Greg Baxtrom of Brooklyn's Olmsted Likes to Snack on Cold Cuts and Entire Ice Cream Cakes

Welcome to Fridge Tours, where we peek inside the personal refrigerators of chefs, bartenders, and food world personalities to see how they eat off the clock, in the privacy of their own homes. For our next installment, we visited chef Greg Baxtrom of Olmsted in his high-rise central Brooklyn apartment.

On the morning that I visit chef Greg Baxtrom at his Brooklyn apartment, he’s in the fortunate position of having just moved into this space less than two weeks prior, so everything is nice and clean and orderly and photo-ready. He’s got no two-month-old food hanging around in the fridge for me to stumble upon or expired milk to embarrass him. He used to live just a one-minute walk from his consistently popular Prospect Heights spot, Olmsted, but says he needed to put a little space between himself and his Michelin-recognized child. (Now he’s a whopping ten-minute walk away.) His entire setup is still perfectly organized, everything in plastic quart and pint containers (swiped from the restaurant) and labeled with tape and Sharpie, as if there is someone else besides him living here who wouldn’t know that in this half-pint container is a small black truffle and in that one are castelvetrano olives. Here's what we found, in addition to his envy-inspiring view of Brooklyn, while poking around in his kitchen.

Name: Greg Baxtrom

Title: Executive chef and owner of Olmsted

Neighborhood: Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

How long have you lived here? Ten days

So tell me about your beverage situation in here. Beer-wise, I basically only drink Stella. Or La Croix or iced coffee. A lot of these champagnes are from friends. That one is from Grant [Achatz, his former boss and mentor at Alinea in Chicago]. He sent me that when we opened.

Are you mostly eating sandwiches when you’re not working? (Assuming that’s what the cold cut turkey is about.) Ahhh, actually no, I’m usually just eating that straight up, rolled up with some hot sauce on it. … If I cook, it’s potatoes and bacon. With eggs of some kind. Or like, duck breast.

Those are two opposite ends of the spectrum. I just really like duck breast! And I really like breakfast food. That’s sort of just the regular thing I grew up eating—breakfast for dinner. I was told later on in life that it was because we grew up poor, but I didn’t realize that at the time. I told my friend that I grew up eating bacon and eggs for dinner, and he asked, “Have you ever had ‘sweet scrambled eggs,’ that’s when your mom takes the egg mix with the cinnamon and sugar left over after making French toast and cooks it?” So she’s not wasting any food. He said, “That’s when you know you grew up real poor.”

Did you steal this Dairyland [the restaurant wholesale food and dry good distributor] butter from the restaurant? It’s expensive when you buy it from the grocery store!

What else did you poach from the restaurant in here? That ranch dressing we made a couple days ago, that was really good, so I took it. … We just took a dish off the menu that had chanterelles, so I took the rest of them, too.

What’s something you always have stocked? Honestly, it’s the Calabrian chili, turkey, and pickled peppers because they never go bad. This [TuttoCalabria chili paste] is my favorite hot condiment. And then always butter to make popcorn. … I lived in Spain for six months, so I always have little salty fish like this. Those are boquerones. They’re so much more subtle. I don’t love anchovies, and those are really mild and delicious. [Note: his publicist emailed me later to make sure that I noticed that he also keeps a whole Carvel ice cream cake in the freezer, since I didn't catch it the first time. "I buy mini ones, birthday cakes, and treat myself," he says. We like that he thought it was important enough to follow up and bring this to our attention.]

Where did you come across the Calabrian chili paste? We use it in everything in the restaurant. I want to say I think a chef friend of mine told me that the reason that Battersby is so good is because they use a lot of colatura, which is an Italian type of fish sauce, and that Calabrian chili, and I was like, “Hmm, gotta see what that’s all about.”

Do you usually keep fresh produce stocked at home or is this just because I was coming? Yeah, I do go to the farmer’s market at least once a week. I keep kale and apples for like smoothies and stuff. … Yesterday was the Wednesday [Union Square] farmer’s market, and that’s when Dave [Harris, of Max Creek Hatchery] is there with his trout, so I bought some stuff. I do that every once in a while.

You're so extremely organized and over-labelled, it's very obvious you're a chef. Can I take a picture of this vitamin cabinet, too? Sure, as long as it doesn't make me look like a serial killer.

What’s it like to live so close to where you work? Is it hard to separate? Yeah, honestly, I was thinking about moving to Fort Greene, not that that’s even that much farther away. There is a little bit of always being around, and I become less productive because of that. Even if I don’t need to be there, if something goes wrong with, like, the water or something—I show up even though someone else could probably fix it. And then I’m just around, but not really doing anything. And between that and the fact that the dry cleaner and laundromat that I use and the business uses are the same. And the grocery store. So if I’m buying a pint of ice cream or a frozen pizza, and then my sous chef walks in to buy parsley or something because they ran out, I don’t want them to see me buying frozen pizza. You’re not supposed to see me in my real life.

What’s the story behind this caviar from Tennessee? That’s left over from when we had the folks from Henrietta Red come up and do a dinner with us. They over-ordered, and we don’t really use caviar at the restaurant, so I took it. It is probably not from Tennessee, just packaged there. It’s paddlefish roe. So it’s not fancy, it’s just paddlefish. Not sturgeon or something crazy.

Who are the cute kids on the door? My nephews.