Coeur d’Alene Resort photograph
Chef Rod Jessick led Hagadone Hospitality’s culinary workforce for 37 years.
If you have ever loved a Gooey dessert at Dockside, the melt-in-your-mouth orange rolls at Beverly’s, or one of many extravagant occasions placed on year-round on the Coeur d’Alene Resort, you have skilled the legacy of longtime chef Rodney Walter Jessick.
Though Chef Rod, as he was identified, retired in 2021 as govt chef from Hagadone Hospitality, which additionally owns the resort conference middle, world-class golf course, quite a few North Idaho eating places and extra inns, his influence has outlasted his 37 years in that capability. The truth is, his place has but to be crammed.
That loss was compounded by the latest announcement of Jessick’s demise at Spokane’s Windfall Sacred Coronary heart Medical Heart on Nov. 23, 2022, from issues of early onset Alzheimer’s and coronary heart failure. He was 68.
Like many cooks earlier than him, Jessick’s curiosity in cooking will be traced to household, and his origins within the trade traced to the dishpit. In an interview for a 2019 Idaho Senior Impartial article, Jessick defined how he’d damaged his mom’s mixer, and received a job the place she labored on the former Pagoda Café in Put up Falls to pay her again.
“My mom might have been referred to as a chef then,” mentioned Jessick, who, inside a couple of weeks, discovered himself cooking in the course of the graveyard shift.
“I realized to work onerous,” mentioned Jessick, who was extra focused on artwork than cooking as a younger grownup, and fondly remembers visiting the Crescent division retailer home windows in Spokane as a teenager. Nonetheless, he traded his desires of artwork faculty for a profession that might carry him to the top of the culinary arts, together with representing Idaho on the prestigious James Beard Basis in 1999.
“Generally your profession picks you,” he mentioned.
When Jessick realized by way of a good friend in 1973 that the lounge on the North Shore Resort in Coeur d’Alene was hiring, he utilized and received the job. He was all eyes throughout that yr, watching and studying, however that wasn’t sufficient. He requested if he might are available in on his personal to study extra concerned strategies, like making roux.
Jessick’s diligence paid off. When a banquet chef place opened, he received the job and labored his approach up, actually and figuratively. Quickly he was a chef on the former Cloud 9, situated on the seventh flooring and which turned well-known for its broasted hen dinner. Certainly one of his proudest moments, mentioned Jessick, was having his mom and grandmother as friends there. One other important second was saving a choking restaurant visitor’s life, Jessick recalled.
In 1986, the North Shore closed for transform, and Jessick accompanied Hagadone Hospitality founder Duane Hagadone on travels to reimagine eating for what would grow to be The Coeur d’Alene: A Resort on the Lake, when it reopened in Might. Collectively, they conceived of signature dishes just like the Dockside’s outsized desserts referred to as Gooey’s, and the orange rolls at Beverly’s, which might additionally supply a then-unprecedented 4 rotating menus.
Until he retired in 2021, Jessick’s workplace was proper exterior Beverly’s, the place he generally slept on the ground if he wanted to. The tiny house housed an enormous assortment of cookbooks, a spherical eating room desk for his desk and mementos from his decades-long profession, just like the 2017 photograph of Jessick in entrance of his employees when he was voted “North Idaho’s Finest Chef” within the Inlander’s annual Finest Of reader ballot.
There was additionally framed acknowledgement of Jessick’s participation within the 1999 “Style of Idaho” occasion on the prestigious James Beard Basis the place he helped put together Idaho potatoes, roasted and stacked like a tower with stuffed morels, Teton Glacier vodka crème fraîche and chive oil.
One other plaque indicated his contributions to the American Culinary Federation, which awarded him two Nationwide President’s Medallions. Jessick was additionally a founding member of the federation’s Cooks de Delicacies Chapter of the Inland Northwest, which named him “Chef of the Yr” in 2001.
He had piles of photographs from his worldwide travels to Japan, China, Mexico and Taiwan on behalf of the Idaho Potato Fee, plus different occasions for which he was requested to prepare dinner. As soon as he ready seven programs on an electrical range aboard the Resort’s Mish-An-Nock cruise boat for friends from Japan, which prompted a return invitation for Jessick to journey to Japan to pattern some native delicacies.
“I’ve been very lucky to have eaten at among the most interesting locations on the earth,” Jessick mentioned.
Jessick’s seventh flooring workplace had a window that seemed into its kitchen. Nodding towards the folks working there, he mentioned, “I name them the guts of the place.”
It wasn’t simply lip service, in line with many longtime and former staff; Jessick created a particular work atmosphere, particularly on the resort.
“He knew everybody’s title,” says Invoice Hill, the resort’s govt banquet chef, including that Jessick had an open-door coverage when it got here to employees.
“And so he was like our kitchen psychologist, psychiatrist, you understand, that anyone might go up there and speak to him at any time,” Hill says. “He would cease all the pieces he was doing to assist folks, whether or not it is work associated for his or her profession growth, or private stuff. He simply had a private contact with everybody.”
Hill was simply 20 when he first began on the resort in 1987. Inside six months, Jessick took him below his wing.
“Once we opened a pair eating places, I’d go there with him to do this, after which he simply type of moved me by way of the ranks,” Hill says. “He taught me all the pieces I find out about meals.”
Previously the resort’s director of catering, Wendi Haught appreciated many issues about working with Jessick, from how he mentored others to his perception into the entire culinary and hospitality course of.
“He had an unbelievable consideration to element, not simply what was going within the dish, however the way it seemed when it was being positioned on the plate, and what is the perspective and the presentation fashion of the service workforce whereas it is being positioned out,” Haught says. “His expectation of precision and worth for the friends’ expertise did not change due to the plate value, the place dinner was situated or who the dinner was for. His fashion simply transcended that.”
Haught, who’s since gone on to run the annual From the Ashes occasion in North Idaho and was not too long ago named senior occasion supervisor for Licensed Angus Beef, additionally admired Jessick’s creativity and perception.
“His aim was at all times to take it to the subsequent degree, which sounds trite, in any case these years of individuals saying that — however he simply did,” Haught says.
“Every part he would do, it would be like, excessive,” provides Hill, who’d reply to Jessick with, “‘I feel we’re making this too troublesome,’ and he is like, ‘No, we’re making it higher.’ Like, we’re making it completely different than all people else.”
Beverly’s govt chef Jim Barrett recollects Jessick saying: “I would like one thing, I do not know what I would like, but it surely’s simply gotta have this wow issue.”
And he would push his staff to do their greatest, says Barrett, whom Jessick employed 29 years in the past as govt pastry chef.
“He was onerous on us in a great way,” says Barrett, who additionally remembers how Jessick would get 20 or so meals magazines a month.
“And considered one of his favourite issues is he would undergo them and circle issues and rip out pages and he would put them in our mailboxes. Simply stacks of stuff that he would need us to see, need us to strive, need us to placed on the menu,” Barrett says.
However despite the fact that Jessick had excessive expectations, folks trusted and revered him, together with Curtis Smith, who labored at Beverly’s from 1988 to 1990, relocated to New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America, and returned to the area to open the resort’s Tito’s Italian Grill and Wine Store in 1993.
“What I’ve at all times mentioned, with out query, is Rod was the best mentor in my profession,” says Smith, who joined Spokane Neighborhood School’s Inland Northwest Culinary Academy in 2006, the place he now mentors a brand new technology of aspiring cooks.
Being a chef is a really demanding job and if you need to fear about your boss, that provides to the stress, Smith says, including that “though I labored for Hagadone Hospitality, I labored for Rod Jessick.”
“I trusted him,” Smith says. “He set the instance in so some ways however hardly ever taking credit score for something.”
The Coeur d’Alene Resort is planning a celebration of life for Jessick on Saturday, March 25, at 1 pm. Within the meantime, Jessick’s nephew, Brad Fuller, has created a GoFundMe web page to lift cash for aspiring cooks to proceed their schooling at culinary colleges in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane. ♦