Albany Museum of Art Supper Series comes to Albany airport

ALBANY — A new dining experience is set to take flight Saturday evening when Chef Jared Hall, executive chef of One Flew South at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, brings his American contemporary style to Albany for a Jet Setter Dinner, the opening of the Albany Museum of Art’s Fine Art of Dining Culinary Series.

Also making the experience unique will be the location for the 6 p.m. Saturday event – a private jet hangar at the Southwest Georgia Regional Airport that is being converted into a dining venue with high-altitude ambiance for the intimate supper.

Hall said he and his wife, Racquel, are excited to make their first trip to Albany.

“My wife and I love to travel,” he said. “I like going out to great new places. Any place new is always exciting.”

Hall, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, or CIA, in New York, has been executive chef at One Flew South since June 2016. He joined the restaurant when it opened in 2008 and was sous chef before succeeding former Executive Chef Duane Nutter.

“I like to cook food that I would like to eat and what I think other people would enjoy,” he said. “I love to cook American contemporary food the most. That’s not quite what we do at One Flew South, but it kind of is – American contemporary with a French flair.”

One Flew South was the first upscale restaurant at Hartsfield-Jackson. Its cuisine is described as “Southernational,” inspired by world travels. A restaurant inside an airport – especially one as busy as Atlanta’s – presents unique challenges, the chef said.

“There are a lot of variables,” Hall said. “TSA can always be an issue. I get multiple inspections, not just health inspections, but ICE inspections. Our knives are actually tethered to the walls and to the stainless steel tables because of security reasons.

“It’s real interesting, but after a while, you get used to it. I have to come through security every day. It takes longer to get from my car in the parking deck to the restaurant than it does from my apartment to the parking deck. I live 7 or 8 minutes from the airport, but it probably takes me 10 to 15 minutes to get from my car, through security, on the airport train, down to my concourse where the restaurant is located.”

Hall’s journey to becoming the top chef at a must-visit dining experience for world travelers was not a career path he saw himself taking early in life.

“My mom did the majority of the cooking growing up,” he said. “My dad did the cooking on special occasions, like on the Fourth of July and doing barbecue. He did more of the barbecuing kind of holidays, whereas my mom did the Monday through Friday everyday cooking.”

As the East Point native neared graduation, he found himself looking at life after high school, and he wasn’t sure which direction to take.

“I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “I knew a standard four-year university or a technical route really weren’t for me.”

His counselor discussed various occupations with Hall, and when the culinary arts came up he said the idea intrigued him. He took basic and advanced home economics classes, then attended and graduated from Atlanta Technical College.

“At that point, I was pretty much content,” Hall said, adding he had worked with hotels including the Hilton and Weston.

His mother pushed him to continue with his education. She applied and did the paperwork for him to be admitted to CIA, which he began attending in January 2005. The cold New York winter was quite an eye-opener for the Georgian.

“It’s right on the Hudson River, so you had these miniature icebergs floating the river,” he recalled.

Hall met his wife at the CIA and earned his associate’s degree there. Again, his mother urged him to continue and earn his bachelor’s degree as well.

“In hindsight, I’m very appreciative of it,” he said. “Between my chef I was working with at the time and my mom, they pushed me to be more, not to be satisfied and settle for mediocrity and being average, as far as your educational level.”

While the seeds were planted, it took a while longer before Hall’s true passion for the culinary arts came into full bloom.

“The true passion – really wanting to be great at everything I did, from cooking to how I clean my stainless steel tables, to how I clean sinks … even if I wash dishes, everything I do in the kitchen now professionally, I always want it to be the best and shine brighter than anyone else in the kitchen that I’m working with – probably didn’t come until later in life,” Hall said. “It was probably five years before it started to really click and I started becoming super obsessive-compulsive about everything I did.“

It’s almost of a case of the career seeking him out.

“I’d say it (the culinary arts) kind of found me and the passion also kind of found me,” he said. “The passion came … and now I’m executive chef.”

Single “boarding passes” for the Jet Setter Dinner are $200 for AMA members and $250 for non-members. Tickets must be purchased in advance and may be purchased by calling the AMA at (229) 439-8400, sending a check to 311 Meadowlark Drive, Albany, GA 31707, or by visiting www.albanymuseum.com/supper-series.

Tickets for the three-dinner series also are available for $540 for AMA members or $675 for non-members. Future Fine Art of Dining Culinary Series dinners this season are:

— Dinner in the Pines, 6 p.m., April 14, at Chokee Plantation, with Chefs Kirk Rouse and Hudson Rouse, and Kathryn Fitzgerald Rouse;

— Starry, Starry Night, 6 p.m., May 5, at the home of Amy Jones, with Chef Johnny Gargano, third-generation restaurateur and owner of Villa Gargano.

For more information about AMA or the dinner series, visit www.albanymuseum.com or call (229) 439-8400.

Jennifer Parks