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L’Auberge hires new executive chef who launched his own career there 3 decades ago
KETTERING — David Lease’s 30-year culinary career has spanned the globe. Now he has returned to l’Auberge, where it all started.
“I have come full circle,” said Lease, who has been hired as l’Auberge’s new executive chef. “This building is filled with memories for me, every square inch of it.”
Lease, 52, was a 17-year-old Centerville High School student when he started working at l’Auberge busing tables. He worked his way up to line cook for the restaurant’s co-founder and executive chef, the late Dieter Krug, who saw promise in young David and sent him off to a restaurant in Chicago to hone his skills. His career then took him to Germany, Italy, San Francisco, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Belize over the next three decades.
The chef returned to the U.S. to explore opportunities here and was visiting his parents in Washington Twp. when he ran into l’Auberge owner Josef Reif at Dorothy Lane Market. Reif invited him to stop by the restaurant and talk. Within a week, Lease was hired.
“He stayed in touch with us as his career went up the ladder,” Reif said of Lease, who returned to l’Auberge to cook for a one-night “culinary olympics” event in 1996, when he was working in Thailand. “A restaurant like ours needs a chef with worldwide experience. He has the talent to create and to make a difference.”
Lease will replace Jared Whalen, who has accepted a position of executive chef at the Kenwood Country Club in suburban Cincinnati. The two are working together for this weekend’s Opera Guild of Dayton Masterpiece Ball: An Evening with the Great Chefs, for which the l’Auberge chefs will serve Chef Dieter’s signature dish, Veal Orloff, Lease said.
Lease said Whalen has established relationships with several local growers, and he’s looking forward to putting his own touch on some of those local ingredients. He also is looking forward to getting back behind the stove, after supervising large staffs and performing administrative duties at luxury hotels in some of his international positions.
“I’ve got a plethora of flavors floating around in my head,” the new executive chef said.
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