Famous street food

by Tony Evans
photos by Paulette Phlipot

Tucked away in a hidden corner of downtown Ketchum, Vintage Restaurant’s customers often have a hard time finding the historic log cabin. But that’s OK. After 25 years in business, Chef Jeff Keys relies more on a steady flow of regulars than passers-by. When the likes of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg return each summer, clearly the food makes it a worthy hunt.

While some of the Vintage regulars are elite and prestigious, many of the dishes Keys serves them are anything but. He specializes in a sort of high-end street food that hides all over the world in plain sight. Vintage, which opened in 2006, is a throwback to intimate village cuisine.

“I like peasant food,” says Keys. “I’m not in to the uppity stuff. There are too many real problems in the world to spend time critiquing food. I just want to enjoy it.”

As he chops ingredients for a pico de gallo on a visibly much-loved cutting board, he recalls watching families gather to drink Coronas and lay out local dishes at a school fund-raiser in Baja California, Mexico. “It was a magical experience,” he says. “Everyone brought their own dishes to the gathering and ate together under bare light-bulbs. The kids were all in their school uniforms.”

Inspired by this relaxed attitude to superb food, Keys transplanted a Los Barriles shrimp tamales recipe he adapted from a street vendor working the East Cape Trailer Park there.
Keys’ own version of the tamales begins by making masa from scratch and steaming corn husks. He serves them with an aioli sauce that, reminiscent of French cuisine, provides a creamy coolness to this Mexican favorite.

Having migrated from the West Coast to the mountains of Colorado as a young man, Keys worked his way up the cooking ladder in the kitchens of Aspen. In 1968, he took over from an itinerant chef at a steakhouse called the Pomegranate Inn, later working at Le Cheminee, the Copper Kettle and Andre’s before striking out on his own in 1976, with Soupçon. In 1984 he relocated Soupçon from Crested Butte, Colorado to the historic Ketchum log cabin that now houses Vintage.

Keys learned about life, not just cooking, from his mentors in the kitchen, and his menus reflect that, depending as much on the weather and his own shifting moods as on what’s popular in the world of cuisine.

Vintage entrées could be borrowed from cooks on a Parisian back-street, the Sea of Cortez, the Mediterranean or an Idaho ranch. Keys creates chutneys and chowders as well as pico de gallos. He smokes his own meats in a $100 Little Chief Smoker. Many of his dishes are sauced with a recipe from his grandmother’s pot roast.

Keys supports the vision of the local food movement. He procures as much of his fresh produce as possible from the Hagerman Valley, 70 miles to the south, which he calls the Provence of Idaho. His “Tomato Manifesto,” in his 2006 cookbook, Vintage Restaurant: Handcrafted Cuisine From a Sun Valley Favorite, bemoans the loss of succulent and disfigured heirloom tomatoes, and other irregular but delicious examples of local produce in favor of the uniform, plastic-like produce of industrial farms.

“Stand up and walk away from the tasteless, the superficially pretty, the hollow hope of mere appearance and walk towards the delights and pleasures of the full flavored, the nutritious, the robust, the life affirming,” he wrote. “You will know it when you experience it. It is a positive action, a quiet revolution, and a step towards making this a better world.”