One Chef, Ten Records: Brad Mathews’ Culinary Soundtrack

Artist: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Favorite Song: Refugee

This is the album I put on after a really bad, hard service. It's a Saturday night, I just got my ass kicked, and I’m driving home. The windows are open, even if it’s cold out, because I just need fresh air, and I put this album on. I'm in pain from a rough service, and that is what this record is to me. When I drive from Bar Le Côte in Los Olivos to my house in Solvang, I just want something that feels like how I feel at that moment.

Artist: Sturgill Simpson
Favorite Song: You Can Have the Crown

I put this album on in the restaurant in the morning after I get back from the farmer's market. I usually arrive when the entire restaurant, front of house and back of the house, goes on break, and it is just me doing fish butchery by myself. I listen to it because it's a pretty high-energy album. It gets me charged for the opening of lunch service and that last hour push before we open the doors, like on a Saturday morning. I just love it for that.

Artist: Amy Winehouse
Favorite Song: Me and Mr. Jones

This record paints the picture of a very intimate dinner at home. Candles lit, just you and your loved one. Picture it: a nice dinner at home. You have the candles. You have a nicely coursed-out meal. You're just taking your time, and it is like the perfect date, but a date at home, not a date out at a restaurant.

Artist: Alabama Shakes
Favorite Song: Give Me All Your Love

Sound and Color is like a tasting menu. It is just the right length, with so many thoughtful details. It is the type of coursing that hits all of the notes. It makes one feel satisfied. It makes one feel happy, but it also encapsulates all of the feelings that give space for that one emotion.

Artist: The Kills
Favorite Song: Black Balloon

This record takes me back to cooking in LA. This is the album I put on after service, when I would be leaving the restaurant, taking the 405 from Manhattan Beach to the 10, and jutting across town to get tacos at El Chato on Olympic and La Brea. It's high energy. It feels good. It sounds good. I can remember, I’m still riding on the high from service, I’m in a happy space, and it is taco time.

Artist: Arctic Monkeys
Favorite Song: I Bet That You Look Good on the Dance Floor

This record is tied to the beginning of my line cookery. This album, start to finish, is what it's like to be a line cook. The energy, the speed, the pace of it all, the intensity of it. I listened to their songs and thought, “God, the guitar playing is so fast.” It reminds me of working the sauté station in a lot of ways. I’d just be on the edge of almost out of control, but somehow in complete control. It's like I’d have it, but then I didn’t, but then I’d get it back. I can remember living in Ithaca, walking in the snow to work, listening to this on my green iPod, just getting so amped up because there's so much energy. It was the perfect pre-service album.

Artist: The Arcs
Favorite Song: Velvet Ditch

Yours, Dreamily, will always remind me of the drive from Manhattan Beach to Santa Monica when I was working at Fishing with Dynamite. I would leave the restaurant to go home and drive along Dockweiler State Beach, up to Lincoln through Playa. The timing was just right. After service, sort of late night, around midnight, driving that beach route. I had a Honda CR-V, and I would listen to it on CD, with the windows down, smoking a cigarette. Listening to this album is a core memory for me.

Artist: Wire
Favorite Song: X Lion Tamer

I was introduced to this by the chef de cuisine at Just a Taste in Ithaca. This was really my introduction to working in a restaurant, being a line cook, and punk music. The intensity of service was matched by my understanding of this record. I felt the parallels between working a night service, those rush hours, and the speed of these songs. The servers would come up to put their orders on the rail. Then we would rip them down, and in a lot of ways, it was like how the band was on that record, just burning through those songs. They’re up, they’re down, they’re up, they’re down, they’re up, they’re down. There was something about that rhythm to those tickets that is reminiscent to me of this album.

Artist: T. Rex
Favorite Song: Lean Woman Blues

This image on the front of this was everything to me and still is: Marc Bolan, a Marshall stack, a Les Paul, backlit, with cool boots. It gives me the same feeling of what it is to look up to a chef that I really like. This person that feels larger than life, this image that feels larger than life. It is very similar to how I would feel when Joe Miller at Bar Pintxo would come walking in through the front door or when Chef David LeFevre would come into the kitchen at Fishing with Dynamite. It was something that I would look forward to. It felt so grand, like I was almost there, but also I could not quite get there at that moment.