Chef Bryce Gilmore Nurtures the Idea of ‘Home’
Originally published in Austin Monthly, March 2020
With a new carbon-neutral initiative, the owner of Odd Duck, Barley Swine, and Sour Duck Market is set on taking care of his business—and the environment.
“Yeah, I don’t do well with labels,” says Bryce Gilmore, the chef-owner behind Odd Duck, Barley Swine, and Sour Duck Market.
Coming from anyone else, this might sound like a freshman philosophy major trying way too hard to sound cutting-edge, but with Gilmore, it seems oddly appropriate. As exhibited at his three acclaimed area restaurants, the chef’s cuisine defies categorization: It’s not quite “modern American” and just borderline “new-wave Texan.” Even “farm-to-table”—the most common fallback descriptor for his food—falls short. The latter feels particularly inadequate since any chef-driven restaurant worth its fleur de sel flaunts some semblance of local, seasonal sourcing.
From Odd Duck’s early iteration as a South Lamar trailer, which challenged food truck perceptions with fine dining–quality dishes like quail and grits, the foundation for every Gilmore concept has relied upon “developing relationships with local farmers and ranchers”—the imperative word being “relationships.” Gilmore still buys pigs from Richardson Farms and other purveyors he met scouring the Barton Creek Farmers Market in those nascent years. Sour Duck’s weekly Wednesday farmers market provides no-fee opportunities for small farmers to sell their wares, and the kitchen purchases any perishables that go unsold. “It’s a goal of mine to see more young people farming. I want to help make it a viable career option,” he says.
Employee security and well-being is another unique way in which Gilmore has bucked industry conventions. Cooks and servers are typically long-tenured, and “family” is a term that’s constantly bandied about. “Bryce takes care of his employees, at work and in life,” says Kevin Cannon, Barley Swine’s chef de cuisine, referring to Gilmore’s hands-on approach to training and development, ensuring that employees are constantly progressing in their careers. Mark David Buley, founding partner of Odd Duck and Sour Duck, agrees: “It’s about so much more than just the P&L.” In fact, such faith in Gilmore’s vision inspired Buley and Sam Hellman-Mass (a founding partner at Barley Swine, and now the owner of Suerte) to move from Aspen, Colorado, to help launch his first two brick-and-mortar restaurants.
“It’s something that I learned from my father [Jack Allen’s Kitchen chef-owner, Jack Gilmore],” Gilmore says. “First and foremost is, take care of your people. They’re the ones sweating on the line and working with hundreds of guests. I want to make sure they feel like it’s worth it.”
Most notably, Gilmore’s sustainable ethics and environmental stewardship—reflected in everything from aesthetics to operations—has separated him from the rest of the culinary diaspora. All dishware was bought at Goodwill, and reused materials are used for building furniture and decor. For example, Odd Duck’s ruddy tin-clad bar was repurposed from the old roof at Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, Texas, and much of wood seen in the rustic planters out front comes from the former Hill Country home of Janis Joplin. The latest and most progressive initiative, though, was Gilmore’s decision to make Barley Swine one of only two Texas restaurants (the other being Emmer & Rye) to go 100 percent carbon-neutral. With guidance from Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit committed to fighting climate change, the restaurant is donating toward carbon offsets and making increasingly earth-friendly choices, such as growing produce on-site, collecting rainwater for its garden, and limiting the amount of beef offered on its menu (cattle farming is notoriously carbon intensive—accounting for 62 percent of agricultural emissions.) “We can’t always rely on our government to make the right decisions,” Gilmore says, “so we have to take it into our own hands and do what we can.”
For Gilmore, everything comes back to nurturing the notion of home, whether “home” means his various restaurant projects, the farms that supply each intricate component on a communal plate, or the planet itself. Adopting that ethos is simple, according to Gilmore—just start with our hometown. “If people keep supporting local businesses, we will retain as much of what ‘Austin’ is as possible,” he says. “It just really comes down to caring, and things will change for the better.”