A snapping turtle, roasted in its own shell, filled with wild onion broth. A celosia leaf carrying the snout and palate of a pig, the parts most kitchens throw away. An eel glazed in a lacquer made from three separate ferments, timed over months to be ready on the same day. This is not a tasting menu from Copenhagen or San Sebastián but what Adam Lawrence cooks in New York, from plants and animals most of the industry has never bothered to learn.
You have probably never heard his name. That is by design.
Twenty-five years of choosing invisibility
Adam Lawrence has spent twenty-five years in some of America’s most serious kitchens. R&D Chef at three-star Saison in San Francisco under Joshua Skenes, where he built the systems for wild ingredients that the restaurant became famous for. Camino and Gather in the East Bay, learning fire and restraint from Russell Moore and Melissa Reitz. A season as a forager and chef in the Alaskan wilderness at Tutka Bay. Most recently, Ilis in Brooklyn, where Mads Refslund, the co-founder of Noma, brought him in to help launch the restaurant. He joined as a cook, but within a year, he was running the kitchen.
In most of these places, he was not the chef whose name you knew. He was the one out at dawn with a knife and a basket, the one with notebooks full of plants that never made it to a plate, the one quietly building preservation techniques that did not exist before. Chefs know him. Mads Refslund says he “has a way of creating food that feels elegant, natural, and deeply connected to its surroundings.” The public does not know him yet – this is about to change.
The weeds
The foundation of his cooking is what he calls the forgotten harvest: the wild plants of America that have been written off as weeds. Golden alexander blossom, ground ivy, tomorrow leaf, water dropwort, native hop shoots. Plants that need no irrigation, no fertiliser, no greenhouse. Plants that come back even when you try to kill them. Plants with flavours no cultivated ingredient can match.
He has studied them obsessively. Full life cycle, peak vitality, how each one responds to climate, to handling, to time. For every plant that reaches a plate, hundreds exist only in his notebooks. In an industry that still flies in caviar and truffles to signal luxury, Lawrence walks out the back door and finds his luxury growing through the cracks.
Learning Korean to read the originals
Ten years ago, he did something I have never heard of another chef doing. He wanted to understand Joseon-era Korean royal cuisine, and he did not trust translations. So he learned Korean. Not the restaurant-level Korean but academic Korean, enough to read primary texts, historical documents, and peer-reviewed research on royal court cuisine and fermentation science in the original language.
What he found there was yaksikdongwon, the old principle that food and medicine come from the same source. Strip away the mysticism and it is a precise system: how ingredients affect the body, mood, and energy, how the five flavours build architecture on a plate, how a menu should change with the seasons because the body changes with them. This is not wellness marketing – there are no health claims on his menus. There is only a simple question underneath every dish: what if how we eat determines how we feel?
His own summary is better than any I could write: “Joseon royal cuisine provides the grammar, but I’m developing my own alphabet.” The grammar is Korean, the alphabet is written in American weeds.
The clearest example is a technique he is coining himself. He calls it convergent fermentation: several ferments, in his eel dish a buckwheat ganjang, a green spicebush cheongju, and a cherry blossom hon-mirin, each started at a different moment so that all of them peak on the same day and collapse into a single lacquer. Nobody taught him this. It did not exist until he made it exist.
Ready
I wrote earlier this summer that I am sick of the pleasant, that I want restaurants built on one person’s obsession rather than a template. Adam Lawrence is exactly what I meant. He chose invisibility and depth when everyone else chose exposure and speed.
He worked for years, now he is ready. This is it. This month he cooks in Ukraine, returning to the country where he cooked in October 2024: rustic, family-style dinners in the countryside, then a tasting menu at Mirali in Kyiv. In October he goes to Korea for the first time in his life, to cook with Bornyon, the Seoul restaurant of chef Bae Kyung-jun, built around wood fire and fermentation. A decade of study, tested in the country it came from. Few chefs would take that risk. He is impatient for it.
And all of it is groundwork. Everything he is doing now is building toward something entirely his own.
Matthew Kammerer of Harbor House Inn, who has known him since Saison, puts it plainly: “The days of caviar and truffles are fading; what’s coming is creating an experience that can only be had in that given moment.” What is coming looks a lot like Adam Lawrence.
Full disclosure: Adam Lawrence is a client of Haut de Gamme. I do not write about clients to flatter them. I took him on because I believe every word above. Journalists interested in covering Adam in any way, an interview, a feature, his dinners, or the full press material: write to me at andreja.lajh@hautdegamme.net.