Chef Angie Ragan talks to diners at a recent pop-up dinner for the Rotary Club of Lubbock in the Kress Building.
Chef Angie Ragan developed her discerning palate and passion for cooking at the counter of Colonial Kitchen, her grandmother’s restaurant on Broadway.
Years later Chef Angie and will dish up lunch and happy hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in the historic Kress Building on Broadway starting later this month.
Salt by Angie, her catering business, holds pop-up dinners and special events, employing about 17 people.
She served chicken-fried New York strip with a creme brûlée at a recent dinner. One of her favorite things to do is creating pop-ups for people’s special events – one was an engagement.
After graduating from Monterey High School in 1992, she pursued a nursing degree at Texas Tech and for a short time was a first responder for local health organizations often dispatched to critical situations around the world.
“But I always took a cooking class wherever I went,” she said.
Chef Angie posts upcoming events on the Salt by Angie website and its Facebook page, where she also offers cooking classes.
Since starting Salt by Angie, she’s developed a following and was a semifinalist on the first season of “Next Level Chef Fox,” making host Gordon Ramsay a fan of her chicken fried steak.
She’s also learned how to harness her ADHD, as a tool to help her succeed.
One of Angie’s fans
Dr. Rebekah Phillips, a pediatrician, said she and her friends are always happily surprised by the food Chef Angie sets on their tables.
Although Salt by Angie menus usually feature meat and often Wagyu beef flown in from Japan, Phillips is a vegetarian. “She thinks about me. She always makes something a little different, a little special for me, which I always appreciate.”
Sometimes Phillips’ dishes are so sumptuous, her meat-eating friends want some too.
Chef Angie made Phillips a savory beet dish with red wine, bay leaf and lots of aromatics, then sliced the beets, topping them with goat cheese and fennel.
“They had a deep earthy flavor. When I served her vegetarian dish, the whole table says, ‘well, we want some too. So I went back to the kitchen and made several more plates to pass around, because everyone wanted a taste. She converted everybody,” Chef Angie recalled.
This Valentine’s Day, Phillips enjoyed two of Chef Angie’s meals. One was lunch with a dozen friends Chef Angie donated to Phillips’ mahjong group for Mahjong Monday, a fundraiser to support local women’s and children’s causes.
Dinner was a pop-up Phillips and her husband, Dr. Cooper Phillips, an anesthesiologist, attended at the Kress Building.
The main course featured Omi Japanese A/5 Wagyu tenderloin with mashed potatoes or sea bass on pureed leeks.
“The leek puree was one of the most delicious things I’ve had in my life. My husband tried it and he liked it. He doesn’t even like leeks. I don’t like leeks, but now I’m going to roast some leeks to try to make something like it because, wow, it was so good,” Phillips said.
Her husband loved his tenderloin and told her it was one of the best steaks he’d ever eaten. “And he’s eaten a lot of good steaks,” she said.
One of the courses, a Wagyu bone marrow boat with steak tartare, a spicy bit of salad and a marinated egg was also a hit with her husband.
“He said it was absolutely delicious. The tartare was like butter in his mouth,” Phillips said.
Chef Angie said of that dish – “I love a good brackish bite. I like it when something’s hot and cold in my mouth.”
Developing her palate
“She was the sweetest mean person you would ever meet,” Chef Angie said fondly of her diminutive red-haired grandmother. “She had a very good heart and was an excellent chef.”
At a young age, Chef Angie learned she followed in the family tradition of having what she called a super palate. Chef Angie, her father and her grandmother had more tastebuds than the average eater and tasted and smelled more intensely.
“I have physical proof of that. We’ve done the testing,” Chef Angie said.
When she was young her grandmother would challenge her by mixing several spices for her to taste, asking her to identify each one individually.
She learned to make a salsa in a similar way when her grandmother had her taste several varieties of peppers to discover where the heat and taste affected her tongue. For example, jalapeños hit the tip of the tongue, while cayenne or habanero fire in the back of the mouth.
Chef Angie learned to layer her salsa with different peppers, so it was full of flavor, but not too hot to eat.
And she realized a poblano sparks the middle of the tongue, perfect for adding to queso, so customers could eat the salsa and the queso for as long as they wanted.
“They can keep eating for hours, because you have not damaged their palate. That’s unctuous in chefy terms. Unctuous means you crave another bite of the same thing,” Chef Angie said.
She learned to make her grandmother’s favorite recipes, but 20 years later learned a secret. Her grandmother’s cooking had been based on Julia Child’s cookbook.
“When I read Julia Child and I thought, oh, my gosh, Ma-Ma, you were reading this cookbook. I always thought she was just this miraculous, crazy, wild genius chef who taught these genius things, because she claimed them as her own,” Chef Angie said, laughing at the discovery.
Wagyu bone marrow boat with steak tartare, spicy bit of salad and marinated egg.
Using her ADHD
Along with her tasting and smelling abilities, she discovered she had challenges focusing while in school and was diagnosed as being gifted intellectually with attention deficit and hyperactivity, she said.
“I can think of seven things at once. If I have a vision, I can deconstruct it backwards and then set out a plan,” she said of how her brain processes information.
“The first responder career was a passion that played to my strengths. People with ADHD are either spinning out or they are hyper-focused. They can block people out and get so focused that they lose track of time. That’s perfect for first responding, for mass casualty,” she said.
But jumping out of airplanes wasn’t best for the family life she shares with husband Jimmy and sons Harrison and Braxton.
She went into clinical nursing and later teaching, but cooking called her.
Genesis of Salt by Angie
She gained experience coordinating events and hosting food fundraisers for the church where her husband is executive pastor.
“I was in a position where I could explore my creative side,” she said.
Although she does a lot of photography and enjoys graphic design, “my passion is always food. I’m always in the background cooking.”
She began to see how cooking could be her full-time work when she raised $20,000 for a graduation trip for her oldest son and her family to South Africa and Spain in 2019.
She started serving to-go lunches out of her home for a donation, with menus like chicken fried steak, roasted rosemary chicken thighs and her grandmother’s pepper beef with rice.
“I did it Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Then in weeks I had cars lining up outside my house. It wasn’t just friends and family. People were freaking lining up. I told my husband he had to come home for lunch to help me get these packages out. In three or four months I had raised the $20,000,” she said.
It convinced her something like Salt by Angie was possible. “All of a sudden you see something you had never seen before.”
‘Next Level Chef’
Chef Angie applied for the show’s first season and was one of 15 accepted out of 170,000 applicants.
She’s glad for the experience that aired in early 2022, but it was traumatic.
“You have to undergo a three-hour psychological evaluation before you can be accepted and you have to do a physical stress test from your physician,” she said. Then contestants meet with a psychiatrist each week they are filming the show and have a therapist for six weeks after they return home, just to make sure they’re OK.
“The competitions are very, very real. The attorneys are making sure no one’s getting cheated and the timing is correct,” she said.
Everything is scripted — where contestants walk and stand when they are on set.
“They do things to you to stress you out, so that you are a nervous wreck when it starts. Normal stuff, but some people can’t handle it,” she said, because normal nerves don’t translate well on camera.
They filmed in a big-circus-like tent in a Las Vegas parking lot.
Chef Angie, 50, one of the oldest contestants, was pleased she had the stamina to compete against a younger crowd.
Sleep and food are limited. After filming two episodes back-to-back, she said they had about four hours each day to sleep and shower. Each contestant had a guide, an escort who went everywhere with them — even to the bathroom.
The producers fed the contestants once a day.
“It was just terrible. You’re eating salmon that’s been so overcooked, if they cooked it any longer it would have been jerky,” she said.
She and the other contestants discussed the irony of caterers serving bad food on a competitive cooking show. “We were all like, ‘this is weird.’” Chef Angie and others learned to fill their pockets with snacks from the food they made.
Chef Angie was a semi-finalist on the program, finishing fifth out of the original 15 contestants.
She’s modeled many of her menus after the meals she and other chefs made as contestants during that first season of “Next Level Chef Fox” and continues to draw inspiration from the best chefs around the world.
Using ‘great food’
“Part of what makes me a great cook is I buy great food. I love chefs that can take cheap ingredients and make it taste freaking amazing and totally next level, but I’m not that chef,” she said.
Her philosophy on cooking ingredients is simple. “I’m going to make them how God created them and I’m not going to alter them too much.”
She sometimes goes off that script, enjoying her creations like jalapeñ0-juiced caviar.
“That’s super fun. That appeals to the biologist in me. But for the most part I want a really fatty, yummy high-end steak with great salt and that’s it. I want my technique and the great food to be the best thing you’ve ever eaten.”
Another set of taste buds
Even though Chef Angie has been around the world and taken cooking classes from international chefs, she still needs other tasters. She knows what she intends with her recipes but needs confirmation.
“It’s why I have an executive chef. When I’m in the kitchen cooking, I start tasting stuff, but then I stop,” she said, calling on her executive chef and others she trusts to help her adjust the flavors.
“We need people around us who are building our palates and telling us the truth, even when we don’t want to hear it.”
Executive Chef Vance Stephens, who’s worked for Michelin-starred chefs, committed to a year when he came in September. But he’s found enough creativity and challenge to stay longer. “I’m really enjoying this.”
Stephens has been a chef for 20 years and spent the last dozen years in Lubbock after living in cities in and around Texas.
Developing menus for lunch and happy hours draws on his experience. He’s also learning about catering and being a private chef from Chef Angie.
The lunch and happy hour menu will be simple to start, he said.
Harissa salmon with Moroccan-curried quinoa and roasted chickpeas is one of his specialties. The menu includes a six-ounce burger with lemon aioli and smoked gouda.
“If you’re trying to do excellent, unforgettable food, you want to home in on just a few menu options so they’re all spectacular, rather than having like a huge menu, where everything’s just kind of mediocre,” he said.
Stephens helps keep the business rolling while Chef Angie continues to build her brand through television cooking and reality shows. Some upcoming productions include an episode for “The Blox,” a show about entrepreneurs. And she’s working with “Legacy Makers,” a streaming series featuring successful people.
‘Educating beyond food porn’
Cooking shows and cookbooks can be exciting, but without the sensual experience of eating and tasting, Chef Angie said it’s essentially food porn.
“The great Chef Anthony Bourdain said watching and listening to shows is a lot like porn. You are watching something, but you have no idea how it tastes,” she said.
“You don’t know how to do it and you don’t know what it tastes like. You watch a master class and go into your kitchen and cook it. You cook and cook. You’re like, this is delicious and, of course, it’s delicious to you. You just worked on it for four hours. But think about it — you don’t know what it tasted like when Chef Gordon Ramsay made it. You don’t know what it tasted like when Chef Wolfgang Puck made it.”
Attending a Chef Angie event includes a little education with each bite.
“You go to a pop-up and I start telling you what it’s supposed to taste like and then you see it and you taste it. What does it taste like to you? Now we’ve created what athletes call muscle memory. We’ve created neurons in your brain. You can go home and practice and know when it tastes like what you’ve had.”
It’s the whole point of spending $75-$100 a plate, she said.
“It’s important to get out and not just stay home and watch food porn.”
