Malaki Craft was recently hired as executive chef of Auro Hotels in downtown Greenville, giving him the responsibility and creative control of Paloma, Juniper, The Press Room, Perfect Buns and AC Kitchen.
Craft became known in the Upstate first as executive chef at Rick Erwin’s Clemson and made the move to Auro Hotels in April, but his food and beverage lifestyle stretches far back.
He was born and raised in Indianapolis and graduated high school in south Florida. His mother was a manager in restaurants and his stepfather was an executive chef who later became culinary director for a country club. While most get that first taste of restaurant conviviality in high school or college, the flavor was present throughout his life.
“I like to see the plate and that negative space. I like very clean, simple dishes (with) really bright, cool flavor. So I work with a lot of acids, lots of citrus, lot of fermentation.” – Malaki Craft
One of Craft’s earliest recollections of this hospitality was at Shula’s Steak House in Naples, Florida, when he was a teenager. The restaurant was trying to recruit his stepfather as executive chef, so his family was invited to spend the weekend in Naples experiencing the culinary offerings of the restaurant.
“(Shula’s) clientele are 50- to 80-year-old millionaires, billionaires, coming in and dropping hundreds, thousands of dollars for dinner. So you don’t often see 15-year-olds in that atmosphere,” Craft recalled. “I was able to just kind of be a fly on the wall and sit next to my parents while they got wined and dined.”
His considered the military after high school, but he opted for culinary school instead and applied to the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California. Craft, a rebellious 18 year old, preferred the smaller classroom sizes in wine country to the school’s campus in Hyde Park, New York.
The institute gave him an opportunity to mature through its structured system, teaching him the brigade de cuisine — the hierarchy found in commercial kitchens. Craft brings this same system with him to restaurants. While he acknowledges that there’s more than one road to becoming a chef, he is a proponent of culinary school.
These days, Craft is a husband and father of three small children and two Great Danes. In his spare time, he focuses on his family. Recently, he’s been teaching himself to rebuild and remodel his home, which was built in 1952. It further reinforces what has already been established in his kitchens — he’s a hands-on guy.
Having been a chef for years now, Craft’s passion is split between the work of preparing food and overseeing the kitchen as a whole. As a chef, he prefers to stay off the line to focus on building and nourishing a cohesive team, but he finds his personal balance on the line.
“You’ll probably almost always find me on a station if I’m having a bad day, because it’s just where I go to calm down,” he said. “As tickets are coming in and we’re cooking, and there’s a rhythm, I love it.”
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