October 2007
By Hope S. Philbrick
Becoming a chef wasn’t Paul Wooten’s original plan. “I fought my whole life what I’m supposed to do,” says the Executive Chef at Midtown’s Sweet Lowdown. “But it found me.” Wooten saw restaurant work merely as a way to make money while in college. Ironically, “I didn’t do great in college at all,” he says, “but I’d get done with class and go to my night job and excel there.” Before graduating from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, Wooten switched majors four times, from film to English to history and finally to hotel restaurant management and institutional management and nutrition. But he consistently worked at restaurants.
The very thing most distracting Wooten from his studies also provided a venue to work with food. “What I did in my early 20s was I’d go for a semester of college and then go see the Grateful Dead on tour,” he says. While following Jerry Garcia, “I’d sell food in the parking lot to make money.” His goal was to sell the best food among his fellow fans. “It’s funny that hippies can be the most arrogant and forthright about their food,” he says. “For a $1 grilled cheese, you’ll get more of an earful from a vegan hippie in a Grateful Dead parking lot than you would get from, say, the Meredith Ford-types. So you want to make sure you’re spot on with your veggie burrito. If you’ve got the freshest ingredients, you’ll do well and you’ll make enough money.” Between college, touring and working in restaurants, Wooten says, “everything seemed to be surrounded by food.”
Wooten’s first restaurant experience was working at Beaufort Grocery Company. “My cooking career developed from the early stage at age 19,” he says. “I grew up in Burlington, North Carolina, which is in the middle of the state, but I would go down to the beach and work the summers there. I was the lunch guy, hosted on weekends, [owner] Charles Park taught me to cut an onion. That’s what enabled me to chase the Grateful Dead around; I always knew I had a job back with them. They were cool; they’d say, ‘go do your thing, come back here.’ They always supported me.” During the school year in Greensboro, Wooten worked at Just One More, a small French bistro and bakery, and Mud Bugs, a Cajun restaurant. At both, he worked his way up to Executive Chef. “I’d been a Line Cook, Sous Chef, and I knew I was onto something, but I still thought I was kind of fudging my way and needed to go back to college. Finally at 28 or 29 I said, ‘Screw it. I’m going to the CIA.'”
At the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, Wooten finally embraced his calling. “I loved culinary school,” he says. “I’d seen college as more of a party. It wasn’t until I got to culinary school that I realized I didn’t know anything at all. I thought I did, but my techniques were all wrong. It made me a far better chef, improved my palate.” His path might have been indirect and long, but Wooten has no regrets. “I was glad that I waited. I got way more out of it than those 19-year-old kids. They did not have the same experience that I did. I knew in life what I wanted to do. I spent my 20s having absolute fun, so when I got near 30 I was ready to sit down and work on a career.”
Based on his experience, Wooten endorses the CIA. “It’s good to go work with Master Chefs and get humbled for just a few minutes,” he says. “The instructors are people who really paved the way for the industry. The cool thing about the CIA at the time was that there were 32 Master Chefs in the world and 25 were at my school. I learned how to make pie dough from a Master Baker-that’s the way you want to do it! But it’s strict at the CIA: You can’t have piercings and dress funky.” For Wooten this meant cutting off his long hair.
Lessons on technique extended to management style. “The kitchen is really soft now,” says Wooten. “It’s not like when I was first getting into it; the abuse and the yelling and all that. I have worked for that type of chef: To this day, I hate him with a passion; he was just the meanest guy I ever met. We can’t do that anymore at all.” Wooten attributes the change to lawsuits, a cultural emphasis on political correctness and open kitchens. “Culinary school kind of gives you an insight into that because you’ve got these old chefs who are big French and German guys with massive hands. If you’re late to class, which is the same as being late to work, you’re scared to death and it’s good to some extent.”
As his technique with food evolved, so has Wooten’s managerial skill. You won’t hear yelling in his kitchen. “I yelled over the years, but notnow. I get mad sometimes but I spend so much time with these guys we’re all like brothers. I’ll get stern, but there’s nothing worse than a crying server. I had one last night! He kept messing up and I had to tell him, ‘Listen, you’re hurting the work I’m trying to do here.’ He took it to heart and started crying, said he was having family problems-oh God, I felt so bad for the guy! But he was going to other people’s tables and sold a dessert that was on special two days ago that we didn’t have anymore. I had to tell him.”
Wooten’s climb to head chef took longer than he’d expected after culinary school. He felt that his previous work experience was too often overlooked. Though he says that finding work at several of New York’s best restaurants, including Tribeca Grill, Restaurant Daniel and Union Pacific, “wasn’t a problem, there were plenty of jobs,” there was a problem: “the amount of pay was terrible. I’d been an Executive Chef at two restaurants before, but the only thing they looked at was that I’d just graduated from culinary school. That hurt me. I thought I’d be making a little more money. I thought I deserved a Sous Chef position right out of school.” After 9/11, Wooten came to realize “I wasn’t a New Yorker. Everyone was coming together, but I was a Southerner. I missed sweet tea, biscuits and a Southern accent.” He started a job search south.
“I picked Atlanta,” he says, after considering a job in St. Johns. “It just happened to work out.” In 2002 he helped open Vinocity Wine Bar and worked his way up to Executive Chef. “I figured if there was a way I could work my way up quicker, it would be joining a staff of five versus [a large corporation]. When you’re 30, you don’t have time to be the pantry guy for two years and move up to line cook.” At Vinocity he met Rodney Wedge. When Wedge opened Sweet Lowdown in November 2006, Wooten joined as Chef de Cuisine and was later named Executive Chef.
The menu at Sweet Lowdown, Wooten says, features “glorified comfort food-very approachable dishes with twists on them.” He’s able to sell country fried steak on Peachtree Street for $25 by using “better ingredients,” such as pounded filet mignon. But he enjoys the challenge of “taking cheaper cuts of meat and showing them off,” which requires an investment of time. “The food we sell here, it’s not that I can come in at 4:00 and have it ready for 5:30 service. I’ve got to stay ahead on it. It’s a lot of braises, a lot of smokes.”
Though Wooten feels at home, among his future goals is one day owning his own restaurant on the beach. “I want to cook in sandals,” he says. “I love Atlanta, but I want to surf all day and cook at night.”
Until then, he’s content working for others. “I’m not one to be a big showoff,” he says. “I just like to come in and work hard and I guess it gets noticed. I’ve just been lucky. I mean it’s been some hard work, but also luck.”
