The Real McElroy: Chef returns to Spokane and finds home at Casper Fry

An elk skull hunches over the stove top, its antlers pointing, like arrows, to the chef’s visage.

As he stirs a simmering mixture of roasted mirepoix, shredded confit duck and lima beans, inked images of branches of bone seem to snake above his temples and across his shaved head.

Mike McElroy has lost track of his tattoos. Like many of his memories, he said, “They just kind of blend together.”

But this one, this elk skull on the back of his head and above the fray, watches over everything, which – at this moment – includes confit duck cassoulet. It sold out when he ran the dish as a special, so – on this recent Friday afternoon – he was preparing to run it again, then add it to the regular menu.

Confit duck cassoulet is just one of the menu changes McElroy has made since starting as executive chef at Casper Fry in early September. After some 20 years away, he’s come home to Spokane, a town he left as a troubled youth, a kid who’d rather be drinking and drugging and skateboarding than going to school. And he’s brought everything he’s learned about cooking Creole, Cajun and soul food – as well as whole animal butchery, smoked meats and classic French techniques – with him.

McElroy comes to Casper Fry, which specializes in Southern-inspired fare, with an understanding of the cuisine of the South and Inland Northwest. He was born and raised in Spokane but earned his culinary chops in kitchens from Florida to California – with longer stints in Louisiana and Texas, where he got clean.

McElroy, the third executive chef at Casper Fry in 4 1/2 years, is three years sober come January. Two and half months in, his boss, Casper Fry owner Deb Green, is impressed with his experience, demeanor and candor – especially about his past.

“Mike’s very humble,” Green said. “There’s no pretense. He’s really genuine, honest, laid-back. I get the feeling Mike’s a big teddy bear in a bad-ass costume. He is calm. He’s collected. He’s cool.”

Street kid

to executive chef

That wasn’t always the case. When McElroy left Spokane in the mid-1990s, he was a punk and runaway who got drunk and high in Riverfront Park when he was supposed to be at school. His drug of choice: “whatever I could get my hands on” – LSD, heroin, cocaine, meth.

He couch-surfed when he could but sometimes slept in parks and under bridges. When he was “probably 16,” he got his first tattoo: the symbol for squatters’ right. His friend did it for him.

“All of my tattoos remind me of a time in my life,” he said. “I was drunk for so long they kind of help me remember what I did.”

He was bullied for being different and bounced around schools – four or five in two years, he thinks, but can’t really remember. He never did graduate. “All of a sudden I was 17 and had no credits, so I just gave up.”

He was too angry; Spokane, too small. “And I had the traveling bug real bad,” he said. “I wanted to see the world.”

McElroy fled to Florida, and eventually he found his way – found himself – in kitchens across the country.

His first restaurant job had been washing dishes at Frank’s Diner on the edge of Browne’s Addition. In the Sunshine State, “they put me on the fry station because I didn’t really have any experience, and that’s where everybody kind of starts.”

He stayed there nearly a year, then traveled to Texas and, later, Louisiana. “I wasn’t really living anywhere,” he said. “I was a street kid most of that time. I hopped freight trains and hitch-hiked – all that stuff. I kinda bounced around. It’s all kind of blurry.”

McElroy got his footing in New Orleans, at Red Fish Grill, a casual Bourbon Street seafood restaurant where he learned to cook and which took him back several times – before and after he moved to California.

He worked at Lulu Restaurant and Bar in San Francisco and Angeline’s Louisiana Kitchen in Berkeley, where he met his wife, Shannan Knox, a bartender and server at Garageland in downtown Spokane.

He would return home to visit. But he didn’t plan to put down roots until the couple moved here in July following another stint in New Orleans, where McElroy worked as chef de tournant – the relief cook – at Cochon and Herbsaint. He also spent about four years in Houston, where “a lot of good things happened to me.”

At D&T Drive Inn, McElroy developed a kind of cult following for his interpretation of a po-boy sandwich and helped the eatery make it on the Houston Chronicle’s “10 Best New Restaurants in Houston.”

He also got sober, “took a few steps back” and honed his skills at a butcher shop. The last restaurant at which he worked in Texas, the Durham House, closed its doors behind him.

‘Not going anywhere’

McElroy was a line cook at Scratch when he first got back to town. But he wasn’t putting his Southern culinary skills to use, and Casper Fry “sounded like what I like to do,” he said.

He liked the look and feel and and philosophy of the place, but saw room for improvement, left his card and started calling. “I kind of bugged them,” he said. “I called like three or four times.”

Just after Labor Day, he took over the kitchen. Within a week, he knew he had made the right move. “It’s exactly what I want as far as the wood-fired equipment and smoker, and it’s already Southern-inspired,” said McElroy, who turns 39 in January. “I didn’t have to change a thing (about myself) to fit in.”

McElroy’s an imposing figure. He wears a lot of black – black Harley Davidson biker boots, black pants, black shirt – and stands more than 6 feet tall. Tattoos cover his hands, arms, legs, head.

Two are knives, testaments to his chef’s life: a butcher’s knife on his left arm, a boning knife on his right. Images seem to overlap; it’s difficult to tell where one stops and another starts – with the exception of the animal skull on his head, a nod to the black metal band Elk, which he was in when he lived in California. Members were all getting elk tattoos.

“I decided to one up everybody and get it on my head,” said McElroy, who’s in the Spokane death and black metal band Rutah. He’s also rebuilding a Harley, converting a 1987 Sportster into an old-school chopper.

“Compared to how I used to be, I’m doing well. I’m very much a different person than I used to be.”

And, he said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

On the menu

McElroy helped hire his old friend Nathan Sanford, from Chaps, as sous chef. They’ve known each other since kindergarten and cooked together in New Orleans. They’ll be stepping up the smoking program and doing more smoked meats as well as classic Creole dishes – with a little bit of soul mixed in.

“It feels right,” Green said. “The food has been spot on. It’s nice to have someone who has that Southern soulfulness just embedded in everything he cooks.”

Shrimp and grits will stay. So will fried chicken. McElroy’s reworked both recipes. And, Green said, “There’s always going to be a steak on the menu and the Altamont Burger.”

Other than that, “I think a lot of (the menu’s) fair game.”

Think red beans and rice, jambalaya, blackened catfish with roasted pumpkin and tasso ham, and barbecued shrimp with melted leek toast, a New Orleans staple that he makes with grilled lemon and “lots of butter.

“I don’t really run off recipes so much as techniques and ingredients available,” said McElroy, whose gumbo is made with a dark roux using pork fat and “a good” shrimp stock.

“You have to have a good shrimp stock or it’s not going to work. The roux and the shrimp stock are the two most important things about it.”

There’s shrimp and andouille sausage in it, too, but no okra. That’s how it’s made in New Orleans, he said. “You’ll find okra in gumbo, but not in town.”

His confit duck cassoulet offers a Southern twist on the classic French creation. It features mirepoix with poblano peppers – “a kind of half-breed of a trinity and a mirepoix” – along with smoked pork and lima beans cooked in cast iron with pork and bread crumbs.

Dishes like these are why “we’re pretty stoked about the future,” Green said.

With McElroy in the kitchen, “it’s an opportunity to get back to the roots we laid down at the very beginning: Southern-inspired dishes cooked authentically. The things Mike has done for us, his specials, have all been prepared in traditional Southern ways with layers and layers of flavors. It’s what we set out to do at the start.”