New Cookbook by Jamestown’s Chef Brian Halloran

In a world where haute cuisine heavyweights seem plentiful, Chef Brian Halloran trained under one of the OGs: the late Roger Vergé, considered one of the greatest French chefs of the 20th century — with three Michelin stars to prove it. Halloran, a Jamestown resident, went on to enjoy a career cooking at well-known restaurants both near and far, including at Newport’s Clarke Cooke House alongside his longtime friend and current executive chef, Ted Gidley, at beloved Boston dining institution Locke-Ober (which originally opened in 1875 until it closed for good in 2012), and restaurants that took him from Nantucket to the South of France, Belize, China, Newfoundland, and even to his own backyard for a while, as a private chef on tony Bellevue Avenue.

Halloran’s new self-published book, After the Last Service: What Cooks Carry Forward When the Line Is No Longer Home, tells more in-depth tales of how his journey led to career shifts and mentorship while addressing a challenge many chefs face: how to translate decades of kitchen experience into meaningful next chapters after active restaurant life.

“It focuses on identifying skill sets for the cook who’s worked in restaurants for the majority of his or her career, and how to apply those skill sets to other factors in the industry,” Halloran says. Burnout, he notes, is both real and rampant in the industry, as are late hours and achy muscles. “They hit 45, 50 years old, they’re on the line cooking and sweating, the hours are terrible, and the whole scene in the restaurant industry is geared toward younger people. It’s not an older person’s profession by any stretch.”

Halloran knows much about how kitchen skills translate to hospitality careers and beyond. For more than a decade, he taught operations classes at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, and he’s served as a research and development consultant for food manufacturers and hospitality organizations, has launched food products, and more. “There’s all sorts of different hats to wear and ways to go about developing different career tracks, and it’s kind of cool to not get locked into one peg and be doing that for eternity on this little spin of the planet,” he explains. 

During one post-kitchen part of his career where was working with an international tourism bureau on food and beverage development, Halloran ended up launching a program that led to sustainable job creation. “I had been teaching down in Belize. We opened up a culinary school down there to teach young Mayan chefs about different techniques for using Indigenous ingredients for the tourism industry. It took off pretty cool — that’s just one of the little hats I’ve worn over the years. That’s why I encapsulated it all into one book, thinking that it would be a nice compendium for other young cooks who are looking to get into something other than line cooking.”

This is Halloran’s second release. His first, Tales From the Flame, Fifty Years a Cook: Memoir & Recipes from Kitchens, Coasts, and Chaos, is described as “part memoir, part reflection, and part working cook’s notebook,” complete with “vivid kitchen stories and carefully earned recipes.” Follow along on Instagram at @chef_brianhalloran