A Fresh Take | Chef Cortney Burns
West Coast cooking star Cortney Burns finds inspiration in New England’s seasonal flavors, plus recipes for spring chowder, chamomile milk custard, and chicken potpie with garden greens.
Chef Cortney Burns
Photo Credit : Megan Haley | Prop Styling by Ann LewisCortney Burns moves quickly along a forest trail in North Adams, Massachusetts, her small frame bundled in layers, dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She’s scanning the wet ground, looking for ingredients. Soon she spots a dense green weed.
“That’s edible,” she says, pointing to the mass of textured leaves and purple flowers. It’s creeping charlie, an invasive ground cover and the scourge of many New England gardeners. In Burns’s eyes, however, it’s a quality ingredient with a sweet, grassy flavor.
Finding the flavors of a place and building a cuisine around them is at the core of Burns’s cooking philosophy, and every dish she makes reflects it. But what’s remarkable is that she’s only a recent transplant to the Northeast.
Photo Credit : Megan Haley | Prop Styling by Ann Lewis
For the past several years Burns was a star chef at Bar Tartine in San Francisco, where she also earned a James Beard Award for the cookbook Bar Tartine: Techniques & Recipes. Despite that success, however, Burns couldn’t say no when she was invited to join the team at Tourists, a modern-rustic hotel that opened in North Adams last year to critical raves.
“This project was based on a sense of travel and wonderment,” she says. “[It] was something I couldn’t necessarily do in Northern California. It was so exciting to come where there was space for something new.”
After moving to North Adams in 2017, Burns began learning the ingredients in the landscape around her. The changing seasons inspired her devotion to fermentation, preservation, and seasonality. “I could get asparagus any day of the year in California,” she says. “But here, the seasons really do dictate the menu.”
As this story was going to press, Burns turned over daily operations of the Tourists kitchen to Corey Wentworth, formerly of Boston’s Flour, in order to devote more time to her new cookbook—which undoubtedly will showcase some of the delicious lessons she’s learned from her stint in New England.
