About Chef Mark Gottwald

Mark Gottwald, chef/owner of the Ships Inn on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, has crafted a recipe for success by combining his flawless French and innovative New American training with his own creativity. The result is a personal style indebted to both, but reflecting his interest in bold, flavorful food executed with restraint, and a sense of understated elegance in presentation.

Mark was one of three boys raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was innately interested in food as a child and "liked to experiment and hang out in the kitchen" when his mother was cooking.

He worked as a cook during the summers while in college, and, after his third year, decided to take a year off to test his resolve to become a chef. After attending the Baltimore Culinary Arts Institute for one year, he enrolled in justly-famed La Varenne in Paris in the school's advanced degree program. It was not only the quality of instruction he received, but the quality of ingredients in France that impressed him.

"The food shops and markets on every corner were just glowing with everything from pastries to avocados and salads, and that just reinforced that I wanted to work with food," he said.

After returning to the United States, Gottwald spent three years in New York working for the legendary Alain Sailhac at Le Cirque, named the Restaurant of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. Sailhac's influence not only pervades Gottwald's cooking, but also his demeanor as a chef.

"Chef Sailhac was very demanding but always fair, and he knows how to motivate his staff with support. That leads to young cooks all wanting to view for perfection, so the chef would give us more and more to do," he recalled. Hired as an apprentice, within two weeks he was promoted to working on the cooking line.

"My thinking today is still a variation on the food I cooked at Le Cirque, but I use some New American combinations that were not allowed in that kitchen," he said.

From the discipline of the French kitchen, Gottwald traveled across the continent to Los Angeles, and around the world in atmosphere, when he was hired as saucier at Wolfgang Puck's Spago.

"I was working in the exhibition kitchen in the dining room and would have the most beautiful women in the world passing by, and I didn't have time to look up it was so busy," he quipped. He has great respect for Puck as a leader, and said that "while Spago was much more relaxed, Wolf was a much a perfectionist as Chef Sailhac.

He spent a total of four years in Los Angeles, and worked for Michel Richard at Citrus when it first opened, as well as at L'Orangerie and the bucolic setting of the Bel-Air Hotel.

Mark is more intimately involved with his ingredients than most chefs. As a licensed commercial tuna fisherman, he knows fish. He has also studied martial arts extensively, having earned a black belt in Tai Kwon Do.

Gottwald and his wife, Ellie, who helps run the front of the house at their restaurant, were married in 1990. The Ships Inn opened in 1991.