Artful Taste

Gwen Gulliksen’s savory career

Cape Fear Community College culinary instructor and chef GWEN GULLIKSEN has spent over thirty years working in about every aspect of the culinary industry you can think of.

Her résumé boasts big titles at notable institutions in the culinary world – among them founding chef at The Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of the largest art foundations in the world. But she wasn’t always on track to be a connoisseur in the food world.

Gulliksen was educated in art history. It was a concentration of Italian Renaissance art that took her to France and Italy where as a young twenty-something she was captivated by their wines and food markets.

The summer before Gulliksen was to begin school at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a doctorate in art history, she received a call from a friend who was opening a restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia. He asked if she wanted to cook. The establishment was an old pharmacy-turned-restaurant with an open kitchen – an idea not so new anymore, but that at the time was a unique concept.

“He (the restaurant’s owner) said, ‘You know more about food than anyone I know.,’” she continued.

On opening night, over one hundred people lined up to get a seat.

“The adrenaline was really exciting,” Gulliksen recalls.                      

That same summer, Piedmont Virginia Community College introduced a culinary program, and Gulliksen decided to take a couple of classes for fun. She never looked back.

She finished the three-year program, passing up the opportunity to get her art history PhD.

“It was a really hard decision to make because I had already been accepted (to UNC), but I loved this,” she says.

Gulliksen began getting a lot of attention in Charlottesville as a young culinarian working as executive chef in several distinguished restaurants, diving into the farm-to-table food industry and freelancing as a food writer.

In 1993, a lot happened for her that took her career to the next level. She received the International Association for Culinary Professionals sojourn that led her to work with Jean-Louis Palladin for two weeks (a notable French chef who among many culinary achievements, came to America in 1979 to open Jean-Louis at the at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.). Then, her recipe of chorizo-stuffed quail with a chocolate mole sauce won Gulliksen a Like Water for Chocolate national competition that sent her to Mexico. Finally, she was one of twenty-four accepted to Madeleine Kamman’s School for American Chefs out of over one hundred who applied.

Gulliksen decided to venture out west, where she spent twenty years in California working in fine dining and partnering with small family farms. It was during this period that she worked at The Getty Center. Her role there administered the perfect marriage of Gulliksen’s passions: art history and food.

“As an art historian I was watching it (The Getty Center) my whole art history career before I realized I would go to Europe and fall in love with food and come home and be a chef,” Gulliksen says.

One of her favorite things that came out of this union of specialties was an exhibit by Italian artist Dosso Dossi, that came to the museum with his family’s 300- to 400-year-old cookbook. Over the course of a few months, Gulliksen highlighted over one hundred dishes from the cookbook to correlate with the exhibit.

“It was really fun for me,” Gulliksen says. “You’re working with the curator, translating the Italian, and kind of modernizing it.”

Gulliksen is adamant that her experience at Piedmont Virginia Community College is what initially propelled her into the world of food and put her in a position to have a long, successful career in top-notch restaurants.

But, it also ignited a lifelong commitment to educating people about food. After teaching at a slew of other places, Gulliksen landed at CFCC. Out of the school’s continuing education department, she offers up her skills to the public through its Culinary Academy courses with focuses such as upcoming ones on holiday chutneys (November 3), stuffings (November 12), and French macaroons (December 10).

She spends the bulk of her time, however, molding future professional chefs, instructing CFCC culinary students. Gulliksen says that you can be a great cook, but if you don’t understand what you’re doing or can’t translate it, it will hold you back from where you could go.

“The cooking world is not known for its high level of education, so anything we can do to change that is good,” she says. “I talk to my students now about how important the education piece is.” 

To view more of photographer Mark Steelman's work, go to www.marksteelmanphoto.com.