Nowadays the general public recognizes the jovial, fully tatted celebrity chef from his role as Neil Fak on “The Bear,” but Matty Matheson’s had a long culinary career that spanned web TV shows, multiple restaurants through Canada and now, his own retail line. His online presence is a mix of controlled chaos, delight and winging it, but don’t be fooled: The man knows his way around a kitchen.
And through his decade-plus of cooking, and web videos and even an Emmy nomination, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about soups, salads and sandwiches: the subject of his third — and latest — cookbook, which is out now.
“It’s like eating a building,” he said. “Sandwiches are like architecture. The bread really matters. The ingredients that you’re choosing to put in different types of bread really matters. When you take a bite of a sandwich and everything slides out the sides and your bread is obviously too hard, and then the ingredients inside are sliced inappropriately, or you take a bite and it just pushes everything out, that’s not good.”
He’s spent years contemplating crunch and slickness and saltiness and sweetness. He’s tested hundreds of iterations. Matheson may seem meticulous, and some of his methodology in “Soups, Salads, Sandwiches” is, but for the most part, he wants home cooks to have fun with it.
Try topping your esquites with fried Oaxacan cheese curds! Give Italian flavors a new lease on life by plopping a comically large meatball into the middle of your soup! Spoon clam chowder onto your fried fish sandwich! In Matheson’s world there are few rules and plenty of chances to get weird with it.
“I try to make them as easy as possible,” he said. “I want people to cook out of this book. I want this to be the book that’s on the shelf that people are grabbing. I think, genuinely, people are eating soups to sandwiches, I don’t know, 80% of the time at home?”
The book is also for his family: The cookbook is dedicated to his wife and kids, and family photos are peppered in every few pages, but it’s also full of spins on what they’re making at home — usually the tuna melt and the tomato soup or the beef on weck.
If his first cookbook is his life’s story and his second is his ode to some of his favorite culinary tomes and the art of the craft, then he says this one is “straight-up for [his] fanbase and people who love soups, salads [and] sandwiches.” It’s an easy entry into cooking, but it’s by no means a boring one. It’s the evolution of a career in cooking, done comfortably: Some of the world’s most famous dishes are translated here simply and with bold flavor.
Matheson was raised in a small Canadian town with few sandwich options beyond basic sub shops, and his love for sandwiches grew as he did with cheesesteaks and Reubens taking the lead — though a straightforward basic is still one of his favorites: a pan-fried Bologna sandwich with American cheese, mustard and mayo. (You can find a breakfast version in his latest tome.)
Salads, too, grew on him: His wife’s family introduced him to leafy greens with every dinner, and now that the multi-hyphenate chef co-owns a farm, called Blue Goose, he’s really leaning into seasonality and simplicity. His creativity for “salads” encompasses ingredients like honeycomb and pastas and crumbled pork rinds.
Lately Matheson’s culinary track — his cookbooks and his restaurants — has felt split from his even newer fame found in “The Bear.” People have long approached him for photos at airports, but now people will also see him on the street and simply yell, “FAK!”
“We would have never thought what happened would happen,” he said. “We made that show and we’re all like, ‘See you never, guys! That was fun!’ We tricked everyone into thinking we could make something, and then we made it, and it’s just like, a whole world … it is a beautiful thing. And I’m just so proud of the work that everyone’s done on it, and to be a part of that team is incredible.”
Matheson will be joined by at least one of his “Bear” colleagues on Nov. 21 when he stops through L.A. to chat “Soups, Salads, Sandwiches.” The show’s culinary producer and co-executive producer Courtney Storer will be catching up with him in an event hosted by Chinatown cookbook shop Now Serving, but if you want to get a jump on the recipes, we have three to get you started.
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Broiled and Burnt Roasted Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Crostini
Few things scream comfort more than grilled cheese and tomato soup, and Matheson knows this. This recipe, slightly adapted here for adjustable thickness, provides a just-charred, roasted edge to the classic tomato soup due to broiling a heaping pile of vegetables together. They broil, they slightly burn, they simmer — by the time they’re puréed and ladled into your bowl, these veggies have developed a potent, rich flavor. Use the garlic-rubbed crostini oozing with cheese to spoon up bites of the soup, or let them float in the mélange to absorb all the liquid.
Get the recipe.
Cook time: 1 hour, 30 minutes. Serves 6
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, Mint, Pistachio, Fish Sauce and Pickled-Pepper Caramel
Crunchy-soft, warm-chilled, sweet-spicy, this is a salad that has it all. Matheson’s throwback to the Brussels sprouts dishes of the 2010s — ubiquitous in just about every gastropub of that era — gets an upgrade with a chile-packed fish sauce caramel and a snowy showering of fresh mint, lime and shaved Brussels sprouts.
“But these fried Brussels deserve to live again because this is something special,” he writes. “The deep caramelization from frying combined with that super-bouncy crunch of the raw is world class. This salad is so f—ing good. Wow. Let’s honor the 2010s.”
Get the recipe.
Cook time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Serves 4 to 6
Fried-Spam Kimchi Grilled Cheese Sandwich
This is a tangy, porky spin on a classic. Matheson also subverts conventional grilled cheese methodology by using a skillet’s residual heat to warm the bread as the sandwich is built — but it’s primarily cooked in the oven, not on the stove — and it’s made all the more unique thanks to a gochugaru-flecked garlicky dipping sauce.
Get the recipe.
Cook time: 45 minutes. Serves 2
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)