Jackson
Locklear

Twenty years, a few kitchens worth remembering.

Jackson Locklear has spent the better part of two decades cooking in kitchens most people only read about, and stealing something from every one of them.

He got his start on Long Island, coming up under Chef James Gee across Cittanuova, East Hampton Point, and The 1770 House, three very different rooms under one roof, which meant learning to cook a casual Italian lunch and a formal tasting menu in the same week. It's also where he picked up the parts of the business nobody teaches in culinary school: running a bar program, planning events, even directing social media, because in a small operation everybody wears a few hats.

From there he headed west, trading the Hamptons for altitude as executive chef of Giuseppe's and Bon Vivant at Telluride Ski and Golf Resort. Cooking on a mountain comes with its own logistics: on slope dining, weather nobody can control, and a season that ends whether the snow does or not. He was the featured chef for the Washington Pear Growers' Dinner, and one winter his recipes even made it onto the Today Show, which is a strange thing to explain to a table of guests who saw you on television that morning.

Then came South Beach, and a call to help open The Bazaar by José Andrés, working under the Think Food Group out of D.C. It's the kind of kitchen that reorders your sense of what food can be, playful, technical, a little theatrical, and Jackson helped stand the whole thing up from the ground floor, building the systems and training the team that would carry it long after opening week.

Along the way he's staged in Michelin kitchens, consulted on more than a dozen restaurant openings around the country, and mentored plenty of cooks who've gone on to run kitchens of their own. These days all of that shows up in a different form: private dinners, small events, and menus built around whoever's sitting at the table, cooked with the same seriousness he'd bring to any dining room he's ever run.