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Menu Talk with Pat and Bret

Menu Talk with Pat and Bret is a collaboration between Restaurant Business senior menu editor Pat Cobe and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality.

Nick Bognar of Indo restaurant in St. Louis shares his approach to fish and lamb

The award-winning chef blends family knowledge of Thai food and his work experience with sushi

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

May 28, 2020

2 Min Read
RestaurantHospitality logo in a gray background | RestaurantHospitality

Listen to this podcast on Apple PodcastsSpotify or SoundCloud.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic shifted everything that restaurants are doing, I had a great conversation with Nick Bognar about his restaurants, Indo, Nippon Tei and Ramen Tei, all in the St. Louis area.

The chef had already won many local accolades, as well as being named a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for Rising Star chef, which goes to a chef aged 30 or younger. Then in May he was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s ten “Best New Chefs.”

Bognar and I mostly discussed Indo, a restaurant that he opened last year in which he leveraged his ten years of experience as a sushi chef — in St. Louis as well as in Cincinnati and Austin, Texas — as well has his own Thai heritage. The result is a restaurant that offers a curated selection of raw fish preparations as well as Bognar’s own take on Thai cuisine.

“What I try to do to make it work is to get people to think less about regionality and more about just trying a bunch of stuff … and to think about me as a person and me as a chef. ’Cause selfishly the place is really just about me cooking what I want to,” he said.

In this podcast Bognar also talks about working for his own family, which he does at Nippon Tei and Ramen Tei, and the St. Louis dining scene while also discussing the nitty-gritty of aging fish, as well as why Bognar thinks Thai flavors go so well with lamb.

Related:St. Louis chef expands hometown Asian food scene

In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn · Nick Bognar of Indo restaurant in St. Louis shares his approach to fish and lamb

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected] 

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

 

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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