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“It was not about the best dish and putting all the knowledge I have in cooking on a plate,” Chef Markus Glocker says. “For me, it was to build a restaurant where people are together. They have great food and have a great time.”
Glocker, the owner of Koloman Restaurant in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, traveled Europe and the U.S. to cook and work with top chefs in the industry: Charlie Trotter in Chicago, Gordon Ramsay in London and New York City, and notable German chefs in Austria, where he was born and raised. Koloman is a French restaurant with a Viennese flare that opened in September 2022. Only a few months after its opening, it was named one of the best new restaurants in America by Esquire Magazine.
Before opening Koloman, Glocker ran Bâtard, a French New York City restaurant, from 2014 to 2022. It was equally a success, as it was named America’s best new restaurant, according to Forbes in 2015.
Glocker’s success running his own restaurants is in large part credited to the hospitality he’s learned over the years. “I learned very important people skills in the family-run hotel where I grew up in Austria, and learned to be social at a young age, which was very helpful in my career,” he said.
In the family-run hotel, Glocker’s grandfather worked the bar, his two aunts worked the kitchen, and he and his brother worked as the service staff.
Cooking has been embedded in Glocker’s family life. “I have childhood memories of my mom cooking fresh every day,” he said. “We have a garden at home. I use those flavors in my cuisine, but I refine it and tune it up a little bit more.”
“I thought becoming a chef was the natural progression and I really enjoyed it,” he said. “But I wanted to do it in a very professional and high-level way. I did not just want to cook at some restaurant. I wanted to make something out of it. That’s why I started traveling and took this opportunity as a career, not just a job.”
Glocker began his career in the food world at 15-years-old, and is still in the industry as a 40-year-old. “I worked very long and hard. I never backed down,” he said. “You have to be aware of what the long road is like. It’s not easy. But it’s very rewarding on the financial and emotional side of the scope to be in this field.”
Glocker noticed chefs using Spanish and French techniques with American ingredients for the first time in the U.S. “For me, the most creative time in my life was in the U.S.,” he said.
That creativity is shown at Koloman in the way Glocker cooks. “My cooking style is simplicity refined,” he said. “I have elegant ingredients. It’s rustic with elegance. Flavor driven.”
Koloman serves about 180 people a night on weekends.
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I enter the kitchen at 3 p.m., and roughly a dozen chefs hustle at their various stations: salad station, pastry station, meat station, and fish station.
One corner smells of baked goods, another of fish. I hear the pounding of a mallet on veal from a few yards away.
Cornelius Hodges, the boucher, is tenderizing the meat. He takes 40 minutes for 50 veal medallions. Each piece of veal is about the size of my palm and vibrant red. In a few hours, each veal becomes a thin Schnitzel coated in Panko. The Schnitzel is one of the most popular dishes. All throughout the kitchen, I can smell it at different cooking stages.
“I love working here,” Cornerlius says, grinning and hammering at the same time. “Markus is a hospitality guru.”
A few tables over, prep cook Gustavo, from Chile, is marinating frog legs — it takes 30 minutes per batch. First, he drenches the leg in a flour bowl, then into a bowl of batted eggs, followed by a bowl of panko (to make it crispy), and finally back to sit in the flour.
I glance one table over and find the pâtissier, Emiko Chisholm, attentively measuring egg whites to put into her esterházy torte with a spongy almond and hazelnut base.
At the table beside Chisholm’s, I find garde mangers, Denise Sanchez, from Mexico, and Maria, from the Dominican Republic, combining salad ingredients. “Markus enjoys explaining things and has patience,” Sanchez says in Spanish. “I learned that the presentation of the food has to be good,” Sanchez says. “To me, finishing the plate is like a reward. I take a picture of the food I make.” Maria says she’s also learned a lot in her six months at Koloman.
***
The restaurant lights dim at 6:00 p.m. At 7:30 p.m., the pace in the kitchen picks up. Glocker stands beside the counter with David Brinkman, the chef de cuisine, by his side. Brinkman worked closely with Glocker and Ramsay in New York before working at Koloman.
The kitchen is made up of two pâtissiers, two garde mangers, two poissoniers, one rotisseur, and one chef de cuisine, as well as one group chef putting final plates together at the counter.
“Five minutes,” Glocker shouts. “Oui,” the chefs respond. The minutes keep counting down (three… two-and-a-half… one) followed by “Oui,” every time. It takes five minutes to finalize the cooking of an order.
Everyone works well together, quickly and in sync. I hear laughter and small chatter while the preparation is being done. Glocker likes to shout “let’s go” in between minutes to help motivate everyone.
In between finishing one dish and waiting for the other, Chef Brinkman grabs a rag to wipe down the counter.
“You can feel the synergy, drive and passion in the kitchen right about now,” Brinkman says when the clock hits 7:30 p.m. “If I could describe the kitchen in one word it would be ‘winning.’ When I leave, I feel like we’ve won.”
When Brinkman cooks, he finds the process satisfying and beautiful. “There is beauty in everyone knowing what to do,” he says.
The longer I stand observing the kitchen, the more I become familiar with a once-foreign plate: six pieces of fish lying on a bed of olive oil, with thick granules of sea salt and mini pieces of celery and parsley on top. I now know it to be a dish called kingfish crudo — the second most popular at Koloman after the Schnitzel.
Glocker and Brinkman work together to add the last touches of the kingfish crudo with precision. Before yelling out “five minutes” again, Glocker stands leaning against the heated countertop overlooking his true creation: Koloman itself.
The restaurant is dark with all black furniture and floors. The dim light fixtures and chandeliers make the vibe romantic. The wallpaper features a pattern of ivory and brown circles and lines, a design inspired by Koloman Moser, an Austrian artist from the late 1800s to the beginning of the 1900s, who the restaurant is named after. Glocker grins.
I step out of the kitchen to observe the restaurant in its grandeur. An air of fun and community fills the space. Everyone, from diverse ethnic backgrounds, in and out of the kitchen, comes together to share a Franco-Austrian meal in a place where they feel celebrated.
At the end of the shift, all the workers come together to do a community “cheers!” One person is nominated to shout, “Three, two, one,” then everyone clinks their wine glasses and shouts in unison, “We Are Koloman!”
