Fresh Focus At Halyards
September 2007
By Christy White
It took a sink full of dirty dishes to make Dave Snyder realize he wanted to be a chef.
“I was 16 years old washing dishes in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” he recalls. “After about a year, they asked me to be a busboy. After my third day I said ‘No more.’ There were some positions in the kitchen available, and after my second day, I said this is what I want to do.”
Chef Dave, as friends and patrons know him, has been serving up contemporary American fare specializing in seafood for the past eight years on St. Simons Island. But it’s been a winding road to the coast.
Although he knew he loved working in the kitchen from his high school restaurant jobs, he continued studying risk management at the University of Georgia. But soon he was skipping class to work his part-time job at a local restaurant. “I found myself cutting class that I was paying for to cook,” he says. “I’d rather be on the stove than in these classes that I paid for, and I thought, something’s really wrong. [So I] said, ‘to hell with it, I’m going to go to culinary school.'”
After attending the New England Culinary Institute, he spent five years working with chefs such as Christian Delouvirer at Les Celebrites, Michael Romano at Union Square Café and Erik Maillard at The Mark Hotel in New York City before heading back South.
His mentors taught him many things about the culinary world, but most importantly, to have a strong work ethic. “There are plenty of guys out there that want to work 40, 45 hours a week and that’s not what it takes,” he says. “If you want to be on top of the game, you have to work your tail off. You got to be able to put in the hours and take it seriously. And they showed me that.”
Besides work ethic, he learned that it takes a person who cares to do the job right, and he looks for that quality in everyone he hires and works with. “I could teach you how to wait a table, I could teach you how to build a car, I could teach you how to shave ice, but I can’t teach you to care to do it again,” he says. “If you care, you execute well, and you put your whole heart and soul into it, whether you’re waiting on the table or feeding the table. If you care about what you’re doing right now, you’re going to do a good job of it.”
A Fresh Success
After New York, Snyder briefly became a chef at Azalea in Atlanta. An avid fisherman himself, the lure of the coast became too strong. He moved to St. Simons and spent three years as executive chef at J Mac’s Island Restaurant. Then he and a friend decided to open their own restaurant on the island and Halyards was born.
The key to the restaurant’s success is freshness. Everything on the menu is made from scratch, and Snyder spends many mornings down at the docks finding just-caught fish for that night’s special. “Being on the coast, our push is obviously seafood and using local ingredients,” he says. “We go down to the dock and talk to a couple of friends of mine and see what we can get that they caught earlier that morning. We’re very lucky.”
Securing fish from local boats means the fish served at the restaurant is always fresher than fish from the grocer, and even from boats that have been at sea for several days. The restaurant often serves grouper, snapper, trout, redfish, mahi, tuna, tripletail or softshell crab, depending on the season.
Aside from five to six standards, the menu changes with the seasons to keep everything fresh. The contemporary American fare often reveals a mix of influences and flavors. Roasted Peking duck breast with Thai red curry is listed next to pan-roasted Mayport grouper with braised red cabbage, potato rosti, asparagus and whole grain mustard vin blanc, which sits alongside mole-dusted prime filet mignon with braised black beans, spaghetti squash and chipotle demi-glace.
No matter what the cuisine, for Snyder, it’s good company and execution of a dish that makes a good meal. “There are a lot of places where the menu sounds great and the dishes on the menu sound great. The server describes it wonderfully,” he says. “You see all the components on the plate and it looks good, but then you taste it, and it doesn’t taste good.”
Moving to the coast has allowed Snyder to focus on the food and his customers rather than trying to become a celebrity chef. “Keeping up with everybody [in Atlanta] was kind of fun, but I don’t really miss being part of the loop,” he says. “It takes so much of your time away from your stove and away from your guests, but that’s a necessary part of the business in the bigger cities.”
In the 11 years since he has come to the Golden Isles, he’s seen the area’s culinary world expand. “There are other chefs that are starting to make a culinary mark other than just hushpuppies and fried shrimp,” he says. “So it’s changed a little bit in the last 10 years.”
New Opportunities
Just this past February, Snyder took another huge step and opened a second concept just 30 feet away from his first restaurant.
Tramici is a neighborhood Italian restaurant with a huge brick oven and an open kitchen. There, traditional Italian food like eggplant parmesan and shrimp scampi dominate the menu, with a few creative dishes scattered throughout such as lobster-stuffed shells oven-baked with tomato cream and oregano.
“It’s just an opportunity for me to give guests a different experience with the same quality and the same standards,” Snyder says. “We apply the same attention to detail and the same quality ingredients, just in a different setting. It’s a different energy and a different feel, but it’s the same goal: hospitality for our guests.”
While many would say running two restaurant concepts would be a stressful endeavor, Snyder, as always, looks on the bright side: “Now, I’ve got two restaurants, I’ve got twice as many employees, I’ve got twice as many opportunities to do a good job and twice as many opportunities to solve problems. It makes it fun.”
Snyder takes his role as chef and mentor to his employees seriously, and his dedication has paid off with a loyal staff, many of which have been with the restaurant for almost the entire eight years of its existence.
“I had an employee meeting the other day,” he recalls, “and I said, ‘I’m not here just to give you a job, I’m not here just to pay you, I’m here to teach you how to be a better cook, a better server, a better dishwasher, a better person.”
“This business is difficult,” he adds. “I’ve never done anything else other than this since I was 16. But like any other job, if you want to do well, you have to put in the time and energy and effort to do it. You gotta care.”