Anton's at the Swan Restaurant, Lambertville, NJ

By Bruce Blackburn

Serving up an atmosphere of eclectic elegance alongside dishes with unfettered flavors, Chris Connors has created his own niche in the local fine dining scene.

Chef/owner Chris Connors is less a competitor on the local fine dining scene and more of a co-collaborator. He's tall and solid, with blue eyes, a brown goatee and close-cut hair the same color—a likely winner in any contest of mano a mano culinary combat. But Chris makes it clear that, for him, competing isn't what it's all about.

"Lambertville is known as a dining destination—I think we all help each other. I don't see other restaurants as competition; they are more of a contributing factor to that good-dining reputation. People appreciate what we're all trying to do."

Restaurant Zen

Anton's at the Swan, in Lambertville, NJ—also called simply Anton's, or The Swan—is rich with dark woods and antiques. It has a distinctively idiosyncratic atmosphere created by original art and other, sometimes curious, collectibles, and was designed by Jim Bulger, owner of the building. Anton's occupies the ground floor of the stately old Swan Hotel, a few blocks from the center of town. Inside, the bar is a world of its own, and the restaurant provides distinctive food that Chris likes to describe as Innovative American Cuisine. "I strive to stick with my artisan sense of cooking. I'm a minimalist; I like to let things speak for themselves. It's that tiny little thing that nobody can put their finger on that makes the difference between what's good and what's great."

"We focus on using as many local and indigenous ingredients as possible, but we infuse them with a global outlook." A Thai dish is one of his most popular. "The French-Asian blend has always fascinated me. They were into fusion before anyone ever knew what it was called. I don't try to do Thai or Indian food, but I like to bring in those and other international elements."

"We have a lot to be proud of, all the synergy of nations. We're blessed with the farm country, too, and I have a great relationship with local resources. It's an exciting place to be a chef. It's almost a Zen balance-using ingredients that grow around you, then serving them back to residents." He and his wife, Ursula, grow a little garden of their own at their Baptistown, NJ, home, which provides the restaurant with tomatoes, chili peppers and other vegetables.

Hit on the Head

Born in Orange, NJ, in 1963, he graduated from high school in 1982 and stood at a classic crossroads: work or college? That summer he hired on as a dishwasher to take over for vacationing dishwashers at a local restaurant. "It was classical continental cuisine, real old-school stuff. It turned out the cook was leaving but his replacement didn't show. The owner asked me, so I took the job of cook."

"He showed me the basics-in four weeks I was really taken with it all, really hit on the head! That's when I started thinking about cooking. I wanted to own a restaurant, but I thought the best way to do that would be to become a chef first." His plan included getting a liberal arts degree, then a formal cooking education, possibly at the Culinary Institute of America. But at college he was totally distracted by thoughts of owning a restaurant and cooking for its guests.

When he came home at Christmas he found a job cooking in a restaurant that served Continental and Italian cuisine, where he learned about what he calls serious cooking—the immediacy of it and the ability to work fast. College wound up on the back burner, then in the deep freeze. He was moving ahead in the business. "It was great exposure," he notes. "I knew then that that's what I wanted to do. I had no doubts." Looking back over the year he spent there, Chris calls it his "sauté proving ground," where he became good at creating pan sauces.

A Little Here and There

Chris' experience in the following years would enhance and round out his skills both in the kitchen and as a restaurateur. He began working at the Tarragon Tree in Chatham, NJ. "Some of New Jersey's star chefs came through and I got to know these guys pretty well. They took it upon themselves to teach me everything they could." One day the owner of the restaurant got a call from a French master chef who wanted to take on some apprentices, and he recommended Chris.

"It turned out to be better than the CIA!" he beams. He moved to Houston, TX, where he became familiar with the classic French brigade style of cooking, a relatively formal, station-to-station method that proved to be a great foundation for what lay ahead. "From that point on," he says, "I never had any trouble getting a job." At the age of twenty-one, he moved back to New Jersey.

Chris picked up other proficiencies along the way. He learned customer service and what there was to know about the meat side of the business from working in a butcher shop. His grasp of seafood came from a place on the Jersey Shore called Doris & Ed's, where he worked from 1990 to 1994. "The menu there was like an encyclopedia of seafood, from one end of the spectrum to the other," he says, shaking his head at the memory. His wine education came from the two-month-long trips to wineries in the Sonoma and Napa Valleys in California, which he took when the seafood restaurant was closed for the season.

Emerging Style

"Everywhere I worked, I tried to learn as much about the business end as I could," he says. He ended up back at the Frenchtown Inn as chef de cuisine for two years (he'd been a line cook there in 1986), and it was there that his own cooking persona began to emerge. "We were really collaborating on the menus, feeding on each other's skills. I started to put my own stamp on the menu instead of doing what everyone else was doing."

His next stop was the Peacock Inn in Princeton, where he met Ursula, who was a waitress there. The couple started dating after Chris left the inn.

Out of work and looking for a job, Chris lived two doors down from Anton's but had never been there. He paid a visit and met Anton Dodel, who had built the restaurant up over the past decade into a class act with excellent food and a full bar. Anton said he could use someone to work Sundays so he could take some time off. Chris signed on as sous chef.

"Anton's day off evolved into a Saturday and Sunday thing. Then he added Wednesdays and finally I was working full time." After two years he began looking into possible sites for his own place in Basking Ridge and Princeton and at certain beaches. He and Ursula became engaged, and Anton asked him if he'd be interested in buying his restaurant. At first Chris said no, but when the backing for a space in Basking Ridge fell through, he returned to Anton and struck an agreement. He took ownership of the business in September of 2001.

From All Sides

Chris and Ursula married that year, and have a two-year-old son, Zackery. The toughest part for Chris is not seeing the family as much as he'd like to. "I've got various ways of handling that, but I can't do what I do and still be home enough. I want the restaurant to be a success and I do enjoy being here—but I know what's most important, and if I lose a couple of bucks by slipping out now and then..." He trails off with a so be it shrug.

Chris most enjoys the satisfaction of seeing something through from start to finish. He's fascinated by what makes dining vary from place to place, and why people prefer one over the other. It is, he believes, more of the Zen balance he spoke of earlier—"The philosophy behind why people do what they're doing, and not necessarily how. On a technical basis, we all have an ability to make good food. What attracts me to a place is how the why manifests itself in the restaurant."

Synchronicity in the restaurant business? As Chris puts it: "Everything has to be in sync and go together. And do it seamlessly." That, he says, is what it's all about.

Revised January 12, 2005