Tory Miller’s first meeting with Odessa Piper at L’Etoile was also an interview, during which she asked him to cook her lunch using whatever was in the restaurant’s fridge.
It was October 2003, and Miller — born in South Korea and raised in Racine, Wisconsin — was coming from the kitchens of New York on a fine-dining professional journey he thought would eventually land him on the West Coast. He had heard about Piper, the chef and owner of a fine-dining restaurant on Madison’s Capitol Square called L’Etoile. She’d won a James Beard award a few years earlier in 2001. Miller’s interview included a stroll around Capitol Square’s Dane County Farmers’ Market, which he didn’t know much about at the time. He was there two weeks before it shut down for winter — he already couldn’t wait to see it the following year at peak season.
That day with Piper, he served her trout from Artesian Trout Farm (a longtime Dane County Farmers’ Market vendor) paired with gnocchi, horseradish oil, roasted beets and Swiss chard…