PHOENIX – Walking into Christopher’s at Wrigley feels like you’re entering a glass observatory. The greenhouse-glass-inspired restaurant overlooks the East Valley from a hilltop directly across from Wrigley Mansion in Phoenix.
“When you come here to have dinner, we want you to feel like you’re somewhere else,” executive chef Christopher Gross explains. “Look at everything. Enjoy yourself.” This sanctuary of culinary art, with the largest wine list in the city and staff cross-trained in both kitchen and dining room service, represents the culmination of a journey that began with a paperboy’s paycheck and a dream of much more.
Gross has received some of the highest awards possible in the culinary world, including the Distinguished Restaurant of North America award, the Antonin Carême Medal and the 1995 James Beard Award, yet Gross remains unfazed. “It’s not about the award so much personally, but what can it do?” he explains. “It’s like taking out an ad you can’t afford in the New York Times. Use it simply as a free ad.”
His philosophy prioritizes learning over money. “Don’t worry about the position,” he advises young chefs. “Steal everything you can, in terms of knowledge. You don’t like the person you’re working for, but they’re talented, take that information.”
Patrons and peers know his signature creations. A roasted-pepper sauce he transformed into soup and a Parisian meringue cake, which evolved into a Muska chocolate dessert, have graced magazine covers and been replicated worldwide. “The greatest thing about the career is being respected by people that are much better than you are,” Gross says.
Gross always valued moving forward. “I always feel like if I hadn’t gone to one place, I wouldn’t have gotten to the next,” Gross says. His culinary education began not in cooking school but through real work experiences in Michelin-starred kitchens around the globe.
At 13, Gross worked at Baskin-Robbins and as a midnight janitor at Jack in the Box. A high school photography job paid his way through school, but everything changed when a Phoenix hotel he worked at brought in European chefs. When Gross witnessed a chef throw a plate against the wall, screaming about temperature standards, something sparked. “Hot food’s hot, cold food cold. That means the plate, too,” Gross recalls. He began asking the chef, “Can I do something I haven’t done before? I want to learn.”
His hunger led him to Los Angeles, then to Europe with $3,000 saved and a $179 ticket to London. While there, a restaurant offered him a job at 40 euros a day, which he worked for a year. Gross then moved on to Paris, where he lived illegally for a year. During his time there, he wrote 100 letters to Michelin-starred restaurants. Only one responded.
At a tiny two-Michelin-star restaurant with just 14 tables, the chef offered him a job after assuming he was English; he discovered Gross was American. “They kept me for a little over a year, paying me under the table because I wasn’t a French citizen,” Gross says, “and it was phenomenal hard work.
I’d be so exhausted I’d wake up screaming out “yes chef or no chef,” like I was at work.” He then continued his education in Normandy, getting up at 5 a.m. to work in a pastry shop, carrying 5 gallons of hot water up five flights of stairs for his daily bath.
What kept him together through all of the chaos year over year is his love for food and cooking. More specifically, what he calls the love of the game: “You have to have the love to do this. To get up every morning ready to get it right.”
Returning to the U.S., Gross accepted a position at Lingerie in Los Angeles, working alongside chefs from France’s greatest restaurants. “The whole team is from all great restaurants in France and Europe,” he says. “You learn lots of techniques because all the chefs on every station have worked with these great restaurants.”
He worked for $5.50 an hour—less than he’d earned before leaving for Europe—because the education was priceless.
He eventually settled in Phoenix, and in 1990 opened his first self-owned restaurant: Christopher’s Bistro. Over two decades later, Gross opened a modernized restaurant at the South Wing of Wrigley Mansion, which became Christopher’s at Wrigley.
One thing has remained consistent for Gross: Discipline. His success is from understanding the difference between an artist and a chef. “An artist wakes up, looks outside, sees it’s not nice, and goes back to bed,” Gross observes. “A chef wakes up, doesn’t want to go to work, but has 100 people coming for lunch and a staff waiting.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
