Creative Caterer: Klein cooking up fun, food at Geist Nursery

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By Sam Elliott

Geist area resident Andrew Klein has been around food and kitchens as long as he can remember.

“I grew up in restaurants. My parents owned five growing up,” Klein said. “My grandfather was a butcher for 50 years at grocery stores and restaurants, so I kind of grew up in it. I went to culinary school at Ivy Tech downtown, I worked in restaurants in Indianapolis for the last 15 years, I was an executive chef at a steak house, downtown, in Broad Ripple, I was an executive sushi chef at Kona Grill in Clay Terrace, so I’ve been around the block a few times.”

Now Klein’s block includes a one-acre plot of land at the five-acre Geist Nursery, 9890 Mollenkopf Rd., where he grows most of the food he cooks with while running his No Coast Cuisine catering company.

“We grow all of our own food here on site,” Klein said. “It’s not ‘certified’ organic, but it is organic and all-natural, we just don’t want to pay somebody $1,000 a year to come out and test our soil. It doesn’t really mean much to me to have the certified organic on it when I know I grow it personally and I take care of everything. It’s all hand-weeded, hand-pulled, hand-cooked.”

Klein began cooking in his commissary at Indy’s Kitchens for events at Geist Nursery — owned by the family of his wife, Whitney Klein — in 2014 following two bouts with multiple sclerosis within five years.

“My neurologist and my doctor said, ‘Hey, you can’t work in restaurants anymore. This is basically going to kill you. If you want to stay walking, if you want to stay upright, you should probably find something else,’” Andrew Klein said. “It’s a very high-stress environment, it’s hot and the heat doesn’t always do so well in MS patients. … I had been catering on and off and people hired me to do private chef jobs where I’d go cook in their kitchens for them for the last 10 years, so I said, ‘Why don’t we just try that?’ That’s how it happened.”

Now he’s traded the stresses of an indoor, enclosed, hot kitchen, he’s enjoying the great outdoors working in a place designed to do just that.

“My daily office is outside,” Klein said. “That’s my office. Between that and being inside the barn, it’s pretty fantastic. I kind of get to step back and really see what life’s all about now. When you’re working for corporate America and you’re in corporate restaurants, you’re inside constantly. I was working 70-80 hours a week on average, and some weeks would be more than that. … This is a family endeavor and that makes it that much more special. I get to be with my 5-year-old son, Levi, who works out in the gardens with me every day. He’s learning the trade. He’s identified plants that most adults can’t. Even before they start flowering, he knows the leaf structure and at 5 years old, almost 6, that’s pretty impressive.”

Food For Thought

Well-travelled and well-fed, Andrew Klein is getting ready to head out on his own tour of the country’s best barbeque styles later this summer.

“I’m getting ready to leave (July 29), heading from here to Shiloh, Ohio, to be part of a 9,000-pound ox roast,” he said. “From that, I’m heading down to South Carolina and doing a position of the Barbecue Trail. It’s kind of like the Bourbon Trail, but it’s the Barbecue Trail. One of my signatures sauces I do with my barbecue is a Carolina-style mustard and vinegar-based sauce. This trip is totally about the Carolina-style sauce and then I’m going to end up in Nashville, Tenn., because my brothers both live there and we’re going to taste some more barbecue, play a little golf and eat some hot chicken.”

Klein, a Nashville, Ind., native, also is involved in the weekly farmers market from 4 to 7 p.m. Thursdays at the Abundant Life Church at 82nd and Hague. He’s also planning to document his upcoming travels for a new food blog project he’s working on.

“I’m going to do them in a series,” he said. “The other series I’m going to do is going to go from here to Memphis down to Louisiana and then hit Texas, Kansas City and St. Louis. I’m hitting all the barbecue capitals in the next 12 months.”

MORE:

NoCoastCuisine.com

Facebook.com/NoCoastCuisine


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