Q&A with Chef Jordan Hawley

Clara Titus

I sat down with Chef Jordan Hawley, Chef de Cuisine at il seme, to ask him questions about how he got his start, what keeps him inspired, and what he cooks at home (when he’s got the time):

I know you didn't go to culinary school. How did you get your start? What would you say was your “in”, and at what point did you decide, “Oh, this is what I want to do.”?

After I dropped out of college, I worked at Hideaway Pizza on Cherry Street. I started in the kitchen making pizzas. To me, it was just a job with one of my friends. I got to wear a tie-dye T-shirt as my uniform, and got a discount on pizza. After a few months of working there, I really fell in love with the process of making something with [my] hands, and being able to give it to someone and watch their reaction–just the celebratory nature of the food-hospitality exchange. I'd never thought of it as a career option until I was in the kitchen doing it.

Then, I was the short order cook [at a diner out of Whole Foods] frying eggs and making pancakes. I really honed my line cooking skills at that time. I was it, I was a one man operation. I was in the back with a little touchscreen computer. Orders would show up, then I would make it, ring a bell, and somebody would come take it from me. You do 40, 50, 60 covers by yourself on a Saturday or Sunday morning, you get pretty good at it after a while. That's where I really got my speed up. 

After doing that for a while, I decided I wanted to be back in restaurants. I had a friend who was working at Torero, it was a Spanish, Latin, tapas kind of thing. Latin American street food, but presented in small plate form. They had a raw bar where I learned how to shuck oysters and how to make ceviche. I learned a ton of stuff there.

From there, I went to Amelia's. I started as essentially the pizza cook, [working the] wood burning oven station. I worked my way up to Sous Chef, got Chef de Cuisine, and then worked through COVID. 

There are a lot of people whose first job is in a kitchen, but they don’t necessarily go on to be successful chefs. Was there a point where you deliberately started educating yourself and pushing yourself? 

I’m a naturally very curious person. 
I'm very hands-on. Whatever I'm doing, I want to be successful at it. I try to find the best way to do things. 
I’m definitely a natural leader, and  tend to take initiative and that's super valuable in a kitchen. Being invested in the project I'm a part of and wanting it to succeed, it’s just kind of inherent in who I am. I don't wanna be part of a sinking ship, you know?

There's a lot about being a chef that appeals to me. When I was going through school I was very involved in the arts– drawing, painting, printmaking. There's an artistic element to [cooking]--an artistic expression. But I was going to college for journalism, I wanted to travel and write. With cooking, you’re learning the story of these foods and kind of documenting and retelling that story to people. And then, my grandparents grew up on farms. 
And I feel like I'm paying homage to my family by working so directly with farmers. It just hits in a lot of ways for me; there are all these links that come together.

You're describing leadership and wanting to succeed, but there's also an educational aspect to this career that you clearly have, but you didn’t receive from a formal institution. Can you talk more about that?

I mean, I've had some really good mentors. There were some really good chefs during my time at Torero. I learned a lot at Amelia's. I learned a lot from Kevin Snell, who was the chef there at first and then Andrew Donovan came in later on. I've just been really lucky that I've been given a lot of freedom in these places where I've been, and lucky being able to work under that mentorship and having that feedback to work off of. They let me experiment and hone my craft. 

I’m always trying to expose myself to what other people are doing. Not only in this [local] scene, but statewide, countrywide, and internationally, too. I just wanna know. Not so much to chase trends, but more to expose myself to ideas. 
I think [chefs] in bigger cities have the benefit of having all different places where they can work and learn. I've only worked in four or five restaurants across my career, which is not a whole lot of exposure to other chefs' ideas and styles. So, I've just tried to teach myself with the internet and with social media, just trying to stay informed. I have a ton of cookbooks at home. I'll buy a book and just flip through it and look for ideas that I can apply. 

I stay curious and take information from everywhere, not only the chefs that work above me, but the other chefs that I work with. I've also had the benefit of working with some really great Mexican cooks. I've got a friend here in town named Rayquan Bennett, over at Summit Club. He's from Saint Croix, the US Virgin Islands. So, to have that person who I can learn one-on-one about Caribbean cuisine is cool. You know, food travels in the same way that people do, and so, ideas and cooking techniques and different cuisines travel too, and I love finding the connections between all of that.

That goes back to what you were saying about the journalism connection.

Yeah exactly. That's one of the things that keeps me hooked– the story of food and its journey. 

Being [at il seme] now, and doing Italian cuisine, seeing the similarities between, not only other Southern European cuisines, but even North African and some Arabian food that's coming up through the Mediterranean, all of that is further informed by the discovery of the New World in the 1400s. It's just interesting to me. 

I stay curious. I love learning about the food and the ingredients and learning new things to do with it and learning what not to do with it. Yeah, I have a lot of fun at work. I think I'm pretty lucky to do what I do and lucky to have the success that I've had.

Last year, you were nominated for the James Beard Foundation category of “Best Chef Southwest”. Was that just totally unexpected for you? What was your reaction to that?

I had worked under three chefs who had been nominated, Kevin and Andrew both at Amelia's and then Lisa [of Living Kitchen Farm Restaurant Group] had all been nominated before. So, I had this resume building and saw I could maybe be there one day. But then to actually have it, it was totally out of the blue. 

When I first found out, it was shocking. I don't say this to be cynical, but I knew from the beginning that I wasn't going to win. So, there wasn’t a lot of pressure that I felt from the nomination. As soon as it happened, it was just like, “Wow, it's cool to see all that hard work pay off.” You see your name on a list with all the other chefs. I mean, there's only a hundred or so names on the whole list each year. So it's pretty cool to be able to call my mom and be like, “Hey! I got nominated!”

It was an individual award category, it was my name, but I can't do it without the people here. 
It was just the ultimate validation of the team that I've built and the systems that are in place. I'm very behind the scenes. I don't walk around and talk to people in the dining room very often and that's just because I'm kind of shy. But it was cool to see the restaurant’s success and the team’s success paying off [with] the exposure that it brought.

Can you talk more about working in a restaurant where there’s such a strong emphasis on sustainability and farm-to-table practices?

Yeah, the sustainability and the direct relationship with the farmers and growers are my favorite things about this job. We try to be as sustainable as possible and reduce food waste. We work directly with farmers that are growing just for us, like in the case of Lightfoot Farms. Having that relationship is not only super unique for a restaurant in a market of our size, but it also helps reduce food waste. Those farmers know exactly what they're growing, who they're growing it for, and that it's going to be used by someone. 
They're not growing in excess. 

I'm pretty confident there's not a single place [in Tulsa] that’s as committed to local food the way our restaurants are. Especially now, in the peak of summertime, there's almost nothing vegetable-wise that I have to order from outside the borders of our state. 

We’ve started sourcing olive oil from southern Texas, which is another really cool way to close the loop and not only support a small family farm, but also keeps us from contributing to the carbon emissions of shipping gallons of olive oil overseas. So, it's just the little ways that we can contribute to that sustainability effort.

Having that face-to-face relationship with the farmers, being able to call
 and 24 hours later [they’re] here with the stuff. Then just hours after that, it's chopped up in the pan and being served to people. There's a lot to be said about eating food when it's that fresh.

Really fresh, peak of the season, super simple, you just have to learn how to complement things and not overpower them. We serve pretty simple, straightforward food. 
We're just trying to do the ingredients justice.  

Elegantly simple. 

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, a few questions just for fun– what do you eat at home? Like, if you’re cooking your favorite meal?

One of my favorite things to cook at home lately has been pozole. It's one of those things that the finished product is much more impressive than the sum of its parts. It's a very short ingredient list, very minimal processing required. It's just about the right combination and the right ratios of those ingredients and then letting them simmer away together. It's a pretty hands- off thing once everything is in the pot, a great one to have in your back pocket. 

Do you have a favorite junk food? Or go-to unhealthy snack? Or do you not eat that kind of thing at all? 


No, I do. My thing is chocolate peanut butter cups. They've always been my thing, even when I was growing up. And frozen waffles! I love them! I put peanut butter on the waffles and then drown them in syrup. [laughs]

And then,I have an awful habit of eating in my car. 
I am never giving myself enough time to eat at home. I do cook at home a lot, but a lot of the time I'm cooking dinner to have ready for a couple of days in a row or I'm making lunch for my girlfriend. So, by the time it comes around to me, I'm grabbing gas station pizza on the way to work. [laughing] And that pizza box is gonna sit on the floorboard of the car for two weeks. 

Such a funny contrast of a chef running this upscale restaurant, but doesn't have time to cook for himself.

When I'm at work, I'm on my feet for ten hours at a time, but I'm eating all day because I'm testing stuff. I'm also like, “All right, I'm gonna eat a peach.” You know? Or gonna have a quarter of a loaf of focaccia over the next hour. I'm snacking the whole time I'm here too.

Chef Jordan and I devolved into casual conversation before he thanked me for my time and hopped up to finish prep for the night. Another busy night on the books!