The Main Course is ICE’s school newsletter. Published three times a year, it includes all the latest updates from around ICE and acts as the catalog for our recreational cooking classes. In addition, it includes a look at the lives and experience of our faculty. For the April issue, Editor Kiri Tannenbaum spoke with one of the newest members of the ICE Culinary Arts team, Greer Nuttall.
Growing up in the South, Greer Nuttall remembers days gardening with her father, eating fresh peppers straight off the vine, visiting farm stands for the ripe melons, and baking banana bread with her grandmother. Food was always a central part of family life. While an undergrad at Guilford College, she landed her first job in the industry at a goat dairy where she made cheese.
Working close to the land had a huge impact on this budding chef and soon after she found herself working in the gardens at Ballymaloe House, one of Ireland’s premier resorts. Upon her return to the States she enrolled in culinary school and after graduation in 2001 she landed in the famed kitchen of Chez Panisse. Alice Waters saw something in Nuttall and sent her to the American Academy in Rome to develop a sustainable food program for academics in residence.
Nuttall’s path has taken her through a myriad of culinary jobs including a stint at Pixar Animation Studios’ corporate cafeteria, recipe testing and product development at Williams-Sonoma’s test kitchen and creating videos for Jessica Seinfeld’s Do it Delicious website. In addition to becoming a Chef Instructor in the fall of 2011, she maintains her position as a private chef with clients on Long Island’s East End. For Nuttall, teaching at ICE is a natural fit. Her breadth of knowledge from fine dining to corporate cafés, to recipe testing and media is something she hopes will inspire students and instill in them that for someone armed with a culinary degree the possibilities are limitless.
