Jan/Feb 2007

A Cinderella Story

Newcomer Philip Craig Thomason weaves a fairy tale story and recipe to win top honors at March of Dimes Signature Chefs.

By Patrick Evans-Hylton

With a rich mix of pumpkin, sweet potato, nutmeg, brown sugar and heavy cream, Phillip Craig Thomason, chef/owner of Vintage Kitchen in Norfolk, wowed a panel of culinary judges at the 2006 March of Dimes Signature Chefs Auction. He garnered top honors against two dozen other chefs, winning the Dish of Hampton Roads with his Drake Farm Sugar Pie Pumpkin Soup with Charles Henry Gray Ham and Newsoms Candied Peanuts.

This was Thomason’s first year participating in the event—an impressive start.

To tie in with the fundraiser’s “Fairly Tales” theme, the dish was served to judges in a faux-glass slipper—appropriate enough since Thomason’s own tale is very much a Cinderella story.

Thomason grew up in Portsmouth and attended both the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and the Sorbonne in Paris, France before returning to France to study cuisine. He graduated first in his class at Le Cordon Bleu.

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu as valedictorian with a grand diplome, Thomason worked an apprenticeship at Hotel De Crillon, also in Paris.

He has a noteworthy culinary pedigree, working with celebrity chefs such as Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, Nobu Matsuhisa and Alice Waters. Thomason has also cooked at Stars in San Francisco and Seattle, Spago in Beverly Hills and Little Nell Hotel in Aspen, Colo.

Thomason returned to Hampton Roads and opened Vintage Kitchen in late 2005 in the former Metro on the ground floor of the Dominion Tower. He quickly found his own place among the number of other notable Hampton Roads restaurants, winning numerous awards in several culinary contests including Hampton Roads Magazine’s Stellar Cellar Wine Awards and Platinum Plate Awards.

The eatery was also chosen by Conde Nast Traveler magazine as one of America’s best new restaurants on the 2006 Hot List.

Like the simple but effective combination of ingredients in his Drake Farm Sugar Pie Pumpkin Soup, Thomason’s other offerings also reflect his purist’s view of food. Each dish he prepares has a succinct number of components, most of them from local or state purveyors and carefully constructed to showcase each item. His stylish but minimalist approach translates to the look of Vintage Kitchen, which is sleek, city and sexy.

Thomason says he was inspired to create Drake Farm Sugar Pie Pumpkin Soup with Charles Henry Gray Ham and Newsoms Candied Peanuts on a trip to the farmers market at MacArthur Center in downtown Norfolk.

“The foods themselves inspired me,” he says. “I picked what was available, what was literally in the market that day. I started with the pumpkin and went from there. It’s part of what I like to do with everything I prepare. I want to increase the awareness of what is available locally.”

Once the soup was artfully blended, Thomason further played into the theme of the Signature Chef Auction by serving it in a Cinderella slipper.

“The slipper vessel initially caught most of the judges’ attention, but it was what was in it that far outshined that,” says Tammy Jaxtheimer, restaurant critic for The Virginian-Pilot newspaper and one of the event judges.

“The soup was well blended, and all of it worked for the common good of lusciousness—the saltiness of the Charles Henry Gray ham and the peanuts with their slight crunch,” Jaxtheimer says. “It was so well balanced. You could extract all the flavors, but none out played the other.”

For the rest of this story, including information on the other winners and participants in the March of Dimes Signature Chefs event, see the January/February issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.