Z Cuisine's Charles MacDonald on his little white knife, "wilties" and the cake disaster

Lori Midson

It's late Tuesday afternoon, and Charles MacDonald, wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans, is hunched over the bar at Z Cuisine, tasting a fleet of Infinite Monkey Theorem wines, which are lined up like dominoes behind a charcuterie plate. "I hope you're hungry," he says, sliding over the platter of cheeses, marinated olives, country pâté, chutneys and pickled cornichons. The guy clearly knows his way to a girl's stomach.

MacDonald takes a swig from his glass of Infinite Monkey syrah, one of the wines he's pouring at an upcoming tasting, leans back and starts talking. "I'm a poor boy from a small mountain town," says the 29-year-old chef de cuisine. Originally from Leadville, MacDonald moved around Colorado before heading off to school in Arizona in 2000. "I thought I wanted to be the shark in a suit -- and that college was the way to get there." He stuck it out for two years before returning to the Rocky Mountains, where he managed a retail clothing store in Breckenridge -- a horrible gig that forced him to re-evaluate his future. "I seriously hated that job -- couldn't stand it -- so I started looking around to see what else I could do with my life," he says.

While sailing around the Caribbean, he met the cruise's on-board chef, a guy who inspired MacDonald to consider a career in food arts. "I got home, started researching cooking and got in touch with the head culinary instructor of Colorado Mountain College, who told me I didn't know enough to get in, but set me up with a private chef gig at Blue Valley Ranch, just outside Kremmling," recalls MacDonald. "I didn't know dick about cooking, but the chef at the ranch took me under his wing and taught me how to make stock, mirepoix, crème Anglaise, and he taught me all about knives."

The instruction paid off, and MacDonald was soon accepted as a student at Colorado Mountain College in Keystone, a three-year European-style apprenticeship program, funded by Vail Resorts, that gives its culinary scholars the opportunity to rotate through several different Keystone-based, Vail Resorts-owned restaurants. "It's a great, albeit underrepresented, program, where you don't just graduate with book knowledge, but with 6,000 hours of on-the-job experience," explains MacDonald, who'd worked in a half-dozen restaurants by the time he was done.

And then, says MacDonald, "I got a wild hair up my ass." Or, rather, a wild desire to reach for the stars: "I knew there was something else out there, and I was bound and determined to work for a Michelin star restaurant, so I started reaching out to restaurants in Northern California, and Cyrus, an amazing restaurant in Healdsburg, responded." The plan was to stage for a single night, but at the end of service, he was offered a job working the meat station, so he bolted back to Colorado, packed up his stuff, grabbed his wife and hauled ass back to California, where he worked in the Cyrus kitchen until the state's economy made it too expensive to stay and the hours became too much to bear. "To see food performed at that level was amazing and spectacular," he remembers, "but I realized that I had to give up everything else, that working there had to be my one and only focus -- plus, the economy was killing us."

He and his wife moved East, to Vermont, where they stayed for one "depressing winter" before MacDonald finally said, "Fuck it, let's go back to Colorado." It was in Denver, while scouring Craigslist, that MacDonald spotted an ad from Z Cuisine. "They were hiring for a chef tournant, and I'd heard awesome things about the restaurant, so I drove over immediately in my jeans and shirt inside out to drop off a resumé," he says. He staged for a night, was hired as the sous chef -- not a tournant -- and a year later, took over the chef de cuisine position when former chef de cuisine Pete Ryan left to become the executive chef/instructor at Cook Street School of Culinary Arts.

Here's what MacDonald has to say about the challenges of the restaurant biz, his little white knife and his intolerance of egos.