After many years as a corporate chef for Kroger and making the rounds at many of the top kitchens in the city, chef Baron Shirley has finally landed in a place of his own with his brand new Inspirado at Madison Gallery in downtown Covington, and it’s so much more than a restaurant.
As the name suggests, the Madison Avenue restaurant/gallery offers diners a chance to enjoy their meals while surrounded by changing local art displays. Currently, the works of splash-paint artist Billy Tackett are hanging on the walls, but Tackett has also been creating his art while people are dining.
“We actually had a six-top last night that got up and came over here to watch him for about 10 or 15 minutes while we prepared their food,” Shirley says.
All art is for sale and a curator is on-site daily to answer any questions.The artwork for the space is chosen by Dr. Christopher Green, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Cincinnati and Shirley’s business partner, for whom art is a hobby.
“We’ve been friends for years and years,” Shirley says. “He wanted to open a gallery, I wanted to open a restaurant, and we decided that there’s no reason why the two had to be mutually exclusive. They could coexist, so we built this.”
The duo stumbled on the restaurant space last February, and in order to save money, they did most of the construction themselves with the help of friends, including covering the kitchen counter with a glittering layer of shiny lacquer-coated pennies. In case you’re wondering, the cost, not including labor, was about $56.
In his early years, Shirley found success as an executive corporate chef for Kroger, opening several of the Marketplace stores, but he always regretted not attending college and couldn’t see a future for himself behind a desk.
“I never went to college because I never knew what I wanted to do, but over the course of the last 10 years I knew that I wanted to be a chef — I wanted to be in the kitchen. I didn’t want to be a corporate manager for the rest of my life,” he says. “I turned 40 and decided that I wasn’t going to hate that anymore and I went to culinary school; I went to Midwest Culinary Institute.”
After graduation, Shirley put in some time with chef Daniel Wright in the kitchens of Senate and Abigail Street, with chef Mike Florea at Maribelle’s eat + drink and at Jean-Robert’s Table before deciding to go out on his own with Inspirado.
Inspirado is Spanish for “inspired” or “full of inspiration,” which is evident in the form of Shirley’s super-eclectic menu. The vast array of dishes is inspired by the way he likes to eat. “One of the first things I wrote in my business plan is, ‘I love Mexican food and my wife doesn’t,’ and I wonder how many times that conversation takes place each night,” he says. “ ‘What do you want for dinner tonight? I want pizza, I don’t want pizza, I want Chinese, or I want Italian.’ You know, why can’t those cultural influences coexist on a menu? I love food from all over the world, so I wrote a menu to encompass a whole lot of different countries — food from all over the world.”
Inspirado’s menu is truly multi-cultural with dishes like cemita, a Mexican braised-pork shoulder sandwich; gulyas, or Hungarian goulash; prawn laksa from Malaysia; and a good old Kentucky hot brown.
“At first I picked my menu apart and I thought, ‘Is it weird to have a multi-cultural menu?’ ” Shirley says. “I get an email everyday from the Culinary Institute of America, the CIA ProChef’s SmartBrief. I read an article in there that talked about the growing trend in multi-cultural menus and I thought, ‘OK, maybe it’s not weird.’ ” Indeed, there is something for everyone.The menu for the restaurant will be seasonal with changes every couple of months. Bread is being supplied by Sixteen Bricks, and Shirley is working with the Ohio Valley Food Connection, Creation Gardens and Sheltowee Farm to source local meats and produce.
The bar in the back of the space features craft cocktails, housemade soda and an authentic East Coast egg cream, a non-alcoholic beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water and chocolate syrup — in this case featuring Bosco chocolate syrup. “Obviously it had to be Bosco,” Shirley says. “Myself and the guy who wrote the cocktail menu are big Seinfeld fans (referring to episode 117, “The Secret Code”) so it had to be Bosco. And you can’t buy it anywhere around here, so I had to buy a lot of Bosco.”
Go: 715 Madison Ave., Covington, Ky.;
Call: 859-261-7600;
Internet: inspiradocov.com;
Hours: 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-9:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-10:30 p.m. Friday; 5-10:30 p.m.
Saturday.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2015.