inthekitchen
inthekitchen
flavour comes first
At Gather, chef Mike Licharson is finding his voice as a chef while helping the next generation find theirs.
By Laurie Hughes
At 29, Mike Licharson has reached a position that can take years for a chef to earn. He is head chef at Gather, the restaurant inside The Leaf, responsible for a kitchen whose menu changes with the seasons and what is available around it.
There is also considerably less cooking involved than he once imagined. Scheduling, procurement, menu planning and the administrative demands of running a restaurant now take up more than half his working day. It is a different kind of kitchen work, one that has forced Licharson to think beyond the plate.
The path began with his grandmother. As a child, he watched her cook and was sometimes enlisted to chop vegetables. His grandparents owned and worked in a restaurant, and from the outside, the business looked like a hard way to make a living. It was not an obvious career choice.
Then Licharson got a job at Joey. That was where something clicked. Working in a restaurant could be a profession and a career, and he wanted to see where it could take him. That realization led him to Red River Community College, where he formally trained in culinary arts.
At One Sixteen, Chef Mike Robins introduced him to another possibility: local ingredients could be the foundation of a menu. Later, at Thermea Spa, Licharson worked in a small kitchen where limitations demanded ingenuity. Chef Thomas Stuart offered another lesson in leadership. There
10 ciao! / aug / sep / two thousand twenty-six