I met Charlie Marshal last fall at a holiday event where he was sampling root beer popcorn balls, ones that ended up on the pages of In Style magazine. Soon after that, I visited his farm-to-table eponymous restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen and became impressed with his emphasis on cooking locally, seasonally, and sustainably. He is passionate about all this as he grew up in the business — on his family’s farm and in their restaurant on Lummi Island, WA.

The Marshal was just received three stars from the Green Restaurant Association and was awarded NY Wine & Grape Foundation’s Restaurant Award. Charlie’s currently working on opening a yet-unnamed wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen, which will focus on small plates. Stay tuned as he hopes to have that open in May. He also recently introduced a BBQ sauce; that will be listed in our Bite of the Rest new product section.

For those in the NYC area, Charlie will be cooking at the third annual LocalBozo Brunch Bash on April 9, where eight NYC restaurants will be providing unlimited eats and bottomless libations; and, March 29, he’s doing a wine dinner at The Marshal with Paumanok Winery. Be sure to check those out.

– bonnie
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Which food product or gadget would you never give up? The obvious answer would be my wood oven – almost no one has one. It is sustainable as long as one burns wood that is being replanted, and it is incredibly efficient; even when the fire has been out all night the oven retains enough heat that I can cook bacon in it the following morning without relighting a fire!

What do you like to serve when you entertain? I always do something from the oven as the entrée, usually braised. This means that I can enjoy the party too. I usually like to do some nice cheeses, meats and small bites on the table like a fois terrine, a salty, spreadable panna cotta, and a fun and funky crudité. Again, this is because if I am going to throw a party, I want to enjoy my guests – doing things that can be served cold to start means I can do everything ahead of time. For dessert, I always try to do something that I can pair with a dessert wine, like a diosa – a nice Labneh lemon tart or if it is the right season for wine grapes I love to get Cayuga grapes at the market and make a sorbet from them and serve it with seeded, peeled, frozen concord grapes. Or sometimes I combine the two by doing prunes in a fine brandy or calvados, or better yet, in pruno.

If you got to choose what you ate… describe your “last meal?” My mother’s lasagna – it is the best thing I have ever eaten in my life. If that wasn’t a choice, the it would be absolutely anything Lidia Bastianich cooked – she is one of the most talented chefs alive today (is it okay to choose my last chef rather than my last meal?   🙂 )

What food is your secret guilty pleasure? Well I guess it won’t be secret anymore! I just loooooooooove marshmallows. I make them at home, from nearly any sugar – maple, sorghum, honey and yes, using real marshmallow root. I have also used gelatin or meringue to get something similar to a marshmallow without so much work. It is a lot of work, but they are so so SO much better than the fake white marshmallows one buys at the grocery store. I also use maple marshmallows here at The Marshal that I buy from Deep Mountain Maple Farm – they are so time consuming that we don’t have time to make them from scratch to use in our Maple S’mores dessert, but his are as good as mine. I think the fascination with marshmallows comes from when I was a kid and I would really tick off my mother by making them explode in the microwave.

What is your go-to neighborhood restaurant? I live in Flatiron and my go to is definitely Maysville on West 26th Street. Chef Kyle Knall is a genius, and he has an elevated comfort food style that I appreciate, a lot. I have had some wonderful meals there, never a bad one. The service is always on point and friendly, and their bourbon selection cannot be beat, anywhere. Go!

What is one food product most people don’t know about, but should? An ingredient I would never want to give up and that people should be using: beet powder! A wonderful sweetener and color agent – a super fun way to get that sweet beet flavor into something that beet juice would destroy (like panna cotta).

Describe your worst kitchen disaster and how (if possible) you saved it: I once did a fancy, six-course tasting menu where the last course was supposed to be a Chinese five spice ice cream in a sorghum cage. I made a ton of these beautiful cages and then, in the heat of sending out 40 six-course dinners, one of my line cooks took these “sugar cages” out of the fridge. By the time I noticed, they had melted into sorghum blobs and were unusable. Luckily, I had some sorghum syrup left, quickly brought it up to hard ball stage and drizzled it onto the scoops as each dessert went out. The final product was not what I envisioned, but it was certainly passable and everyone still loved it. I still mourn those beautiful cages that melted though, every time I think of them.

Who was your most influential mentor? My mother Elisabeth. I grew up in her kitchen, in her restaurant and on her farm. Growing up growing food shaped my own view of food immensely and the creativity she has always encouraged and taught me not to let other chefs’ conceptions of how things “should be done” to limit my own ideas. I always like to say I was trained by the school of Mom, not in a culinary school.

To follow Charlie Marshal on Twitter, click here.