Stephen Trojahn, the Corporate Executive Chef at the 601 Graves has been let go. Trojahn was the guy at the tippity top, over the Cosmos chef de cuisine Håkan Lundberg and the Bradstreet chef de cuisine Jesse Spitzack. No replacement has been named. “There are no changes here,” Shawn Nayyar, the hotel’s Vice President of Operations told me, though he added that the company will be doing a national search for a replacement.
Here’s a thought: Why not hire Steven Brown, who lost the exact same job at Minneapolis’ other luxury skyscraping hotel, The Ivy, a couple weeks back?
I guess what makes me feel sad about this is that it’s more proof that good work doesn’t necessarily translate to gainful employment: The Star Tribune’s Rick Nelson couldn’t have given Cosmos a more glowing review last summer, and everyone I’ve spoken with who went to the restaurant lately loved it. I had my quibbles with Cosmos—I felt it was sort of still riding on Seth Bixby Daugherty’s coattails, long after he departed, and I would have liked to see more aggressive menu changes after he left—but still. This looks eerily like what went down at the Ivy. Why pay many salaries when you could pay fewer? It seems we are going to come out of this recession with a net loss of cooking jobs in this town.
Everyone, kiss your favorite chef tonight—or make a reservation. It’s brutal out there.
