Wildman Chef serves up savory aromatic tastes at the Wildflower Cafe

TALKEETNA — Are you looking for a new experience with food? Wild man Chef Jerome Longo serves up an artistic palette of tastes.

“I consider myself an artist...Picasso never had to sit next to his picture while a thousand people went by his picture and said ‘I don’t really get that,’” says Longo, owner of the Wildflower Café in Talkeetna.

“All we do is care about the food here…we are just really conscious of trying to put out the best, freshest possible, food available… I am very adamant about cooking sustainable, fresh, local food,” Chef Longo said.

On its plates the Wildflower serves only the freshest, cleanest, locally produced food it can find.

“All the meats that I get are free range, organic, sustainable, animal friendly… right from the field or the barn, it’s fresh; I get it whole; I do all the butchering myself; nothing frozen,” Longo said.

And all the fish are ocean caught from commercial fisherman off the coast of Anchorage, too, he said.

“As a Chef, I try to be constantly changing, constantly going with the flow of the seasons and the food that is available,” Longo said.

Chef Longo tells a story about how he quit serving King Salmon, because of the poor King Salmon runs in the rivers, he did not feel comfortable if this food source wasn’t going to be sustainable; he made a decision not to serve it in his cafe.

“I have no dry ingredients, everything is fresh. I make it all. The only thing I don’t make here is the oyster cracker’s for the soup,” he said.

The Wildflower supports the local farming economy and has hired three local farmers to grow crops for his restaurant exclusively, including farmer Chris O’Neil of Big Mountain Farms.

“He can grow…all my local lettuces, all my vegetables, my potatoes, whatever is successful,” Longo said. “Last year he lost all of his romaine.”

Chef Longo also buys from other local farmers and gardeners in the area. “I have 3 or 4 sweet old ladies who come with baskets full of edible flowers, bean sprouts of all kinds, I love people coming to my backdoor with what they have. I buy and I serve it to my customers,” Longo said. “Everybody who has got a garden and has anything left over, who eats here locally, usually brings me whatever they have… They get good money for them. They get to eat it. They bring their friends in and say ‘I grew that.”

Chef Longo’s back story is just as interesting.

“I came here to run dogs and climb Mount McKinley. I left everything…I drove here with 14 dogs and everything I own,” he said.

Before coming to Alaska, he worked at “Tides by the Sea” a five star restaurant in Goose Rocks Bay, Kennebunkport, Maine.

One night, after the kitchen closed, Chef Longo had finished a long shift, one of the waitresses said the owner was seating a party of nine.

“I said, I don’t care I am going home. I was getting dressed to go home…y’know Chef stuff…the owner came in and said, ‘I just sat a party of nine’…I said ‘ I don’t care if it’s the President of the United States!” [At that moment] George Bush [Sr.] opened the door and looked at me and said ‘ how about the Vice President?’ He said, ‘I just want Lobster.’ I looked at him and said ‘sit down and we’ll take care of you,” Longo says laughing at the memory. “About six months later, I get a knock on the back door of the kitchen. It’s Secret Service and they said there is a job opening, and George requested that I apply for it… So I applied… I had to go through all sorts of training…I worked for him when he was Vice President and then three years as President…It was beyond anything a Chef could ever imagine, a dream come true for sure, it was an honor… and then I came here to get away from it all.”

Chef Longo has good memories working for the President of the United States, but he said that isn’t who he is, or what he is about.

“I love what I do...I cooked for a lot of famous people in my life — Paul Newman, Johnny Carson; I did his son’s wedding. I really don’t find that to be the prize. The prize for me is having the average person coming in telling me that this was the best meal they had in their lives,” he said. “This is a dream come true for me…when I was a younger man I said I wanted to live in the Last Frontier somewhere and raise a family. Do my own thing. The restaurant kinda called me.”

Chef Longo’s passion includes both food and dogs, he relates a story from before he moved to Alaska and how his passion for food, beget his passion for dogs.

“I had a golden retriever that I walked the Appalachian trail with me from start to finish… The combination of being a chef, and a mountaineer…I brought the dog along to carry the food so I wouldn’t have to eat bad food,” he said.

He ran his first Iditarod in 1997. He ran five and his kennel ran 12 Iditarod races in a row.

“When I figured out I could strap them together and pull a sled, I could haul even more food,” Longo said.

Running a restaurant, a hotel, rental cabins, a kennel of dogs, a garden, raising chickens and turkeys, serving a thousand meals in a weekend; Chef Longo keeps busy running like his dogs.

“I was once told that if you aren’t a little bit out of control in life…you’re not going to get successful. I am running just a little out of control. Just like a race you have to run a little faster than you do in training. I get six hours of sleep, I’ve got to pretend that’s enough,” Longo said.

Almost any day of the week from morning until evening May through September, Chef Longo can be found leading his staff at the restaurant, putting out their tasty creations for folks to eat.

“Just like the Chef’s who trained me…Trust your own taste buds…It’s like those Buddhists who make that sand art…they wait for a windy day and they bring it outside and watch it blow away…It’s not the final product; it’s the process,” he said.

On the back deck, Chef Longo had a mural painted from one of his memories on the trail of the Iditarod. The Northern Lights are out, the full moon is up, Comet Hale-Bopp is in the sky and there is a wolf howling. In the center of the mural, Wildman Chef Longo is forever mushing his dogs across the wall of the bar he built on the back deck of the Wildflower.

Even as a chef for a President, Longo was a renegade.

“They use to call me out all the time, and clap for me, I’d go back into the kitchen and go ‘I hate that’…so I figured out they were so pretentious that if I made my chef clothes dirty they wouldn’t call me out…it worked,” Chef Longo said. “It was a great relationship, he [George Bush Sr.] wasn’t a picky eater. I had lots of fun with him we did some fishing together. He was a meat and potato kind of guy…It’s been 25 years, he’s older and moved on, as I have. The George Bush story for me is old…I have been here over 20 years. I prefer cooking for normal people… I am a wild man…I never stopped being a wild man.”