sophistication did not particularly impress Bryan. Nor did his flamboyance. But his relentlessness did.
``You worked for Tommy,'' Bryan testifies. ``You polished the silver. You maintained your station.''
That was the beginning of a complex chain of apprenticeship that wound its way through the kitchens of such exalted establishments as Le Saucier and L'Auberge de France in New Jersey, Pierre Francois and The Bridge Cafe in New York, Chinois on Main in Santa Monica.
``I was hooked,'' says Bryan, ``I was possessed, I was seeing things I never heard of.''
To the uptown accomplishment of haute cuisine he brought his own down-home brand of grunt-taught, hard-knock teamwork.
``If the person next to you isn't doing it, you pull him along,'' Bryan said.
First, you accomplish the mission.
That done, you sit down together and have a beer.
``He's absolutely the best boss I've ever worked for,'' says Yvonne Lastra, bar manager and waitress at the Coastal Grill. ``He likes you to get things done when he tells you to get them done. That means immediately.
``But he's also very caring. He'll do anything for you. He even taught me to ski.''
Coastal Grill is not a high-turnover operation. People tend to work there for years. Sometimes they depart because Bryan has unselfishly boosted their careers.
His sous chef, Sven Skelenger, is heading for Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan. It's run by Bryan's friend Tom Colicchio, named one of the 10 best new chefs in the country by Food and Wine magazine.
``Jerry runs his restaurant like his home,'' says Colicchio. ``He has a sense of hospitality, and that's what this business is all about. His fare isn't bistro, it isn't brasserie, it isn't new American - it's just good food.''
When his wife's work brought him back to Hampton Roads, Bryan chefed at The Max, then determined to open his own establishment. With partner Jack Stallings, a commercial fisherman who supplies a good deal of the fresh seafood for the restaurant, he opened the Coastal Grill in November of 1989, just in time to see 181,000 heads of Hampton Roads households take off for the Gulf War within weeks.
``It was a tumultuous first year,'' he says.
But the restaurant not only survived, it prevailed. Now the Coastal Grill sustains 22 employees. And a consistent menu that, unabashedly, does not pursue fads and trends.
``We're not about pretentiousness,'' maintains Bryan. ``We're about comfort. We want to have a place where you can put your elbows on the table but still enjoy a $50 bottle of wine if you want one.''
But smoking permitted at the bar only, pilgrim.
And no separate checks.
Bryan pointed to the ceiling.
``See those little green marks?'' he noted. ``That was my mom, touching up the paint. My dad and my partner's dad and my little brother helped build this place. The Coastal Grill is a labor of love.''
And, like its co-owner/chef, squared-away.
Ping!
Seventeen crisp tables.
Focused.
by CNB