Lord and Master
BY MATTHEW MORIARTY: STAFF WRITER

Chef Warren Lewis probably has made the same joke a thousand times. They probably taught it to him in culinary school.

It goes like this when someone asks, "So, what is your favorite thing to make?"

"Reservations," he says.

Like his meals, the fact that his joke has been perfected through the years only makes it better.

Lewis, 44, and his wife, Marianne, have owned and operated Chef Warren's in downtown Southern Pines for eight years.

Lewis is a stocky guy, with a goatee and bald head. He wears the traditional colorful chef's pants and an embroidered chef's jacket that reads "Lord and Master."

He says that cooking is very technical. You need to be aware of so many aspects and how they interact together, but there is also some artistry to it.

"Sometimes you look into the soul of what it is you are cooking and see what needs to be done with it," he says.

As a boy, Lewis wanted to be an engineer. He loved to build things, snaking model trains through the rooms of his home in Wantagh, N.Y., a place Lewis describes as "cookie-cutter."

As a kid, he modeled for his uncle, a photographer, and was on the cover of an erector set toy called Bolts and Nuts.

"I was cute," Lewis says. "But I outgrew it."

He was born in the hospital at nearby Bethpage to Arlyne and Dean Lewis. His father was a real estate agent working in Manhattan, and his mother was a registered nurse.

He was the middle child of three, with two sisters.

When he was about five or six, the family moved to Bellmore, about six miles away. It was a suburban, middle-class town. All the fathers in town took the train to the city every day and the mothers stayed at home, he says.

Lewis' mother kept the house open for all the kids in the neighborhood to hang out.

"Everybody knew everybody," he says. "Trick or treat was like, supermarket bags full of candy."

He attended Hebrew school for five years, and that was enough. He played in one little league baseball game, and that was enough.

"I was a catcher," he says. "It was just not my sport."

Lewis wasn't much for sports, he says, other than running cross country in high school. He later ran a marathon.

He was into math and science. He was on the chess team and math squad. He got into photography and had a dark room in the basement.

"Half the photos in the yearbook were mine," he says.

Lewis and his friends hacked into the school mainframe, just to prove they could.

But he also liked to do active things that weren't team-oriented. He got certified to scuba dive at age 15, then the youngest age allowed.

"I was a good child, and my parents encouraged anything I was interested in," he says.

After high school, he went to the University of Miami because, he says, his family had a lot of ties to Florida, and he loved the campus. He majored in micro-electronics and computer engineering.

Lewis had an idea that electronics would be faster and better if you etched the transistors on glass rather than silicon. It would make them faster and run cooler, he says.

Hands-On

But when it came time to get a job, Lewis realized he didn't want to work in his field. He realized he needed to have his hands on things.

"I would get to work and do what?" he says. "It wasn't a tangible thing."

He got a job peeling vegetables at Doral Tuscany Hotel in Manhattan.

"I need to be touching things," Lewis says. "I realized that there is a certain amount of artist to me.

He went to school at the Culinary Institute of America, but Lewis says that's not where he learned to be a chef. He learned that by bouncing around from restaurant to restaurant and learning what he wanted to be -- and maybe, more importantly, what he didn't want to be.

He learned by ordering fish for a restaurant in Australia that he had no idea how to cook, or even what type of fish it was.

While working at the Doral for the second time, he met Marianne. She was working as a cocktail waitress. Lewis says he knew right away she was the woman for him.

"She had a black leather jacket, a short black shirt and thigh-high leather boots," he says. "Any questions? It was a no-brainer, in my mind."

That was 1988, and they have been together ever since.

Marianne had been saving to move to China and teach English. The two of them decided to travel the world together. They spent over a year traveling, mostly inSoutheast Asia.

He worked briefly for a restaurant in Australia because they ran out of money. Back in the states, he worked for the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., for a few years. He moved to Boston and found out that he didn't like the cold and that he wanted to be more than just a person who churned out good meals, he also wanted to be friendly with his customers.

Lewis worked in Florida for several years, bouncing around from restaurant to restaurant. Some of the names he worked with through the years include Christian

Delouvrier and Mark Militello, who is of the so-called Mango gang who first fused Floridian and Caribbean cuisine.

Wanted His Own Place

It was all that moving that made him the chef he is today, he says.

"Kids come out of school and think they are chefs," he says. "They are not. It takes 15 years to become a chef."

At one point, he even considered trying to get in on the ground floor of the Food Network. They looked into getting a publicist and an agent, but decided it was too much of a financial risk at the time.

Besides, these celebrity chefs now operate several restaurants and sell food in grocery stores, which is not what Lewis wanted.

"There is nothing wrong with that," he says, "but they are really far away from the food. Emotionally, it wasn't it."

Besides, the publicist wanted too much money. He says he's not upset at the missed opportunity.

"My ego is OK," he said. "It's my soul that needs work."

But Marianne hated living in Florida, so Lewis jumped at the opportunity when a friend from his vegetable peeling days at the Doral offered him a job at the Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst.

"If you've ever lived in South Florida, you know you can live there only so long before it's time to move," he says.

Lewis and Marianne came to the area, looked around, and three weeks later they were residents. They never guessed that they would settle here.

"My dad always says that life is what happens when you are making other plans," Lewis says.

That was 11 years ago. Lewis worked for CCNC for about 18 months, then moved to the Jefferson Inn. It had new owners, and they wanted him to be the executive chef. He worked there for another year and a half, when he and Marianne decided to open their own place.

'Where I Belong'

About eight years ago, they took over what had been Ed's Gun Shop and opened Chef Warren's: A Southern Pines Bistro.

"There is still a bullet hole in the window," he says. "The interesting thing is that it was coming in, not going out."

He bristles at the suggestion that it could be fixed.

"Why bother?" he says. "It makes a nice story."

He jokes that he serves "neo-spherical" cuisine, a nonsense phrase he made up after too many red wines one night. Really, he says he serves food that "makes sense."

The restaurant is run like a classic French bistro. The husband takes care of the kitchen and the wife runs the front.

When he opened, there weren't a lot of restaurants in downtown Southern Pines. Now, the town is practically a restaurant district.

"I think our success shows the direction this area is moving toward," he says. "We're somewhat upscale and there is a demand for us."

He and Marianne have one child, Ben, who is almost 6 now and can recite many of the lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Lewis says is important.

"He's awesome," Lewis says. "It's incredible how much your view of the world changes (when you have a child)."

He is into yoga and has kept up with his photography hobby.

"It allows me to be involved with something from the outside looking in," Lewis says, "as an observer. Also, there are a lot of cool toys. I'm big on toys."

He also likes to mentor young people who are thinking of becoming chefs. He has had three come through his restaurant who are either working in their own kitchens now or in culinary school. He pressed them to get out into the world and learn, and then come back home.

Lewis said he and Marianne have no interest in leaving town. They are involved with Ben's school. They have spoken about setting up a consulting firm, but haven't nailed down the specifics.

"I'll keep doing this until time to stop doing it," he says. "This is where I belong."

Originally published on:
http://www.thepilot.com/stories/20061104/scene
/arts/20061104chef.html

Matthew Moriarty can be reached at 693-2479 or by e-mail at moriarty@thepilot.com.