By June Mathews
Earlier this year, Rob McDaniel was named a semifinalist for the prestigious James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef South award.
But to his mind, the honor – and what it could become – is not his alone. It rightfully belongs, he said, to the entire team at Helen, a contemporary Southern grill in downtown Birmingham.
“At the end of the day, though, what I want our team to focus on is not the award, because I think if you focus on that, you lose sight of what got you there,” he said. “What got us there is continuing to come in every day, working hard, and a good team.”
Co-owner with his wife, Emily, of the restaurant named after his maternal grandmother, Helen Frutiger (Nanny), McDaniel is the executive chef at Helen and no stranger to Best Chef South semifinalist lists. He racked up five of the coveted spots during the 11 years he served as executive chef at SpringHouse near Alexander City and another in 2022, two years after Helen opened for business.
This second time Helen appeared on the semifinalist list, said McDaniel, “completely caught me off guard, just like the first time.”
He and Emily learned of the first appearance via congratulatory text messages they received during a trip to Atlanta. He learned of the second one when he arrived for work the day the nominations were announced.
“My sous chef who opens the restaurant every morning looked at me and goes, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’ And I said, ‘No, I have no clue.’ And he said, ‘We’re on the list.’”
So McDaniel checked the semifinalist list and, sure enough, “Rob McDaniel, Helen” was on it.
“It had meant the world to me the first time,” he said. “But this time, it really means a lot because of what we’ve done and what we’ve had to do to get to where we are.”
Work-Life Balance
While McDaniel attributes his success to the people he works with, it clearly begins with his brand of leadership.
“Part of my job is creating a good work-life balance so that I’m not overworking people,” he said. “When they come in, they can think about what they are here to do. So we’ve worked really hard from when we opened until now to get to where we’re not working 60 hours a week.”
Achieving that balance, McDaniel said, involved paring work schedules down to a more reasonable 48 to 50 hours a week.
“That’s one of the things we wanted to change when we opened the restaurant, and we’ve accomplished that,” he said. “And we’ve seen a big change in how people work while they’re here and how long they stay. We have a lot of people who have been with us since we opened because they haven’t gotten burned out.”
McDaniel has also instituted a cross-training process in the kitchen so that each person can function in more than one position.
“We try to keep people moving into different stations, so they don’t get stagnant. It also makes for a more versatile kitchen staff,” he said. “Our goal by the end of 2024 is that everyone in the kitchen can work two stations, hopefully three. Some people are well on their way to that, and some are still learning, but I think we’ll get there.”
Just as the McDaniels strive to give their employees more of a work-life balance, they try to achieve the same for themselves so they can spend more time with their kids. The McDaniels are parents to twin daughters.
A Comforting Food Memory
Known for its steaks and vegetables dishes, Helen is based on a food memory related to his Nanny that McDaniel holds dear.
“She and my grandfather had a ranch-style house just outside of Oneonta in a little community called Rosa,” he said. “My grandmother had a grill inside the house to the left of the fireplace, built into the brick wall and connected to the chimney to draw the smoke out.
“I can remember going through the back door, walking through the hallway into the kitchen and seeing Nanny with one foot up on the hearth, cooking steaks on that grill and squirting them with a mustard bottle of water,” he said. “It was a memory I had in the moment I felt that God’s timing was right for us to open this place. I knew Helen would be the name and that this would be a restaurant that served really good steaks. We didn’t want it to be a steakhouse; we wanted it to be more than that, and that’s what we’ve done.”
The James Beard Foundation bestows Best Chef awards to “chefs who set high standards in their culinary skills and leadership abilities and who are making efforts to help create a sustainable work culture in their respective regions, while contributing positively to their broader community.”
Nominees will be announced April 3, and winners will be celebrated during a ceremony June 10.
As McDaniel and the entire Helen team await the Best Chef South results, McDaniel and the Helen team continue to do what they do best, he said.
“There are going to be good times; there are going to be bad times,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter, good or bad. It’s just part of what we do. You’ve just got to keep pushing it and know that the bad will make the good better and the bad will also make you stronger.
“We just come to work every day and try to be better than we were the day before, and hopefully, that is what the foundation is looking for.”
