E-Mail This Article to a Friend All grown up With 20 years at Icarus under his belt, Chris Douglass works to promote local food sources and sustainable cuisine BY TAMARA WIEDER

YOU KNOW THEIR names. Todd English. Lydia Shire. Michael Schlow. Barbara Lynch. Jasper White. Ken Oringer. Jody Adams. Ming Tsai. When it comes to the local food scene, the Boston area has more than its fair share of celebrity-chef heavy hitters.

Yet ask your average diner if he or she knows the name of the man who’s helmed the kitchen of one of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants for two decades, and you’ll likely be met with a blank stare. Because despite his long-time critical success, Chris Douglass, the chef/owner of the South End’s Icarus, is a relatively anonymous figure on Boston’s culinary landscape.

It’s certainly no reflection of his talent. Douglass started working at Icarus — which celebrated its 25th anniversary this past summer — when it was no more than a funky Tremont Street storefront. Twenty years later, Icarus ranks consistently at the top of the Zagat ratings both critical and popular, and has garnered awards from the likes of Gourmet and Wine Spectator — in no small part due to Douglass’s commitment to local food sources and sustainable cuisine. To that end, Douglass sits on the Board of Overseers for Chefs Collaborative, a national organization dedicated to promoting sustainable food choices, responsible growing techniques, and the advantages of locally grown and seasonally fresh foods — all of which benefit those who sit down to a meal at Icarus.

Q: Did you ever imagine, when you started working at Icarus 20 years ago, that the restaurant would exist in 2003, and that you’d still be there?

A: No, I don’t think I did. I’m not sure whether I thought about whether the restaurant would exist or not; I don’t think I was thinking that through. But I certainly didn’t think I would be in the same place, no.

Q: What’s kept you there so long?

A: I just really enjoy what I’m doing. I really like the whole process of sourcing food, using it creatively, cooking it, working with a group of people collaboratively to make it happen, and providing good guest experiences. Being in one place for a long time has really helped to sort of work on that craft without having to work on "Where am I going to work?" or "What’s my new boss like?" or "What’s this new place like?" I’m able to just focus on the thing that I like about it.

Q: Do you ever get bored?

A: The restaurant business is not boring. There are times when it’s maybe not as exciting, but you know, the seasons change all the time and we really try to keep up with seasonality, so it really keeps us on our toes.

Q: When you started at Icarus, the South End was obviously a very different place than it is today. How do you think the gentrification of the area has affected the success of the restaurant?

A: I think that the gentrification of the neighborhood has obviously brought in a lot more restaurants, and consequently a lot more diners. When we first started, we were much more of a neighborhood restaurant. I hope that we haven’t lost some of that; we have a fairly strong neighborhood loyalty and clientele. But I think we’ve been able to expand our clientele to include the whole region largely based on what we do and our reputation, but in part due to the gentrification and the general restaurant scene that has grown in the South End.

Q: How’d you first get involved in the restaurant business?

A: I grew up down in Cohasset, and I never really took a regular job; I did some house-painting and some lawn-mowing and some babysitting and things like that when I was a kid, but I never really went and punched a clock anywhere. Then, in 1976, my family moved into the city, we moved into Beacon Hill. I was the oldest of seven, I was 18, I was going to be home for the summer from college, and my mother said, "You are getting a job." She said, "There’s a restaurant that just opened" — the realtor told her about it — "why don’t you go in there and ask them for a job." And I did. I was washing dishes at Salad Days, it was on Charles Street, this was 1976, and I hated washing dishes. It was miserable. It was way before there were any kind of smoking regulations, and it was one of these soup-and-salad joints where they serve really big portions, these big salad bowls, you’d go up to the salad bar and get it loaded up. So I’d get all these salad bowls coming back with grimy blue-cheese dressing and cigarette butts stuck out of it, and I was disgusted.

But I really liked the culture of the restaurant scene. I was really attracted to it; I really enjoyed the front-of-the-house, back-of-the-house energy, I enjoyed the camaraderie of the people in the kitchen, and the chef was nice enough to keep me around and let me do some other things and not wash dishes, despite the fact that I didn’t have any experience. I thought I was getting a great opportunity; in hindsight, he probably was just as desperate to find people to do the work. Now that I’m in the position of hiring people, I understand what his position was. But I felt grateful that I was able to cut up tomatoes and wash lettuce instead of washing dirty plates.

So that’s how I started, and I went back to college, and I didn’t finish. I dropped out, and it was the only job that I’d had, so I sought another job in the restaurant business and kept going from there.

Q: You’re obviously very well-respected in the business, and yet you haven’t taken on the celebrity-chef persona that some other local chefs have — the Todd Englishes and the Lydia Shires. Is that by design, by choice? Why hasn’t that happened?

A: I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I think that there’s probably multiple answers to that question, but it’s in part my personality. I think that it’s important to have a strong presence and to try to promote your restaurant, and I try to do that, to some degree, to make sure we’re busy all the time. But at the same time, I don’t really sort of strut around my restaurant in my whites and hobnob with my guests so much, and I haven’t really sought out too strongly the celebrity-chef status. I guess because I’m not out there so much, then maybe I don’t engender the kind of attention that other people get.

Q: Tell me about your involvement with Chefs Collaborative — what the organization does and why you got involved.

A: I got involved because I really believed in their mission and what they were talking about, and that is to support and promote local, sustainable, artisanal food, whatever that might be. It could be local vegetable farmers, it could be cheese makers, people who raise livestock. And to one degree, from a selfish point of view, to build relationships and to sort of celebrate that and to get other people to do it, to build relationships directly with the food producers and suppliers, as opposed to having it go through larger distribution channels where you don’t have that personal connection. And to be able to have a better understanding about how the food was grown, taken care of, and be able to make choices having that information, to be able to get food that’s of really high quality, organic in a lot of instances, or sustainably raised. It’s about getting information, learning about your food sources.

Q: Why is sustainability so important?

A: I had a strong interest in the environment, in ecology, when I was a teenager, and in college I was studying forestry. So it’s something I’ve thought about a lot, always; that’s always been important to think about the larger picture, to think about the environment, but also to just really try to get the best-quality food there is, and to try to get things that are interesting. If there isn’t a strong demand for a wide variety of different fruits and vegetables, game, poultry, things like that, then the choices will become more and more limited. So part of Chefs Collaborative and being part of a group that celebrates these local, regional, and artisanal producers helps to create a market for them and helps them to exist, to thrive. And therefore there’s product available that I’m looking for.

Q: The restaurant business obviously went through a dip, as everything did, but how are things looking now?

A: I find it to be pretty good right now. I think it’s been pretty strong. We had our strongest summer ever this past summer, in part due to Restaurant Week, which has been very successful, and in part for us due to the celebration that we did for our 25th anniversary. We did a special $25 fixed-price menu which everybody thought we were kind of crazy to do, but we doubled our business in July, so it was quite successful.

Q: How do you feel about cooking for vegetarians?

A: I have mixed feelings about it, I guess. I personally find it somewhat challenging to create a vegetarian entrée that seems like it’s got a real focus and real cohesion that matches the quality of cuisine that we’re putting on our other plates, and commands the kind of price that our other plates do. Although we do put them on, and there’ve been some that we’ve had that I felt really successful about. But I find them maybe a little bit more challenging sometimes than doing some of the protein-based entrées. We currently don’t have a vegetarian entrée on the menu, but I really enjoy the challenge of having a vegetarian come in, particularly if they’ve given us some warning — we had a vegan coming in last Saturday night, and they had let us know, so throughout the day on Saturday we were thinking about it, and I was able to put together what was really fun to do, and a really delicious meal. But it wouldn’t necessarily be one that would be repeatable. Not only that I would want to repeat, but that would be functionally repeatable to have prepped and ready to go in any kind of numbers on a regular basis, on a night-to-night basis. This was really an ephemeral improvisation on what was available and what we had and what was going to work, and they really enjoyed it, so I enjoyed that challenge. But I do sometimes find it challenging.

Q: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever had on the menu?

A: It’s hard to answer that, in part [because] with the printing technology that exists now, we print the menus in-house; I think the failures aren’t around long enough for me to remember, because we get them right off the menu. I don’t know why, but every year when Easter time comes around, I think about putting rabbit on the menu, and it never seems to be what the public wants at that time of year.

Q: Well, you’re not putting Santa on the menu at Christmastime.

A: Yeah. Or Rudolph.

Q: Can you imagine another 20 years at Icarus? What’s the plan?

A: I can imagine myself here. Perhaps not in the kitchen so much. I’ve got a really great chef back there, who has been with me 10 years, Ron Able, and he’s really my chef de cuisine. He and I work closely together to write the menu, and he really is the one who takes care of a lot of the execution. So I’m actually in the process of sort of giving him more responsibility and leaving it a little more to him. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a second restaurant, something quite different than Icarus, something more casual.

Q: Would you stay in the South End, or try another neighborhood?

A: I would perhaps try another neighborhood. You know, I think about Dorchester, where I live, which is a big area of the city with a pretty urbane, mixed population. A lot of people are feeling economic pressures, I think, from the real-estate prices in the city and the South End in particular, and they’re moving to Dorchester, and it’s sort of an underserved population in terms of restaurants, so I think about that as a possibility. I think about the South End for a casual place, too. But it would have to be the right deal. I’m not impatient to jump into something. But I’m poking around.

Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com