HIS WORDS, NOT OURS ‘I will work for you for free for two weeks. If you like me, I’ll stay and then you’ll pay this amount of money. If not, we’ll say good-bye.’ I was there for seven years.

Chef | Owner                      Cobalt Grille

Do you remember the first thing you ever cooked? I do. It was a fried egg. I was hungry and there were eggs in the fridge and I had seen people do them. This is when I lived in England, I was just five or six. I burned it.

Did that pique your culinary curiosity? Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. It burned the edges of the white, yet the center was still raw. I couldn’t understand why and I was really curious, so I started cooking different things. My folks came from Jamaica to Leeds in the 1960s before I was born, and we were real poor. My mom worked nights and my dad worked days, so I would cook for myself and my friends.

When did you realize that cooking was your calling? In middle school. We used to have a home economics class and we’d make pizzas and all kinds of different things, and I was really good at it. I thought-hmm-let me kind of roll with this. I went to culinary school and then to London to the best: The Mayfair Hotel, Grosvenor House, Savoy

Group. You really learn under these crazy maniac European chefs.

Why did you come to Virginia Beach? My sister was here, and I’d heard that in America, if you work hard, it pays off.

What happened next? I ended up at Le Chambord where I met Frank Spapen. He said, ‘I don’t know you from Adam, and you say you’re this and you worked here and you worked there, but I don’t believe you. Why should I pay you this amount of money?’ So I said, ‘I will work for you for free for two weeks. If you like me, I’ll stay and then you’ll pay this amount of money. If not, we’ll say good-bye.’ I was there for seven years.

How has your food evolved since opening Cobalt Grille? What we call it now is American Contemporary. We focus on what’s fresh, what’s best, what’s local. People swear by our duck and lamb. When I opened, I was very European, small portions. My customers are very loyal, very local; they know value and they told me straight away, ‘You’re not going to survive if you do this.’ So I adapted to more substantial portion sizes, but I still make the food pretty. We change seasonally. We always have NY strip, salmon, tuna, but we’ll change the vegetable, the starch, the sauce.

For example… In winter we do a lot of risotto, mashed potatoes. The sauce might be a béarnaise or bordelaise. In summer, we’ll do a squash or a Northern white bean salad and we’ll go to a roasted tomato vinaigrette. In winter I do beef Wellington. I don’t think anyone else around here does that.

What’s your favorite menu item? Or is that like picking your favorite child? Well, chicken penne pasta-it’s my firstborn, but I’ve made it so many times, it’s like waking up and brushing my teeth. I really like the coq au vin; it’s slow-cooked.

For a while, you were involved with other projects… For a period of two years, I was part of Bardo and I was bouncing between the restaurants. That was real hard, trying to give everything to everybody, and it just wasn’t working. Now I’m here, my customers see me in the open kitchen, they come up and wave, and there is definitely something to be said for an owner-chef being in his restaurant.

Where do you get inspiration to keep things fresh? I travel to New York, D.C., Dubai. I get back to England. And I always visit as many restaurants as I can. My most recent favorites are Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Napa and Marcus Samuelsson’s C-House in Chicago.

HE'S COME A LONG WAY, BABY From England to Jamaica to the US, and from a fried egg to a coq a vin, Williams continues to grow and adapt.

What do you focus on besides food when you’re there? We went to Gary Danko in San Francisco and the service was impeccable. Here we’re a little more relaxed, but I still think we have great service. And when I travel, I do tend to take photographs in restrooms.

Really? You can tell a lot about a restaurant by them. We were the first pretty restroom in Virginia Beach, I think. Granite, tile.

How do you keep in shape around all this wonderful food? When I go out west, I snowboard. In the summer, religiously I do a 10-mile bike ride every morning down Shore Drive and on the boardwalk with my iPod.

What’s on your iPod?

The book I’m listening to right now is Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, and I find that pretty inspiring, pretty interesting. Music, oh boy, I listen to reggae, R&B, a little bit of classical, all kinds of things. The Beatles, of course.