Chef Duo Pairs Big-City Flair with Local Flavors
In the very back corner of Shred Monk in downtown Bozeman, executive chef Dustin Burnett picks up a plastic gallon container from a wire shelf and pulls the lid back slightly. A tartness wafts up from a pool of fermenting cherry pits, followed by a twinge of sweetness. Burnett holds the container up to eye level and spins it for a 360-degree examination. The pits, from cherries he picked in July on his stepfather’s property on Flathead Lake in northwest Montana, float in a pickling juice the color of a light Pinot Noir.
“I’m not sure what this is going to be,” Burnett says, seemingly pleased with the progress of his experiment. Perhaps it’ll become the base of a meat marinade, he suggests. He puts the container back on the shelf next to several other fermenting test samples: peppers, mushrooms, onions, and a host of other vibrant produce, all sourced from local farms.
Up front in Shred Monk’s kitchen, Burnett’s fellow executive chef, Allison Fasano, is cleaning up after a busy Thursday night at the restaurant. Her apron is still speckled with some flour, possibly from the pasta she made earlier or the baguette recipes she was experimenting with.
The cherry pits, the flour, and the wire rack of concoctions are a collage of fragments from both Burnett’s and Fasano’s robust culinary backgrounds, pasted overtop a picture of a Montana farmscape. The result is big-city flair and local flavors breeding a culinary brand entirely new to Bozeman’s food scene.
You might not be able to tell just by peeking at her from one of the tables in the restaurant, but Fasano’s resume sparkles with moments of celebrity. A contestant on some of Food Network’s popular culinary competitions including “Beat Bobby Flay,” “Chopped,” and “Supermarket Stakeout,” the Brooklyn-born chef has garnered esteem on a national level. Fasano studied Italian cuisine in Calabria, Italy, and has worked in a number of big-name kitchens, among them Michelin-starred restaurants including Joe Bastianich’s Del Posto and Bobby Flay’s Gato.
The cherry pits, the flour, and the wire rack of concoctions are a collage of fragments from both Burnett’s and Fasano’s robust culinary backgrounds, pasted overtop a picture of a Montana farmscape.
In the bio of her Instagram, which has more than 16,000 followers, Fasano lists her motto: “Food and laughter is what I’m after.” This is evident in the way she runs the Shred Monk kitchen, with that flavor of humor that’s so dry you always wonder whether she’s joking or not—but come to find out, she is.
Taking a new gig leading the kitchen at a coffeehouse/ brewery/restaurant in Bozeman might seem astray for the Brooklyn-born talent, but it’s the challenge that makes the move on-brand for Fasano.
While Fasano and Burnett could be considered opposite culinary poles, they both bring an element of playfulness to Shred Monk’s kitchen, and it’s a big part of why they’re both there. In their decades-long careers, they’ve each been promised by restaurant owners and management that they would have total creative license in the kitchen, however the promises proved empty, a time-tested artifice that left their culinary muscles feeling limp. But Shred Monk is different. In this kitchen, Fasano and Burnett say they actually are given room for play. It’s a unique opportunity, Fasano says, to flex the culinary muscles they developed in big-city environments in the starkly different venue of Bozeman.
Even without a window into Burnett’s fermentation shelf or Fasano’s bread experiments, patrons taste the risks both chefs take. It’s evident in the big flavors that define every single dish. Even their potato chips, an unlikely suspect for having such a distinct culinary fingerprint, are seasoned with a dehydrated kimchi Burnett prepares using kohlrabi and chard. Menu items like the chips, or the light and buttery beer bread Fasano makes from local spent grain, are evidence of the first of two points of pride the two chefs assert in the Shred Monk kitchen: Everything that can be made in house, from ricotta to pasta, is made by Fasano or Burnett.
The second principle the chefs have cultivated at Shred Monk is that anything that can be sourced locally is. This tenet is especially derivative of Burnett’s background. Before moving to Bozeman a few years ago, Burnett spent three years getting sober after a career of debauchery dating back to his fi rst kitchen gig in Dallas, the kind of grimy joint that’s specialty was serving catfi sh on Tuesdays. At 18, he took to the industry’s dark side, adopting a lifestyle of drugs and alcohol he describes as “the whole Anthony Bourdain and Sean Brock thing.”
Burnett and Fasano say every so often they enjoy trading Main Street for dirt roads, traveling to their producers to pick up products instead of having them delivered. They take a lot of inspiration from the farmers, usually translating it to the dishes they serve downtown.
While getting sober, Burnett worked with famed Dallas chef Matt McAllister, who was passionate about the concept of farm-to-table. McAllister brought Burnett out to the farms where they sourced food, an experience that he says gave him an entirely new perspective.
“Say you work with a farm in your area, and there’s only 36 bunches of asparagus for every restaurant in the entire city of Dallas and they give it to you,” he says. “That’s a pretty big deal. That’s pretty special.”
The food that showed up in his kitchen was no longer seen as an ingredient; it was a product that had been cared for by farmers for an entire growing season from sunup to sundown, and he had the privilege and responsibility to fi nish its journey.
“That right there is what really made me want to do what I do,” Burnett says. “[We] ended up moving through the farms’ progression of the season with food in the restaurant.” Burnett passed his philosophy on to Fasano when they started at Shred Monk together, giving her the same fi rsthand experience that inspired his own passion for locally sourcing food.
“We just got in our car and drove to farms in, like, a 30-mile radius and then made these connections with the farmers,” Fasano says. “They would give us tours and you’d meet them … and then you’re, like, ‘How can I not buy from them?’ You see how much hard work [they do] or how beautiful their fields are, and it was something that I was not used to.”
Burnett and Fasano say every so often they enjoy trading Main Street for dirt roads, traveling to their producers to pick up products instead of having them delivered. They take a lot of inspiration from the farmers, usually translating it to the dishes they serve downtown.
Recently, Burnett was especially excited about some chicken livers from Black Dog Farm in Livingston. After saving them for a month, he turned the liver into a creamy mousse that he artfully spread between layers of Fasano’s beer bread.
With winter upon us, the chefs are dreaming up new dishes a different growing season inspires. Burnett talks about lentils and squash—maybe something with fermented cherry pits.