TOWN

As the executive chef of TOWN, John Johnson brings more than ten years’ experience at top New York restaurants, sourcing local ingredients to compose innovative, elegant, seasonally driven dishes.

Johnson’s foray into professional cooking has deep roots in the coastal countryside of New Jersey, where, as a child, Johnson hunted game, trapped lobster and grew heirloom tomatoes. This early exposure to wild, regional foods, often leading to elaborate family meals, informed Johnson’s notion of cooking—and eating—at a very young age. Johnson’s passion and knowledge for the finest ingredients has driven his relationships with small, heritage farmers in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York raising grass-fed, free-range pigs, guinea hens, rabbits and fowl, exclusively for TOWN as well as International ingredient sourcing in Europe, India, Lebanon, and Southeast Asia.

With superlative local ingredients, Johnson finds inspiration in the provocative cooking of restaurants such as L’Arpège & L’Astrance: juxtaposing flavors and textures to marry sweet, silken tuna with effervescent, briny champagne uni sauce, offset by concentrated, spiced, roasted summer melon. Johnson has reinvented TOWN’s  menu to emphasize the fleeting bounty of garlicky ramps, crunchy softshells, and melting, milk-fed veal.

A graduate of the Academy of Culinary Arts, Johnson met TOWN Chef and Owner Geoffrey Zakarian while interning at “44” at the Royalton. After working with Zakarian at “44”, Johnson moved to Patroon in 1996, to work with Chef Franck Deletrain, where he quickly rose to the position of sous chef. He left Patroon in 1999, to join Chef Kenneth Addington in opening a “funky” Australian restaurant called Eight Mile Creek, which received Two Stars from New York Times Food Critic, William Grimes.

While conceptualizing TOWN in 2000, Zakarian tapped Johnson as his executive sous chef; the restaurant quickly earned three stars from former New York Times critic William Grimes in Spring 2001, who lauded the “elegant, clean…distinctive” cooking. In September 2002, Johnson was promoted to Executive Chef of Town and promptly received a 4-star rating from Forbes Magazine.

When he is not presiding over the kitchen at TOWN, Johnson conceptualizes and prepares the food for high profile events such as Vanity Fair’s 2003 Oscar Party and the Tribeca Film Festival’s 2003 Gala Dinner. Johnson travels internationally in his commitment to find exceptional ingredients for TOWN; in January 2004, he spent a week truffle hunting in northern Italy and again returned to Europe to source elusive white asparagus around Carpentras, France. John was also featured as a guest chef on Tony’s Table television show on CBS news preparing his Vermont Guinea Hen, as well as The Secret Life Of with Jim O’Connor on the Food Network.