Credit: Werner

Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Matt Conroy

5 Minute read

09 Jun 2025

Nevin Martell

Journalist

Matt Conroy has cooked in diners, neo-bistros, and Michelin-level Mexican restaurants—but his approach remains the same: edit ruthlessly, honor tradition, and let flavor take the lead. The Pascual co-chef talks fine dining, French bucket lists, and the secret to great soup and butter.

What Is Your Deserted Island Meal?

A perfectly cooked omelet with some chives, good salt, and black pepper.

What’s Your Most Poignant Food Memory?

When I was younger, I would go to my grandparents’ house after school. My grandfather would always make soup. There would always be bread, and he would just leave the butter out at room temperature. Spreading room temp butter on nice bread to go with a nice soup—I loved that.

What Does Fine Dining Mean to You?

Fine dining is the level and the quality of food. There’s this thought that it needs to be very stuffy feeling, but I don’t think that’s the case. It should be a restaurant where everybody who works there cares what they’re doing and is proud of the restaurant.

What Are Your Restaurant Goals or Dreams?

For Isabel and me to eventually have our own restaurant.

What’s On Your Restaurant Bucket List to Visit?

I’d love to eat at some of the classic three Michelin star restaurants in France—the old ones that have been there for a long time, and not even the ones in Paris, like Michel Bras’ Laguiole in Aveyron.

What Is Your Food/Cooking Philosophy?

What can we take off the dish? There’s a time as a young chef when the approach is to add more, more, more to show off, but then things just get lost in the mix. Less is more.

What's Your Comfort Food?

Chilaquiles. Toss together some chips and salsa, put a fried egg on it, add a little queso fresco on top, and I’m happy with that.

The Chef

Matt Conroy began cooking at 14, working as a short-order cook at a diner. His career took a more refined turn when he trained under James Beard Award winner Tony Maws in Boston, mastering French bistro technique. In 2012, he moved to New York to join the kitchen at Alex Stupak’s Empellón Cocina—specifically because he didn’t know anything about Mexican cuisine.

“I had done a lot of French food,” he recalls, “and I wanted to do something completely out of my comfort zone.”

At Empellón, he met pastry sous chef Isabel Coss. The two were dating within a year and married in 2015. Conroy went on to lead the kitchens at Little Prince in SoHo and Virginia’s in the East Village before joining chef Justin Bazdarich at Brooklyn’s Oxomoco, where he deepened his passion for wood-fired, modern Mexican cooking.

Eventually, Conroy relocated to Washington, D.C., to helm the kitchen at Lutèce, a French-inflected neo-bistro run by the Popal Group. Coss later joined as executive pastry chef. The restaurant quickly garnered national acclaim, including a spot on The New York Times’ list of “The 50 Most Exciting Restaurants in America,” a #2 ranking in Washingtonian’s “100 Very Best Restaurants,” and a 2024 RAMMY Award for Upscale Casual Restaurant of the Year.

In 2024, Conroy and Coss launched their first joint concept: Pascual, a wood-fired Mexican bistro on Capitol Hill. Backed by the Popal Group, the restaurant was named one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants and appeared on The New York Times’ list of “America’s Best Restaurants.”

09 Jun 2025