Living Her Dream

Aase Andersson’s dream was to run her own professional kitchen.

The Danish mother of two could do the cooking, no question, having earned jobs at prestigious eateries in Europe before her husband accepted an offer to move his family from Denmark to Florida in the early 1980s. As a chef, her daughter said, Andersson was “really, really good” and eschewed traditional meals, a tendency that put her well ahead of her time.

“We would have family gatherings and they would do flambé pears in copper pots,” Cecile “CeCe” Andersson said. “She would do squab and quail and pheasant. We never had ordinary Christmas dinners; my dad would bring reindeer from Greenland and that’s what we would have.”

Klaus Andersson, the patriarch of the family, worked for the American government, and when he and his family were relocated, Aase took a job at the gaudy Don CeSar hotel, a beachfront palace painted pink to offset the blue skies in St. Petersburg, Florida. Aase managed the presidential suite at the hotel, catering to high-end clientele, and when her daughter CeCe turned 16 she faced a challenge not uncommon to mothers of teenagers.

“My mom didn’t want me to hang out on the beach and get in trouble, so she put me to work,” CeCe recounted, smiling. “It’s true. She went to the chef and she’s like ‘She needs to work’ and I just did piddly little stuff. It was a summer job that I never really left.”

The 16-year-old started out cleaning lettuce and washing vegetables, typical kitchen grunt work, but the job would last her through high school and well beyond. Andersson spent eight years in the kitchen at the Don CeSar, absorbing knowledge under a handful of elite chefs and eventually working her way up to executive sous chef by the time she was just 24.

That same year, however, tragedy struck the Andersson family. Aase succumbed to the cancer that had plagued her for more than a decade.

When her mother passed, the younger Andersson left Florida and took the first of several jobs serving some of the world’s most well-to-do men and women. Initially, she was a private chef for a family based out of Los Angeles that also had homes in Florida, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. It was a memorable experience for the Andersson, then in her mid-20s, who was working nearly round-the-clock and said she didn’t “really have a life,” although it wasn’t enough to sour her completely.

“You’re young and you’re having a good time,” Andersson remembered with a laugh. “I loved it.”

After two years in that job, she moved full-time to the Caribbean and worked for a pair of restaurants in Aruba, then came back stateside for a sous chef job California. Eventually, Andersson caught on as an executive chef at the uber-exclusive Jonathan Club, a self-described private social club that caters to an extremely wealthy clientele. It’s the kind of place where a strict dress code accompanies annual dues in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Andersson’s time at the Jonathan Club taught her both the valuable organizational skills that come with overseeing a large kitchen staff and the pleasure of cooking for a customer for whom cost is not a concern.

“Well it’s always fun to cook for people that have money because then you get to use (any) ingredients,” Andersson said. “It’s not like being in a taco truck.”

But as much as the ability to spend lavishly was a perk, it also drove home something that continues to inspire her recipe choices. To Andersson, “it’s not about me, it’s about the guest.”

“What makes me happy is what makes the guest happy,” she said. “To me, it’s much more important to make something that the guest goes home and they go, ‘Oh my God, that’s the most incredible soup I ever had.’”

The economic downturn in the late 2000s cost Andersson and several other managers at the Jonathan Club their jobs in 2009, and after four years of catering for private clients she moved to Whitefish in 2013, convinced she was done with the restaurant business.

Two months later, however, she found herself in a meeting with restaurateur Pat Carloss and took over as the executive chef at Tupelo Grille, spending five years at the renowned downtown Whitefish spot, invigorating a menu rooted in Southern cuisine. Once she did that, the 49-year-old Andersson was ready for her next challenge and joined with Steve and Bettina Patyk to start Beargrass Bistro, a five-day-a-week dinner spot in Lakeside that opened last year.

“It was a great run at Tupelo,” Andersson said. “It was just time for me to do something where I was more involved with … ordering and stuff like that. Here it’s much more about the food.”

The menu at Beargrass is, she estimated, about 80 percent controlled by Andersson, who picks her vendors and prefers simple recipes using high-quality ingredients to the more complex and abstract creations that tend to be associated with elite chefs. Staples at the Lakeside restaurant including free-range roast chicken and Wagyu beef and bacon meatloaf, but there is no shortage of variety in her menu, a nod to her well-traveled upbringing and career, including the lessons she learned in her home kitchen.

“(Aase)’s the one that inspired me.” Andersson said. “She didn’t get around to it because she passed away … but her dream was what I’m doing.”

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