Pressure Cooking

A country club chef nurtures a need for competition

- Katy Orell

THE RED NUMERALS count down just above his white paper toque. His hands know the precise cutting and assembly motions before his brain can tell them what to do. Despite working in a kitchen across the ocean from the one he’s used to, Jason Hall is calm and focused as his first plate of foie gras royale with duck consommé is served to a panel of world class chefs.

Hall, a certified master chef and current executive chef of Charlotte’s Myers Park Country Club, traveled to Lyon, France after he was selected to participate in the International Catering Cup (ICC). The competition is laborious. Chefs worldwide come to test their culinary prowess against each other, all seeking to call themselves the “World’s Best Reception Caterer.”

A kid from Ohio, Hall grew up not with cooking in mind, but music.

“I started playing drums in school when I was about 14,” Hall says. “I played the drums in bands throughout high school, and we played in little bars all across Ohio and Pennsylvania. I guess you could say music was my passion.”

For a little while, the noise of his percussion instrument drowned out a skill that the future chef didn’t realize he’d been honing: cooking. Hall’s interest in cooking came from his mother, grandmother, and father, who were all often in the kitchen. As he got older, his parents gave him the responsibility of cooking weeknight family dinners, leaving a note with instructions on what to prepare.

“It was basically learning mise en place to make dinner, but it was just chores at that point,” he says.