E-Mail This Article to a Friend Circle dance They may be young, but the chef de cuisine and sommelier at Radius are at the top of the culinary game BY TAMARA WIEDER

BRIAN REIMER AND Scott Fraley do not want to be sitting here at this table, in the semi-private dining room at Radius. They do not want to be talking about how unusual it is for a 24-year-old and a 32-year-old to be holding down the chef de cuisine and sommelier positions at one of the most lauded restaurants in the city. They do not want to discuss the fact that they’re roommates, living a short walk away from the workplace at which they spend six days and nights a week. And they don’t particularly want to outline their philosophies on food and wine, and how the two relate to each other.

It’s not that Brian Reimer and Scott Fraley aren’t nice people. It’s just that, as a Wednesday-night dinner rush swings into gear, as the crowd of hungry patrons swells and the noise level rises, they’d rather not be sitting here talking to a reporter, when they could be — should be — working.

Q: How’d you end up in this business?

Scott Fraley: I went to grad school at Boston College and fell in love with the city and the restaurant business. I paid my way through school doing restaurant work, and liked it a lot better than what I was studying in grad school. So I sort of fell into it.

Q: How’d you end up at Radius?

SF: When I was in grad school, I finished my class work and I went home for a while to North Carolina to write my thesis, chill out, chill my brain out. When I decided I wanted to move back to Boston, because I missed the city, I did some research into what I thought were the best restaurants — read Gourmet and Bon Appétit, and Radius kept coming up. So I faxed them my résumé and started as a back waiter. I started in May almost five years ago.

Q: What about you?

Brian Reimer: Very, very random. I’d met [co-owners] Michael [Schlow] and Christopher [Myers] through someone I was working with in Napa, Thomas and Joseph Keller. I was moving to Paris, and my father was going to be [in Boston] on business, and he said, "You should come; we haven’t done a family vacation in years." So randomly we all met up here in Boston, and I asked Joseph, "Where should we go and have dinner?" He said, "You have to go see Christopher and Michael, they just opened this beautiful restaurant downtown. Give them a call, tell them you’re coming." Had a nice meal, beautiful service, loved the room — always love this room. A year and a half, two years later, came back [after a] small, short stint in Miami, a project that fell through. Sent out another dozen résumés across the country. Oddly enough, [Christopher] was the first one to call me back. So I came out for an interview, liked it, played with a couple more offers, one in New York. I was flat-out broke; I had nothing left after working for free in France for almost a year. So I needed to start a job. Under the pretense that I would be a sous-chef, came in cooking. A year and a half later ...

SF: They just told you you were going to be the sous-chef; they never actually meant to make you the sous-chef.

BR: Probably true. They never meant to make me the chef de cuisine, either, but things happen.

SF: Touché.

BR: It’s true. Or him the wine guy.

Q: Is it unusual, for someone so young to be doing a job like this?

BR: It is.

Q: Why do you think you got where you got at such a young age?

BR: I work rather hard. I think it’s paid off.

SF: Sometimes he works, like, forty-five hours a week.

BR: It’s rare. So, so very rare.

SF: They don’t pay him overtime.

BR: With salary, I always figure ...

SF: I mean, he is only 24, he’s a child ...

BR: ... spend a little amount of time here, you’re still going to make the same money ...

SF: ... he stomps around ...

Q: How’d you end up living together?

SF: We don’t have any other friends.

BR: It’s true. We don’t spend enough time anywhere else.

SF: We actually never see each other, except in the kitchen. That’s a fact. Well, and at bars.

Q: What’s your kitchen like at home?

BR: Empty. Nothing in it.

SF: It’s disgusting. I guess we just don’t care. There’s so much to care about here.

Q: Do you ever get sick of each other?

BR: It hasn’t happened in months. It was probably November?

SF: We don’t see each other enough to get sick of each other.

BR: We literally almost never see each other in the house. Saturday night is probably about the one night of the week that more than likely we see each other at the house. Because we don’t have to work on Sunday. After work, like five o’clock in the morning.

SF: Go to Chinatown ...

BR: Sushi, few bottles of wine ...

Q: So there’s wine in the house, just no food?

BR: There’s plenty of alcohol in the house.

SF: There’s alcohol all the time.

BR: Usually some ice cream in the freezer.

SF: Ice cream. And cornflakes.

BR: Yes. And usually a gallon of milk.

SF: And I cook myself a fried egg.

BR: And there’s bacon, for the late-night craving of a bacon sandwich.

SF: Which is a fantastic thing: bacon and mayonnaise on toasted bread. Bacon is the best-tasting foodstuff in the entire world.

Q: What’s more important, the food or the wine?

BR: Yes.

Q: C’mon.

BR: It’s a balance.

Q: Totally?

SF: Completely. It’s organic. Food and wine are organic.

BR: You can’t say that a poached-bass dish with artichokes is going to work with wine, right? Probably not.

SF: Probably not. You have to figure out some way to cook the artichokes so they don’t produce that weird chemical reaction that affects the wine. So we try and do that.

BR: So now it’s served in a broth, as opposed to with the vinaigrette.

SF: Poach it in wine, add a little lemon to it to ratchet up the acid in the dish a tiny bit. And then serve a wine that has enough acid. That’s what I mean when I say it’s organic: it’s about this sort of interplay between the food and the wine.

Q: How do you learn all that stuff?

SF: It’s a lot of reading. A lot of tasting. But there are a few very simple ideas. There are a few ideas about what wines go with what food. And there are some more fundamental ideas about balancing acid in wine with sugar, and balancing sugar in wine with acid. And then there’s sort of a basic philosophy about how you want food and wine to interact with each other, and at Radius, we want food and wine to interact in a way that the wine highlights the food, and the food brings out elements in the wine.

For example, we don’t offer Australian shiraz, because we’re not a barbecue house, and we don’t have big steaks. And that’s what you need, when you have a big, fat, sweet wine, you need a big, fat steak that has char on it. We don’t do anything like that. Our steak is basted in butter and fresh herbs, and it’s delicate. It’s fantastic, it’s a flavorful steak, but it’s a different idea. So the wine provides the backdrop for the food, and the food brings out elements of the wine. That’s our thought, our philosophy.

Q: Is there ever anything on the menu that you don’t like?

SF: Yes.

Q: How do you pick wines for those things?

SF: Because wine and food pairs, they’re not absolute, but you know whether a food and wine pairing works or not, because you have taste buds. So I may not personally love a dish, but I understand it on a historical or culinary level, or at least I’ve tried to understand it. It’s also a little bit about understanding Brian and what he’s trying to get at. Brian’s job is a complex job, because he’s trying to cook his own food, and allude in his food to Michael Schlow’s food, and at the same time allude to the great French chefs. It’s a hard thing to be creative and original, or at least attempt originality, or attempt a new way of doing the same things, and still make allusions to the chef, the man who created this restaurant, and the culinary tradition that created all of this. That’s really hard. So my job is about understanding what he’s trying to do, and understanding him, and seeing whether he is getting done what he wants to do. And Brian teaches me all the time about what he’s trying to do. It’s constant communication and dialogue.

Q: Does it ever bother you that you have to build your menu around his menu, and not the other way around?

SF: Absolutely not. In fact, I’d hate to do it the other way. Because if the food is right, then the wine is right.

Q: And not vice-versa?

SF: Not vice-versa. Although I have to say, personally, away from the restaurant, I might drink Burgundy with cornflakes. Because that’s what I like. I’d rather drink Burgundy than anything, for the most part, except in the summertime, I might drink a little sweet prosecco. But when you’re talking about building a wine list, there are too many wines in the world to not be edited by something, and food is the only reason, the only thing to be edited by. The wine list has to be about the food. There’s no other reason for having a wine list. The only other option is just not to have a wine list, and when someone orders food, you put the right wine down. That’s a little Napoleonic.

Q: How do you feel about screw caps on wine?

SF: If in 10 years everything’s not in a screw cap — it’s a Stelvin closure, by the way, named after Mr. Stelvin, apparently — I’d be really surprised if in 10 years everything’s not in a screw cap. I think it’s fantastic. The wines are just better. Who knows what the percentage is, but the industry average is 10 percent of wines are corked. And I catch a lot of corked wines. I think as a restaurant we catch a lot, but there’s no way we could catch every one, because I don’t taste every wine for guests, because I think guests don’t expect me to. An awful lot of times, they don’t know why they’re tasting the wine, but that’s exactly why they’re tasting it: because there’s a cork in it, and it might be fucked up.

Q: Do you have a guilty-pleasure food?

SF: Yellow cheese. Processed yellow cheese from 7-Eleven. And frozen pizza.

BR: Ice-cream cravings every once in a while. Ben & Jerry’s. Toffee Heath Bar Crunch.

Q: What’s your favorite season cooking in a restaurant?

SF: Spring. Morels, favas ...

BR: Asparagus ...

SF: But really, a New England spring is, like, June. It’s great to do the deep braises in winter, but the things that come out of the ground in the spring are ... what is it about spring? They’re fantastic, they taste so good.

BR: Everything’s better.

Q: Who’s the best chef in the city?

BR: I think the term "chef" has changed quite a bit. You take someone like Ming Tsai, who everyone regards as a fantastic chef. Personally I’ve never eaten at his restaurant. He’s come here, he’s great friends with the restaurant. Is he going to be that person that is at his restaurant all the time? Or, a great friend of the restaurant is Mario Batali. He and Chef [Schlow] have known each other since they met in Carmel a half a dozen years ago. Phenomenal chefs. It depends on how you look at that. I think it’s a bit of a loaded question. To say that you wouldn’t walk into Clio and have a very, very well-prepared meal even though Kenny [Oringer] might not be there that night I think is not fair to say. Would it be a different night when Chef expedites or when I expedite? It absolutely should not. That’s the mark of a great restaurant. It’s not necessarily the chef that’s going to make sure the restaurant is running correctly. It’s the entirety. If the hostess or whoever’s at the door doesn’t greet the guest at the beginning, it doesn’t matter that that most perfect piece of salmon came out to the same table. It’s just lost. It doesn’t matter at all.

Realistically, I’m not going to be back there tonight poaching the bass. I’m not. I can’t. So my job is to make sure that John, who is cooking the bass tonight, poaches it correctly. Because you shouldn’t be able to tell that it’s any different. And if I butcher this or one of the cooks does, it should be the same. And I think that’s our greatest responsibility as cooks and chefs, is teaching that.

Q: For people who don’t know, define what a chef de cuisine does.

BR: Runs the kitchen. Chef of the food. My job, my responsibility, what I do on a day-to-day basis, is probably teach. I’ve learned that more and more. You become a teacher. Everyday, giving that consistency, up in the morning, you come in, you make sure that everything is done the same every day. As soon as that cook or that staff member doesn’t have the tools to create that thing, and repetitively create it — which is what the mark of a great cook is, is being able to appreciate the fact that every single day, I’m going to come in and slice chives. Every single day. You’re going to do that for the next four or five years. And if you can’t take joy in the repetitive nature of it all, and making sure that each one is better than the last, you’re not going to make it in this business.

Q: Did you guys watch The Restaurant?

SF: Not once.

BR: No. We never watch TV.

SF: I watch The X-Files.

BR: There’s a futon mattress. A TV. A bike in the corner. And a chess board right next to the futon.

SF: We’re chess freaks.

BR: There’s a desk, but it doesn’t have a chair.

Q: Who’s better at chess?

SF: Brian.

BR: Scott.

SF: I’m into the theory of chess. Like, I read chess books. It’s very geeky. I lose. But I’m always fascinated when I lose. How did I lose that one?

Q: What’s the craziest diner you ever had?

BR: There was a couple who sat here, it was a macrobiotic couple.

SF: Yeah, macrobiotics are tough.

BR: They called ahead and we talked a few times. We cooked for them.

SF: There’s a lady who will come in and ask for the wine with the highest percentage of alcohol. It’s too impossibly infinite. Do you mean dessert wine? Because there’s more alcohol in dessert wine. Or do you mean a dry wine? It’s too much. And the funny thing is, we consciously don’t buy wines with high alcohol, because it messes with the food. She might be the craziest.

BR: We have a lot of people who come in and we know them, they’re friends of the restaurant. There’s a woman who, every time she comes in, she gets a little pot of Dijon mustard next to her. And there’s a couple that comes in every Thursday night, they have set restaurants that they’re at all week, and Thursday night is their night here, and every night, Licia Gomes, the pastry chef, makes fresh madeleines for them.

Q: Perfect meal, with the perfect glass of wine?

SF: Burgundy with anything. Chicken with truffles and a glass of Burgundy. Right?

BR: It’s not half bad.

Brian Reimer leads a cooking class on the foods and wines of Alsace at Radius on March 13. Call (617) 426-1234. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com