Ramses Alvarez knows beauty. All you have to do is look at his food. In restaurant parlance, he is an “industry veteran.” The Mexico City native cooked for two decades in Milwaukee restaurant kitchens before starting his own concepts. He’s into big flavors and gorgeous presentations. You can envision Alvarez finishing dishes with a spritz of this, a sprinkle of that – edible artistry.
After settling in Milwaukee in around 2000, he started immersing himself in the food scene – cooking, dining out and taking inspiration from so many things. The diversity of the cuisines he experienced blew him away. In those early years, while he was working at Sanford Restaurant, he helped out at a James Beard dinner put on by Sanford’s then co-owner Sandy D’Amato. That led to meeting the owner of Blackbird, a Chicago Michelin Star restaurant (that has since closed). “The service, everything about the food was incredible,” he says. There, he was served a salad inside a puff pastry shell. He would never forget it. He wondered how it was made. As the years passed and he grew in cooking experience, that salad started to take shape in his mind. But it wasn’t until the COVID shutdown – when he was doing more private chef dinners – that he put the time into developing interpretations of dishes that he’d experienced over the years. That led to the recipe for this salad, inspired by that long-ago meal at Blackbird.
