Restaurants and bakeries are more than just places to eat. The people who work in the hospitality and food industry are a huge part of our community. They’re the people who serve us when we’re celebrating a birthday or special occasion. They are the bartenders who comfort us after a bad day. They are the restaurateurs and entrepreneurs who create the third spaces where we gather to connect with others. And these are the people and places we’ll be featuring in the Colorado Springs restaurant community. We’ll be sharing their restaurant tips and insights about where they go to find great food and community. Read about them here on our website and watch them on our Instagram. Welcome to our new collaborative column with Meagan Thomas and Springs Native!
First up …
Meet Jonah Attebery of Gather Food Studio & Spice Shop
Jonah Attebery has followed one of the most unique paths into the Colorado Springs restaurant scene. He spends his days working remotely as the global medical director for GE HealthCare’s patient monitoring division and his weekends working as a physician covering the Pediatric ICU at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children at Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver. But if you’re lucky, you also can catch him teaching cooking classes at Gather Food Studio & Spice Shop in Old Colorado City. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Attebery decided to begin the culinary program at Pikes Peak State College, which led to him cooking at Red Gravy, catering and working in food with friends, and eventually, teaching at Gather.
To find out more about Attebery’s unique road to the food scene, we went to Chaang Thai, one of his favorite restaurants in Colorado Springs. “Listen in” on the conversation and get insights about Gather Food Studio, Red Gravy, the best dishes at Chaang Thai and how Attebery ended up in the Colorado Springs culinary community.
You already had a career in healthcare. What made you pursue a culinary degree and cooking?
Attebery: Mostly it was because I like to eat. It was amid the COVID pandemic, and given the stress of working in the ICU I knew I needed an outlet, something completely different from medicine. I started to do an MBA but got distracted. Prior to medical school I had been an art major, and I missed that creative outlet. So I started taking culinary arts classes at Pikes Peak State College and immediately recognized this was what I wished I could be doing all the time.
How did you start “informally” cooking at Red Gravy?
It started with Meals to Heal. As the world began to re-open and I was able to explore the culinary scene of a city I had moved to in 2020, I was looking for a unique culinary experience in Colorado Springs. I found out about the Sunday Supper Club at Red Gravy that at the time was supporting healthcare workers during the pandemic and thought it was a win-win. I appreciated there was a restaurant doing something for the people at the hospital. [The Meals to Heal program was begun by Red Gravy’s owner, Chef Eric Brenner, to provide free food for healthcare workers, first responders and emergency services personnel while also supporting local restaurants and foodservice communities across the country.]
Eric and I bonded quickly over mutual ties to St. Louis, where I had lived for four years, having done my fellowship training at Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. As I went through the culinary program at Pike’s Peak, I realized I needed some experience in the kitchen. So I asked Eric if he would be ok with me spending time at the restaurant, washing dishes or working the line. He and A.D. [Red Gravy’s chef de cuisine] were incredibly patient teaching me how to work in a commercial kitchen, cooking on a line and working as a team. It was great.
What drew you to cooking?
My mom cooked a lot when I was growing up, and as a family we spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Winters in the Northwest can be wet and cold, and at the time, the only room we could afford to heat was the kitchen with an old propane heater. So my mom, stepdad and I spent a lot of time at the kitchen table just spending time together. She was always good at taking whatever we had in the refrigerator and making something amazing out of it, and she especially loved experimenting with different ethnic cuisines. She made a lot of Asian food growing up, and I was usually there watching or helping her cook. I spent a lot of time doing that during my early years.
What would you cook together?
We’d do a lot of baking. My favorite thing to make with her is actually a recipe that I still have of hers: oatmeal bread. It’s oatmeal, rolled oats, brown sugar. She’d make that bread, and that was my favorite thing to make with her. She is a stellar, stellar baker. Just a great cook. She could take anything and make a meal out of it.
Tell me why you love Thai food.
It’s always important to me to find the best Thai restaurant in every city I live in. It’s what got me through college. Growing up in the Northwest, there’s a lot of Asian food there. There’s a lot of good dim sum. There’s a lot of good Vietnamese food.
Thai was something I started to really get into in college because in Seattle, in the area I lived, there were like six different Thai restaurants. Everyone had their favorites. Mine was called Kwanjai Thai. It was famous among my friends because it had a grandma — this Thai grandma — who would sit in the back, and wafts of skunky smoke would come out of the kitchen. They’d bring you this plate of delicious pad thai made by this toked-out grandma in the back. It was fantastic. It was an experience back then. So I ate a lot of Thai food because Kwanjai Thai was across the street from the coffee shop I studied at back then.
Why is Chaang Thai your favorite in Colorado Springs?
I like Chaang Thai because it’s balanced. The thing about Thai food is people either go way too spicy and it’s just all spice, or they go way too heavy on the tomato or tamarind sometimes. Sometimes you order pad thai and it’s just this sloppy, goopy sauce. That’s not good. It’s got to be a little bit dry, and just enough heat to compliment the sweet of the tamarind.
Pad thai is the flagship dish that all Thai restaurants should be judged by. So it’s got to be just spicy enough to compliment the sweet. And it can’t have so much tamarind. It can’t be too liquidy so that it is soppy.
What are your favorite dishes there?
I like the yellow curry — it’s so basic yet so homey. I like the massaman curry. And I like the Pad Kee Mao (drunken noodles). Those are my three favorites. The problem I’ve found at other Thai restaurants in Colorado Springs is sometimes everything is too sweet. At Chaang Thai it’s the right amount of curry, the right amount of coconut. Nothing is too sweet there. Everything is just the right amount.
Which class is your favorite to teach at Gather Food Studio?
I have a really good time with the knife skills class because when I got into teaching and culinary school I really nerded out on knives for whatever reason. Different types of cooking knives affect how well you can cut different products. So I like teaching people small skills that can make their life in the kitchen easier. It’s one of those things where you can teach a cooking class and someone will make the recipe once — but if you teach knife skills, they can use them in the kitchen all the time for all of the meals they cook. They don’t need a recipe for that. It’s just a few tricks here and there that they learn to make their lives easier in the kitchen, and hopefully they use that to cook any recipe they want to try. Then the kitchen becomes their creative outlet, too.
Find Jonah Attebery’s knife skills or other cooking classes at Gather Food Studio. The Westside space is an inclusive food community based on learning, sharing and doing, and you’ll find a full range of cooking classes across techniques and cuisines.
You can also get hot takes on the Colorado Springs restaurant scene by Springs Native’s Meagan Thomas in other stories like Where to Find the Best Wings in Colorado Springs.
