Inside the Culinary Mind of Matt McClure

Simplicity, seasonality, a touch of Southern charm — oh, and a lot of farm-fresh produce — these are the ingredients the new executive chef is using to usher in a new generation of dining at the Woodstock Inn & Resort. This piece appeared in Woodstock Inn magazine

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In the waning days of the New England summer, shortly after taking over the role of executive chef at Woodstock Inn & Resort, Matt McClure found himself hoarding all of the turmeric and apple cider vinegar in Windsor County, Vermont. 

It was because of the tomatoes, see. While wandering the grounds at the resort’s Kelly Way Gardens, one mile south of the inn, McClure had noticed green tomatoes thriving on the vine in the three-acre garden’s hoop houses. Before it freezes, he told the Kelly Way team, let’s pick those tomatoes and I’ll pickle them. As a native Southerner, it was something he was quite fond of doing.

A few days later, he found himself in the possession of 400 pounds of tomatoes. 

“It was wedding season,” McClure recalls with a chuckle. “We were so busy, and those tomatoes? They just crushed us. Just absolutely crushed us. Thankfully the banquet team had a two- or three-day stretch without any events, which is very rare. And we were able to cut, you know, like five-gallon bucket after five-gallon bucket after five-gallon bucket.”

It may seem like a good problem to have, as a chef. So many green tomatoes! Fresh from the farm down the road! And McClure would have to agree, especially since he’s a chef whose entire philosophy is based on forming relationships with growing partners and prioritizing the use of ingredients that have been recently plucked from nearby soils. But the arrival of 400 pounds of them at once is indicative of the challenge McClure’s gladly accepting in his new role as the mastermind behind the resort’s culinary program, which includes five separate restaurants. 

“That’s what really drew me in,” McClure explains. “How could we utilize produce from Kelly Way Gardens in recipes that we prep and then send out to the country club, to the ski resort, to these other places? And how do I put my approach — you know, my food philosophy — to use, connecting all of those outlets, giving them more of a distinct, on-brand, appearance and quality level?”

It’s a puzzle he’s anxious to solve — and a puzzle that starts by answering this question: What are we going to do with all these pickled tomatoes?

Making use of the freshest ingredients available — farm-to-table cooking, as we all know it — is a fairly modern approach to restaurant menu planning. But for McClure, that’s just how it’s always been.

He grew up in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, but as the son of generations-deep country folk who loved to hunt and fish and therefore had a pantry and a refrigerator stocked with the fruits of their labor. It wasn’t uncommon for McClure’s friends — like his high-school girlfriend, who’s now his wife — to give their compliments on a meal, only to find out that the roast they were enjoying was actually venison neck. 

“None of us were great cooks,” he admits. “But we certainly enjoyed eating.” 

His fascination with restaurants began in New Orleans, at the crawfish shacks and po’boy shops the McClures would frequent on family trips. Back home, in high school, he decided to give restaurant work a try, first at Pizza Hut and then at Macaroni Grill. “I was the youngest cook on the line,” he says, “and I was proud that I could hang with that crew. The energy and intensity of a busy shift was almost addictive.”

Three semesters into life as a mechanical engineering student at the University of Arkansas, McClure knew he’d rather be somewhere else. A professor mentioned that he’d almost gone to culinary school. The wheels turned, and a few months later, McClure “got a loan, sent a check to the New England Culinary Institute and was off to Vermont,” he says. “It wasn’t until around Nashville that I realized, I’m really doing this. What an adventure I’m on!”

Unlike mechanical engineering, cooking stuck. He spent the next few years rooting himself deep into the upper echelons of Boston’s culinary scene, but then home started calling, and he and his wife entertained the thought of “escaping the grind” and returning to Little Rock. When he found out what was happening at the marquee hotel in town — the Capital Hotel — he was intrigued.

“I remember thinking, Is this the same Capital Hotel?” he laughs. “It took somebody coming from the outside, looking in, and just seeing all these wonderful agricultural resources in Arkansas and being able to put 'em together in a fine-dining experience. And I was in.”

While it was there that all of the experience he’d gained in his culinary wanderings started to come together, it was his next move — to another hotel, this time to boutique hotel-slash-gallery 21c Museum Hotel in Northwest Arkansas — that allowed him to truly execute his own vision. At the restaurant he helped dream up, called The Hive, he was able to set the tone.

“I never came up with a dish and then ordered everything I needed for it,” he says.  “I’d go to the farmer's market, and peaches would be in season, so boom, I’m buying a couple hundred pounds of peaches, and the team would be like, Oh my God, Chef ordered again. I'd just say, we're gonna figure it out. So we're making peach sorbet, we're grilling peaches, we're gonna pickle some, we're gonna do all these things. We're gonna celebrate the season.”

But even more important to McClure than the creative component in creating The Hive was the human component: the right mix of people, in the right kind of environment, using ingredients grown and produced by people they knew and respected. 

“At the end of the day, I love really great ingredients and really good food — but how I arrive at that is just setting the culture of the kitchen,” he says. “Once you get that great mix of people in there, and you nurture a healthy environment for sharing ideas, you get really great things. And the guest wins. Everybody wins, quite frankly.”

And did McClure ever win — his leadership and creativity led to his recognition as a James Beard Foundation Best Chef "South" Semifinalist seven times during his tenure at The Hive. So when it was time for the next challenge — taking what he’d mastered at The Hive, and putting it to work on a larger scale — he knew Woodstock Inn & Resort was the kind of place where he could thrive.

“I had all of these questions, these little things that are important to me,” he says. “And the team at Woodstock had all the right answers.”

But back to that other question: What to do with those pickled tomatoes?

“That’s still on my list of things to tackle,” he laughs. But he says his first order of business once taking the executive-chef reins back in August was to get in the kitchen.

“To me, it's all about relationships. You have to have a good relationship with the people you work with — they're gonna need certain things from me and I need things from them,” he says. “At the end of the day, a high-level guest experience is the goal. But how do we go about getting there? To me, that is the fun part.”

Once established in the kitchen, he and his team started fine-tuning the menu of the resort’s award-winning, fine-dining restaurant, The Red Rooster, setting the foundation for what McClure sees as the evolution of the Woodstock Inn — a starting point to pull from and build on throughout the resort’s dining experiences. When asked to describe a few of these foundational dishes, McClure bubbles over.

“I've always really loved having a simple salad with a great dressing — at The Hive it was a sorghum vinaigrette, but here, because we’re in Vermont, we’ve got this apple-cider-maple vinaigrette and these fantastic greens — kind of spicy — from this great local outfit. Oooh, and I do some shaved radishes in there because we always have radishes from the garden ...”

“Oh, and we’ve got this lobster dish with cabbage and parsnip, but I’m from the South, so we added in some housemade tasso,” he continues. “And there’s a lamb dish that’s rubbed with harissa and served with some creamed grains and spaetzle — it’s very elegant…”

He’s excited to experience all four seasons at the resort, not only learning how to maximize his relationship with Kelly Way Gardens but also figuring out how the main kitchen can best interact with the other Woodstock Inn & Resort restaurants. Maybe that apple-cider-maple vinaigrette turns up on a grain bowl at Perley’s Pourhouse. Maybe the braised pork belly at The Red Rooster becomes a sandwich special at The Fairway Grill.

“We’ll start with the ingredients,” he says. (Possibly some pickled tomatoes.) “And then we’ll tailor the recipes across the resort to those ingredients — it’ll be thoughtful, curated, refined cooking. We’ll layer in some modern techniques. And really, it’s that simple. Because you can taste it when there’s something special happening.”