Small Plates, Big Ambitions
By Becky Cooper -- April 17, 2008If you're lucky enough to get Jerome Picca talking, you probably won't be able to get him to stop. Picca, the slender, meticulously dressed owner of Small Plates, the newest tapas restaurant in Harvard Square, is happy to expound on everything from his meta understanding of culinary arts to physics.
Perched on a stool, swirling a glass of Chardonnay, he's ready to tell his story. Picca was still in high school when he started working in a kitchen as a dishwasher. Despite the restaurant's meat loaf and casserole repertoire, the training a la francaise he received there indelibly affected his career. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, he worked at a series of restaurants across the United States. "When you graduate from the CIA, you're still a cook," Picca's careful to note. "Chef really means manager. You have to work in a professional kitchen before you can become a chef."
His philosophy in the kitchen is a product of his culinary background: simultaneously meticulous and relaxed. "I'm very prompt to knock down chef's who are too quick to question." Picca says. "Creativity is great, but you can't be creative unless you know the chemistry and physics behind what you're doing." That said, he doesn't punish chefs for making mistakes, "I would rather them make the wrong decision than not make one at all, as long as they learn from it."
By the time he became the executive chef at Small Point Inn in Maine, his rigorous approach was cemented. He worked seven days a week and insisted on the freshest food available. "Local kids brought me crabs they caught, fisherman delivered salmon and I foraged for wild strawberries and thyme. We were a community and were making great food."
After a few years working these exhausting hours, Picca moved to Boston and started a catering business. "I became obsessed with having a successful business. I'd never gone to business school, but I knew I could make it work," Picca says. "A lot of chefs suffer from fanaticism," he adds, shifting to the front of the stool, his voice picking up strength, "Their food is great, but food costs are out of control. When I fixate on something, I set a boundary in my own mind. Otherwise it's like a long distance trip without a destination."
Five years ago, however, Picca's muscles began stiffening. Four months after the symptoms first appeared, he couldn't walk. The next year he received a diagnosis. Moersch & Woltman Syndrome, also known as Stiff Person Syndrome. This rare neurological disease affects about one in a million and is characterized by muscle stiffening and spasms.
"I'm writing a book about my life," Jerome says, "I'm going to tell the story of how I got here, but I also want to tell the story of my illness. How it had defined my goals: to have a life, to work, and to be proud of something I built with my wife while still controlling the symptoms. No one has done that yet." Though the syndrome affects him constantly, it certainly has not prevented him from running the kitchen efficiently. Warmly reviewed by the Boston Globe and by Picca's own estimations, Small Plates is a success.