When you walk into The Bywater, the Cajun restaurant launched in 2016 by David Kinch and Andrew Burnham, you see Mardi Gras beads hanging everywhere, amid black and white photos of NOLA shenanigans. You hear music ranging from Alain Toussaint to Nathaniel Rateliff. You inhale a welcoming aroma of deep brown gumbo bubbling in an enormous pot in the back of the open kitchen.
And at the pass, you may see young chef de cuisine Jerry Casimiro-Rodriguez–tall, tattooed, focused, and sporting an impressive head of wavy black hair–calling out orders, shucking oysters, or whipping up the butterscotch pot de crème topping.
Casimiro-Rodriguez has been sharing chef duties with executive chef Nick LaMantia since January of this year. And lately he’s been making a big impression.
Growing up, he always had an interest in food and wanted to watch chefs on TV. “But my family couldn’t afford cable,” he explains. “Then one day, we went to Santa Cruz flea market, and we got a TV box that had cable—but only four channels.” One of them was KQED, the Public Broadcasting Service member station. The station’s cooking shows captivated him.
“When we were growing up, we never really sat down as a family and had dinner together, so I think cooking was part of healing for me,” he recalls. Casimiro-Rodriguez remembers coming home after school and watching shows like “America’s Test Kitchen,” “Jacques Pepîn,” “Lidia’s Kitchen,” “Simply Ming,” and “Check, Please! Bay Area.”
When he was still a high school freshman in Watsonville, Jerry got an opportunity to be a dishwasher at a local barbecue place. Eventually the manager asked him if he wanted to learn how to cook. He jumped at the chance. His time watching the chefs on TV had taught him about what a cook should and shouldn’t do.
“I realized that everything they were serving at that place came from a can or a powder,” Jerry says. He decided to leave kitchen work and get a job at a souvenir store at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. That lasted about a week.
“It was too boring,” he says with a laugh. “I missed the chaos of the kitchen.”
Later, Casimiro-Rodriguez secured a job as a cook at Mentone, David Kinch’s Italian Riviera-inspired restaurant. There, he immersed himself in “elevated” cooking. He’d worked at places where there was playing, joking and messing around. But at Mentone, he remembers thinking: “This is not a game. This is real.”
He was mentored by then-chef de cuisine Matt Bowden, who he now regards as his most influential instructor. Bowden taught him about Escoffier’s “kitchen brigade” system that high-quality kitchens employ to ensure order and discipline in a busy workspace (think: “Behind!” “Hands!” and “Yes, chef!”) And he helped Casimiro-Rodriguez understand the importance of not just knowing the steps in putting a dish together, but also why each matters.
The young chef also developed leadership skills: like how to get the team through intense periods where tickets stack up as something goes awry in the kitchen. Today at Bywater, if things get a bit frantic, Casimiro-Rodriguez says, “I’ll just tell them, like, ‘OK, don’t look at the whole board. I don’t need you to worry about anything. I just need two gumbos and two cups of red beans and rice, an oyster po’boy. This will pass, and we’ll be having a beer together in an hour.’”
These days, Casimiro-Rodriguez has been wowing guests with his creative new entrées, as well as exquisite desserts. He says that when he’s working on ideas, “I usually like to look at what produce is in season first. I mean, there’s always gonna be a cut of beef; there’s always gonna be some pork. The trick is, what’s gonna go with it.”
Dinner specials that’ve reeled in diners recently include soft shell crab with Thai green curry, halibut crudo with tepache vinaigrette and even a strawberry mille feuille pastry dessert.
Some locals were perplexed when they noticed this summer that Michelin dropped the restaurant, as well as Campbell’s Orchard Kitchen, from its Bib Gourmand guide, where the ranking is based on menu pricing rather than artistry in the kitchen. When asked, Casimiro-Rodriguez said it wasn’t clear to him why this happened.
Impressively, the restaurant was featured this year in not one, but two well-known foodie shows. One was Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.” The other? The show that Casimiro-Rodriguez watched in the very beginning: “Check, Please! Bay Area.”
It’s a fitting flashback for this hungry, focused chef who began it all with the desire to provide a chance for friends and loved ones to gather at a table to share a meal.
“We try to make sure that people come in happy, and leave feeling more happy,” he grins.
