Nothing I’m about to say will be journalistically neutral because Todd Ritter cooked me maybe the best breakfast I ever had.
In the kitchen of The Flats Bistro, where he was helping with dinner prep, Ritter made a breakfast that included potato hash tossed in pesto, salmon he cured in vodka, Moroccan preserved lemons and dill, and a red bell pepper sauce whose contents included ground-up sourdough bread. In case that wasn’t enough, there was a poached egg on top and bruleed bananas on the side.
Ritter knows this kitchen well — he cooked at The Flats for a while. Now, he’s running his own show at Alaskan Roots Catering, the culinary business he founded a few months back.
“I do everything from in-house parties to catering to treating people that need meals with dietary needs,” he said. “But the most intriguing part that I’m into is the adventure chef, where I get to go out on a boat or go out to very remote places and cook for people over an open fire and use a lot of old-world, primitive-type techniques, like cooking food and smoking and dry-aging stuff and bringing back a lot of really old techniques that are lost, that Alaska was known for.”
These trips are usually paid for by Ritter’s clients. He gets paid on top of that, too, and will charge anywhere from $150 to $1,000 a trip, depending on the request.
Ritter did five trips this summer, three to Whitter and two to Homer.
“I did a lot of shrimping trips in Whittier,” he said. “Went out for three or four days. Went shrimping and cooked there and set up a little camp on the land. We were picking blueberries out there. And fileting cod and picking mussels off the beach.”
You may be wondering how one becomes an adventure chef. Ritter said it’s something he wanted to do for a long time. He was working at The Flats when the restaurant closed due to COVID-19 mandates. Then he started making and delivering meals for people. It got huge; he said he was delivering 100 to 150 meals per day.
Ritter grew up in Soldotna and studied to work in the oil fields at Kenai Peninsula College. He switched gears and started Last Frontier Brewing Co. in Wasilla, with a friend. Brewery life was not nearly as well-paying as a career on the North Slope would have been but he said it made him happier.
He later followed that same friend down to Asheville, N.C.
“I moved there initially to build breweries and make beer and got kind of bored of that so I got back into the restaurant scene and ran a couple hotels and restaurants,” Ritter said.
He also worked in Boone, N.C, as the chef at an ashram, and in Hawaii for two years.
While we were talking, Ritter slid kimchi onto my plate, made from kohlrabi, beets, cantaloupe and, surprisingly, scallops. He also made me a tea with coconut almond milk, dates, cinnamon, ginger and turmeric. He learned how to make that in his time at the ashram. He said it’s good for digestion.
Catering has given Ritter a chance to work more intimately with clients, which he loves. He said he’s an introvert but he enjoys company, too.
“Sometimes I’m kind of shy, so it can be somewhat exhilarating in a way, too,” he said. “Push me out of my comfort zone.”
The money’s not bad, either.
“I can honestly make more doing like one event or one day than I can do in two or three weeks running a restaurant,” Ritter said. “I live pretty minimally. So I can typically work one day a month and cover all my bills and then everything else is just fun.”
Long term, Ritter would like to build a lodge where people can go hunting and fishing and where he could partner with local guides. Ritter fishes and forages and sometimes hunts, though that’s not his preference.
“Hunting’s not necessarily my biggest forte,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe I’m an emotional person. But I respect animals a lot, and if I do, I like to utilize the whole thing. But it’s just kind of brutal. You know, I was raised that way. So I try to stay true to family tradition. … My dad’s a big-time hunter. I’d much rather go out fishing or harvesting seafood.”
Ritter’s available for reservation on his website, toddfeedsalaska.com.
You’re especially welcome to give him a call if you’re heading to Northern Europe or Patagonia, post-pandemic. Those places are on his adventure chef bucket list.
