“My grandma, believe it or not, was the first-ever woman vice president at Blue Cross,” said Chef Rick Mueller, who runs kitchen for Tavern 4&5. “She inspired a lot of people around her. But to me, as her grandson? Nothing was so impressive as her skill in the kitchen.
“Her meatloaf. Her cabbage rolls. Her hearty soups and sandwiches. With all due respect to my wife and my mother, no one will ever make better comfort food than Grandma Dorothy, who always hosted every holiday, and who always cooked from scratch, and who never left any doubt in my mind as to what I wanted to do with my life.
“I had to cook. And I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now.”
Chef Rick cut his teeth on restaurant work as a teenage busboy at a steakhouse, though he was soon absorbed into its kitchen. “The ‘90s shouldn’t feel like they happened so long ago, but they really were a different era,” Chef Rick reminisced. “Conduct standards for kitchen staff were more relaxed back then, which meant I heard and saw a lot of … interesting things during my earliest days on the job.
“That was also back before the internet was much of a thing. Cooks didn’t have recipes for every dish on earth right at their fingertips. Instead they had to cultivate a solid, fundamental understanding of how food works, and develop recipes based on what their own experience had taught them.”
Chef Rick’s culinary crucible grew even hotter when he traded the steakhouse for a high-end downtown hotel. “It was a cutthroat environment, where recipes were never written down, and where I was surrounded by cooks three times my age,” Chef Rick continued. “One year in that place taught me more than I could have learned at any culinary school – and I spent five years there.”
Chef Rick cooked for various other restaurants around the metro during and after his hotel years. He had good bosses. He had bosses who must have had the potential to be good somewhere deep down inside of themselves, but had not yet discovered where. Out of all of them, he liked none better than Chef Scott Foster
“Scott opened a couple of our area’s most influential restaurants over the years,” said Chef Rick. “I was fortunate to make his acquaintance early on in my career. He taught me the actual process of running a kitchen – not culinary skills per se, but about preparation, ordering, labor, and every other aspect of operating a kitchen that’s actually profitable.
“Above all else, Scott taught me that it’s all about your people. As important as the bottom line might be, you can’t make it the be-all and end-all. Otherwise, you’re going to wind up alienating those who care most about quality.
“I called Scott out of the blue around three years ago. At the time I was working at a major international franchise’s Twin Cities location. That restaurant did around $1.5 billion in sales annually, with world-class operations that truly honed my skills to a new level. But I’d gotten to a point where I no longer wanted a career. I wanted a home – a restaurant right here in my hometown of Eden Prairie, ideally, where I could slow down, focus on executing the highest-level of culinary skill, and become a sort of staple in my community. I wanted to cook for my neighbors.
“I’ll never thank Scott enough for bringing me on as a unit chef for Tavern 4&5 (which is managed by the Nova Restaurant Group he is partner to). It let me resume cooking with the same passion that drew me into Grandma Dororthy’s kitchen way back when. We’re having fun together. We’re serving amazing food. We’re creating great relationships with our guests. I suppose there are higher concepts for a restaurant, but to me, ‘cozy neighborhood hangout’ is the pinnacle of all of them.
“Now that I’ve been promoted to ‘food and beverage analyst’ for Nova, I have several other restaurants to help manage around the Twin Cities. Despite this, Tavern 4&5 will always be my home kitchen – the place I return to whenever I feel like cooking with love.”
Tavern 4&5 serves breakfast, brunch, lunch, happy hour and dinner at 16396 Wagner Way. Visit Tavern4and5.com to make reservations, arrange private dining, or order online.