Welcome to the ninth episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative, craft-based field. Listen below to learn or keep scrolling to read about Donnie Ferneau and his restaurant, Cathead’s Diner!
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There’s just something about local food for Chef Donnie Ferneau.
Early on, growing up in the Chicago area, he discovered that he could always find a job in a kitchen, and then he stumbled onto buying local produce and meat. When he moved to Little Rock in 2001 to be closer to his parents, he decided to continue buying and cooking local. “I was doing farm to table before farm to table was a movement,” Ferneau explained. “Knowing about food and looking at a carrot and thinking about all the different things I could do to it, but also thinking about where it came from, the people behind it. It’s just like when you drink a bottle of wine. You look at the region and you think about the trees, the grass, the people. Everybody involved in that berry that goes into a bottle of wine. … When you look at the animals, too, and the proteins you’re cooking, that animal died for you, so I always had to cook to the best of my ability to give it that honor. … It’s my happy place. I have a lot of passion.”
With his move to Little Rock in 2001, he knew that he wanted to be a business owner, and began looking for a way to combine his natural abilities with his creative interests. “I wanted to be in control with something that I created,” Ferneau explained. “Marketing and all those things those were great outlets, but I just found that the food side of it, making people happy and all the passion I could put into it, and then the flavors I was able to create, was just always intriguing me every day. It seemed like the chefs I worked under at that time in my career and my life touched my soul so much that it was something I just wanted to keep digging after. And then I opened up sides of me that I didn’t know existed. Not to get weird about it, but it helped me grow and then I kind of unleashed some stuff that I didn’t even know I had in me, and here we are now.”
Donnie’s Favorite – A Chocolate Cortado (espresso mixed with warm milk)
His first venture, Ferneau Restaurant, opened in 2004. “I just knew it would be fine dining,” Ferneau said. “I was good at it. It was wildly successful. We did it in a neighborhood called Hillcrest. … Like with any business, we just got lucky. We sold it successfully and it was a lot of fun.”
He then traveled and cooked for two years, before coming back to Little Rock with a healthy restaurant in mind, Good Food by Ferneau. “Even though we all talk that we want to eat healthy, we all want to do it, unfortunately it was a poor business decision,” he explained. “I could blame it on location. I could blame it on a lot of things. I would sum it up to be inexperience.”
But Ferneau took away some valuable lessons. “I’m much better with money,” he shared. “I’m much more aware of the true cost of how to run a business. When we had the first one, we were making sales left and right, so we were allowed to make those mistakes. When you’re not making very much money on the sales end, every mistake, there’s so much more gravity to it. But it was a big learning lesson.”
And he first met his current business partner, pastry chef Kelli Marks, while he ran Ferneau Restaurant. “The first day I met her, she made some of the best desserts I’ve ever had in my life,” Ferneau shared. “We always thought, ‘Wow, can we have her work with us?’ Over the years, she would make desserts at Ferneau Restaurant and we had a relationship there. Now it’s kind of cool because at this point in our life we’re both able to work under the same roof and be partners in the same business. It’s kind of fun because she does all the sweet and I do all of the savory. Our collaborations together are nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Now, he co-owns the brand-new but already popular Cathead’s Diner, and he’s bringing all the lessons he’s learned along the way. “Cathead’s is kind of everything I learned over the years wrapped into one, and the one thing I learned is, listen to your customers,” Ferneau shared. “Give them what they want. … If you read these blogs and you read about where people are eating and you want to make fun of them, and you’re a chef, take a step back and read it from a different angle. ‘Wow, this is what they’re eating. This is what they want.’ This is where I live.”
Cathead’s Diner itself, which opened June 13, 2018, is a unique concept — bringing southern staples like fried chicken, barbecue, grits, mashed potatoes, greens, cornbread, and biscuits to a scoop-and-serve line that maximizes the number of customers served without sacrificing quality. Ferneau also focuses on obtaining humanely raised and sustainable sources for meat and vegetables, while buying local as much as possible.
Ferneau is quick to point out that he has a good team. His method of management lines up with his own personal philosophy — being able to learn from mistakes and move forward. “Competition is natural, and you always want to be the best, but I guess you have to be beaten down a bit or be born a little bit wiser to be able to take a step back and look at your failures, rather than brush them under the rug and say they never happened,” Ferneau said. “Something I’ll say to people, if they look at it through a peephole or somewhat of a closed mind, it will piss them off, but whenever I see somebody fail, and they come and tell me about it, usually complaining, I just ask them, ‘Did you learn anything? What did you learn?’ And sometimes, if they’re already aggravated, they’re quick to think I’m being condescending with them, but literally, I’m asking a question. ‘What did you learn from this? Okay, it might have cost you x amount of dollars, but what did you learn from it?’ When my cooks burn something or they mess up a stock, or just little weird things that cost me money, I’m investing in that person right there. ‘What did you learn from this? It was an expensive mistake, so tell me you learned something. ‘Cause I just don’t want to just fire you.’ It took me a long time to get there. You have to put your ego in your pocket sometimes.”
And if someone disagrees with him, he’s willing to hear them out. “You just don’t tell somebody they’re wrong, because you’re always going to move forward and not know why,” Ferneau shared. “So one thing I found was, well, why don’t we try it your way? Why don’t you make this dish and I’ll make this dish. … It’s very easy to shut them down, but when you shut that person down, but you’re shutting a door on their creativity, their passion, and their want to be there. If you can learn together, so why don’t you make it like this and not like this, and whichever one works best, we’ll go with that. And most of the time, I’ll usually win that conversation, but what really opened my eyes was the first time I did it. I learned something, too. And then you build that camaraderie and that trust. It’s more of a relationship than just a worker-boss relationship. Both people walk away learning something. And yeah, there’s always a better way out there. Just because I’m a chef, and I’m sure I’ll get crap for this, but we don’t know everything. We like to act like we do.”
Ferneau’s advice for those looking to become a chef is to read first. “If you’re really wanting to become a chef, and, who knows what your reasonings are, there’s a couple of books you should read,” he shared. “And it’s of course, Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain and then Letter to a Young Chef from Daniel Boulud.”
Then find a restaurant to work in. “Go work in a restaurant where you’re gonna get your ass kicked every day, and after that month, then decide if this is what you want to do,” advised Ferneau. “The rest will follow. Read those books and keep kicking butt.”
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Cathead’s Diner is located in the Old Paint Factory, off of Sixth and Shall, on the east side of the building. Find Cathead’s Diner on Instagram and Facebook, follow Chef Ferneau on Instagram and Facebook, and see more at diner’s website.
There’s a whole lot more in the podcast episode! We talked about the moment Chef Ferneau discovered local food, how he met his wife, and what they decided to do as newlyweds.