We live in an era in which chefs––celebrity, reality show, and fictional––are often presented in mass media as swashbuckling raconteurs, tweezer-wielding technicians, or tattooed and scruffy heartthrobs. One could be forgiven for walking right past the portly guy with rumpled hair smoking a cigarette on the side of the building at 5430 Penn Ave. The droopy-dog countenance and the Crocs might suggest he’s not the culinary genius behind Spork (now One on Spork).
That’s Christian Frangiadis, a classically French-trained, James Beard-nominated, master of reinvention, who with 40-plus years in the industry has done just about everything. And he has no intention of stopping anytime soon. “In terms of food, I’m just always looking to see what I don’t know, and what I can learn next. I have to have some reason to get up and be excited.”
Christian Frangiadis on the Balancing Act of a Chef’s Life
“I could not continue to do this if I weren’t still learning. That is 100% true. Because I’m not the most disciplined person. What would happen is, I would do things badly. If I were trying to replicate the exact same thing that I did last year, it would turn out pretty shitty. I’m just not built that way,” he says.
A native of Reading, PA, Mr. Frangiadis came to Pittsburgh in 1991. He worked at some memorable restaurants of that era, including Mount Washington’s Isabela on Grandview, his eponymous Christian’s in Turtle Creek, Simply French and Southwest Bistro in the Cultural District, and Bikki in Shadyside. In 2004 he relocated to St. John’s in the US Virgin Islands. He lived there for a decade and started a family.
He returned to Pittsburgh and opened Spork in 2016 with business partner Andy Tepper, first as a neighborhood gastropub. That evolved organically into a destination restaurant focused on charcuterie, house-aged meats, house-made pastas, and tasting menus. It’s now One on Spork, an immersive, 16-seat chef’s tasting counter experience.
A Garden on Penn Avenue
They built a garden on a vacant lot behind the restaurant that boasts hundreds of varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices. The garden would be the envy of most restaurants this side of New York’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns. His team traveled to Texas for an extended eating tour of that state’s best barbecue. Spork Pit, down the street from the mothership restaurant, was born just after.
A trip to the rarified air of Noma in Copenhagen inspired them to create a “food lab” at Spork where they preserve and ferment produce from the aforementioned garden to create ingredients––powders, garums, misos, and waters––that put a burst of umami in every dish, helping to satisfy the expectation of a gourmet experience at Spork.
“I don’t want to be stagnant. I don’t want to be the guy doing the stuff that he did five years ago, or 10 years ago. I’m always looking for new things to do in the kitchen, trying to find new flavor profiles, going places and seeing things that are interesting, and trying to incorporate new things into the restaurant. The trick is to take these influences and then you say, Okay, how would I use this? Not how would they use it? But how would I use it? But the creativity should never trump the deliciousness. The deliciousness should always trump the creativity in my mind,” he said.
“[I] just keep just pushing forward because I always said the barometer to me is like, you should be better this month than last month. Because presumably, somewhere along the way, you’re going to find a more efficient way to do something, you’re gonna find a way to make something tasty,” he explained. “Just a tiny bit better. It is definitely an evolution.”
Personal Growth in a Chef’s Journey
The food isn’t the only part of that evolution, however. His approach to the work is, too. “Starting out in the business, I was like a lot of chefs––you go through that period where you’re just extremely narcissistic and egotistical and hard to get along with, and everything’s about you,” he said. “And as I’ve gotten older and mellowed, it’s so much more gratifying mentoring young people, and building a good team. There’s more respect given amongst the staff now and if you’re not doing things that way, it’s probably not going to work. Because honestly, the Millennials don’t want to hear your old war stories. Like, if I say ‘look, you know, when I was 22, I would run through a brick wall for my chef.’ They’d say ‘well then you were an idiot!” he laughed.
“We have probably six or seven incredibly talented people in the kitchen, and equally talented people behind the bar and in service. You get their creativity and passion too, because they all have something to say. What’s been really fun for me is trying to build a team, foster it, get everybody involved, get everybody contributing to the menu and the place and then rewarding people for that. It’s been a lot of fun. Yeah, finding: finding the right staff and finding the right formula.”
His wife, Marilu, whom he met while living in the Caribbean, pointed to an antique crystal double pan balance scale on their kitchen island. “You have to keep it like that,” she said “Balanced.” An apt metaphor for a restaurant, and for life.
NOTE: Spork recently transitioned from a traditional restaurant to a 16-seat, immersive tasting format called One by Spork. Book your spot now and experience Christian Frangiadis’s latest evolution.
Story by Dan Gigler
Photography by Jeff Swensen
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