Alex Sazama 

Born in Green Bay and raised in the Milwaukee area, Alex Sazama says his first dabbles in the kitchen were in childhood, with simple things like pancakes during summer break. In high school, he got his first cooking job – at the old Rafters supper club in Oak Creek. That’s where he learned the ropes and “made a lot of my cooking mistakes, [learned] how to juggle cooking a lot of food at once.” He spent over three years at Rafters before getting the opportunity to open Water Buffalo in 2006. He’s stayed with the same parent company since and opened more restaurant projects along the way. Woven in there, too, are traveling through parts of Europe and starting a family.

This first recipe, for warm mushroom salad, is, in a way, more chef-y than the meatballs and sauce that follows. It’s a little more reflective of his evolution as a chef and shows his love of layering flavor. The cremini mushrooms he works with here “give you kind of the illusion that you're eating meat.” To achieve that, he cooks the mushrooms on high heat and then, toward the end, he adds those flavor-building blocks of Fresno peppers, sage and fennel seed, and deglazes the pan with balsamic vinegar. Once he assembles the salad, there’s more flavor – and texture – courtesy of layering in peppery arugula, sweet dried cherries, creamy goat cheese and rich pine nuts. These mushrooms get star treatment – like they’re the lead singer and the supporting ingredients are backup vocalists.