It’s a feature of restaurant service that its practitioners have to be quick on their feet.
Sarah Natvig learned this skill gradually, but faced a test when she was 18 months or so into operating Black Krim Tavern, the restaurant she co-founded in Randolph in 2011.
Though she’d gone to culinary school and had worked in restaurants for years, she hadn’t run a restaurant kitchen. When co-founder and chef Emily Wilkins decided to move on, Natvig took over as chef.
More recently, Natvig has made another career shift, closing Black Krim after more than a decade and taking over the culinary arts program at Randolph Career and Technical Center. Her experience running a restaurant informs a key lesson she imparts to students, one that became even more important during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think a lot of people discovered how important it is to pivot in this industry,” Natvig said in a recent interview.
Natvig changed jobs in the summer of 2021. She’d been on the culinary arts program’s advisory board and the outgoing director asked her if she’d be interested in taking over.
Cooking wasn’t part of Natvig’s repertoire during her own school days. Her mother, Nancy Natvig, was a great scratch cook. Both of Natvig’s parents worked at Central Vermont Hospital in Berlin, and they lived in East Roxbury, a tiny hamlet just south of Northfield. In high school at Vermont Academy, where she was a boarding student, there wasn’t any need to cook.
But after school, Natvig enrolled at New England Culinary Institute (NECI). The now-defunct cooking and fine-dining school in Montpelier was then still a force in training up the legions of chefs and hosts who streamed into Vermont’s growing food economy. Natvig specialized in front of the house operations, so she spent only around six months on cooking and baking.
After graduation, she had an internship at Twin Farms, the luxurious resort in Barnard, again in the front of the house. But she paid attention to what was going on in the kitchen.
“A lot of it was just an observation because it’s, you know, not really a place where they’re going to want me to be like, ‘So how’d you do that?’” Natvig said. “Every now and again, I would establish a nice relationship with a chef and I would ask a few questions, but mostly, it was just a lot of observation.”
What intrigued her was the creativity she saw coming out of the kitchen. She called it, “the art of culinary arts.” Food done at a high level fit well with her competitive nature, she said.
After her internship, she and husband Chip Natvig (he took her last name) moved to Washington State, where she continued to work front-of-house restaurant jobs. That was where her training took her, but her interests were taking her somewhere else.
“I don’t know what switched or turned on, but I just really wanted to try to figure out food and, you know, try cooking, essentially, for the first time in my life,” Natvig said. She started to acquire cookbooks from well-known authors and to experiment in the kitchen.
She and Chip moved back to Vermont in 2008 after the birth of their daughter, and she worked in NECI’s catering department, then ran the front of the house at Sarducci’s, a longstanding Italian restaurant in Montpelier.
Having her own restaurant was always in the cards. Part of the curriculum at NECI requires graduates to complete a business plan, one polished enough to take to a bank, Natvig said. Even before that, as a child playing with her younger sister Gretchen, Natvig was always opening pretend shops, usually involving food. She’d written several business plans for restaurants, and put one together for Black Krim Tavern, which takes its name from a dark maroon heirloom tomato first propagated in Crimea. She was looking through a seed catalog during a car trip when she had to choose a name.
“It got to the point where during tomato season people would bring us, they would buy the Black Krim starters and put them in their garden, like bring us their tomato,” Natvig said. “It was like the cutest thing ever.”
The small restaurant on Randolph’s Merchant’s Row had only 25 seats, and Natvig ran it with only a couple other employees. It was a droplet in the wave of farm-to-table restaurants that have opened over the past 15 years. Pebble Brook Farm, which Chip started in Moretown, Vt., and then moved to Braintree, Vt., when they moved closer to home, supplied the restaurant with organic produce. The Natvigs have lived there for the past 11 years, and the farm and restaurant went hand-in-hand.
From the start, Natvig saw Black Krim Tavern as a vehicle for creativity. Though she became a chef by necessity, she was ready for the kind of experimentation that running a kitchen requires. She changed the menu at Black Krim every week, which gave her lots of opportunities to combine flavors.
In her time out West, she’d come across a cookbook she still keeps close to hand: Culinary Artistry, a 1996 book by James Beard Award winning authors Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, became a kind of Rosetta Stone for professional chefs. It was the first cookbook to explore thoroughly the affinities between certain ingredients, and many chefs consider it revolutionary.
In addition to learning to cook, Natvig, 43, also absorbed how to live during the decade she was running her restaurant. She had a small child at the time, and restaurant hours don’t always mesh with parenting.
“I learned a lot of hard lessons in terms of life and family balance,” she said. Even before the pandemic, “there were times where I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, why am I doing this?’”
But the enthusiasm of patrons and the paychecks and tips her staff was taking home kept her coming back to work. “There’s just so many things that I walked away with, you know, I would never take anything back.” And “to transition now to sharing that passion, you know, the business side and the culinary arts to, you know, budding entrepreneurs and chefs is kind of a cool transition for sure.”
She hadn’t been planning to close Black Krim, but when the opportunity to move into education appeared last year, teaching juniors and seniors at the tech center, she couldn’t pass it up. The hours were an improvement, more in line with those of her daughter, who’s now 15. And a decade of restaurant ownership had been rewarding, but also tiring. A former staff member and a partner took over the space and opened Wit & Grit, a breakfast and lunch spot.
In her first year teaching, Natvig has brought her disposition into the classroom. She distrusts recipes, so class might start with analyzing a recipe to see whether it will work. The program is capped at 16 students, who cook five days a week, she said.
“They’re at the point now, where two weeks ago, I said, ‘OK, you get up, you get in pairs, you walk around the kitchen, pantry, cooler, freezer, whatever, you pull products out, you make a dish. And they did. And they did an amazing job, no recipes, they literally just picked up a bunch of ingredients, gave themselves 10 minutes of, you know, research and how they were going to do it. And they cooked and it was amazing. I was like, wow, this is so cool,” Natvig said.
That ability to create with the materials available goes along with the nimbleness anyone going into the food business needs to develop. Natvig encourages her students to be well-rounded and curious, so they can step in and pick up an unfamiliar role in a pinch.
“I think one component that I talk about quite a bit is getting as much experience as possible in different departments,” she said. The food industry is vast, ranging from cooking to food styling and photography, with sales, marketing, recipe development and everything in between. Her own experience gives her a way to talk to students.
“My curriculum here is essentially modeled after how I would train my staff coming into the restaurant,” she said. “And that’s how it is, you know, like, 99% of the folks who I hired for the restaurant had never worked in a restaurant before. Definitely not a kitchen. They had a passion for food, which is the most important thing. … It seems to be working because they’re doing a great job.”
Valley News correspondent Rose Terami and Valley News staff writer Alex Hanson contributed to this report. Terami can be reached at rosoterami@gmail.com.