One of Durham’s rock star chefs returns to lead one of the city’s most acclaimed kitchens
When he landed in New Orleans in the early 1990s without a job or a place to stay, Shane Ingram pestered Emeril Lagasse every day for a place in his kitchen. By the time he had run out of money and options and was looking to jump back into a corporate hotel kitchen, Lagasse gave Ingram the “yes” he had been waiting for, setting him on a path that continues to this day.
The latest stop on that path for Ingram, whose former restaurant Four Square was one of the Triangle’s fine dining beacons for nearly two decades, is The Durham restaurant.
Last year, Ingram quietly took over as executive chef of The Durham, running the restaurant, rooftop and room service of one of the city’s highest profile kitchens.
Ingram says he returned to Durham dining after five years away with one mission: to pass on his tricks and trade to a new generation.
“Deep down, what I was looking for, what I wanted, was to teach,” Ingram said. “I had spent a career gaining all this great info and knowledge and I wanted to share it. I felt like I was just sitting on it.”
Ingram succeeds Andrea Reusing, the James Beard Award-winning chef of Lantern, who opened the restaurant and rooftop at The Durham more than six years ago. Reusing left The Durham in 2020.
At The Durham, with its iconic rooftop and mid-century wonderland of a dining room, Ingram hopes to mentor a new generation of chefs and cook a collaborative menu aimed at building Durham’s reputation as a dining destination.
“I want to keep the history of The Durham going,” Ingram said. “I love this food. I didn’t want to change the culture. ... Durham is a dining city. That’s something we need to be proud of, that we managed to make it a national spot for dining.”
Three giant chef influences
Ingram found his spark for cooking in an eighth-grade home economics class growing up in New Jersey.
“I always wanted to get into cooking,” Ingram said. “It’s the only job I ever pursued. I always knew what I wanted to be.”
Ingram’s mentors include three of America’s most influential chefs, a cross-country trio who have helped weave fine dining and restaurants into popular culture.
Emeril Lagasse, Charlie Trotter, Patrick O’Connell. To have one of these chefs on a resume can be life-changing. Ingram spent years with all three.
Ingram went to culinary school in Atlantic City. He followed a mentor to New Orleans, looking to join the kitchen of the landmark restaurant, Commander’s Palace. Finding that to be a dead end, Ingram started knocking on Lagasse’s door, as the Sultan of Bam was in the early stages of superstardom with his eponymous restaurant, Emeril’s.
In that kitchen, Ingram said he found one of the most nurturing chefs of his career in Lagasse, who would make sure cooks were drinking plenty of water while working on the line in the heat of a service.
“That sent me on the course I am now,” Ingram said of Emeril’s. “He taught me everything there is to know.”
Later, Ingram moved to Chicago to work for the late Trotter, whose restaurant was one of the most demanding and revered in the country. Ingram said that while Lagasse would make sure his cooks stayed hydrated, Trotter would wonder why they were standing around drinking water.
“By far, Charlie’s was the most challenging line to work on,” Ingram said. “There was no talking. Not because we couldn’t talk, but because we were all focused on what we were doing.”
While it was a kitchen with impossible standards, Ingram only talks about it affectionately, seeing it as a point in his career where he discovered the depth of his capabilities. He said he also thinks about that time in figuring out what kind of mentor he wants to be.
“I want to teach through positivity,” Ingram said. “Things did change in the kitchen, and thank God they did. But Charlie was respectful and really lifted culinary arts as a whole. You’d wear those pans flying across the kitchen as a badge of honor.
“The worst thing was him not talking to you. The yelling and screaming, he was trying to make you a better person. ‘This is your shot, this is your life, you chose to be here.’ But I decided if I ever worked that hard again it would be for myself.”
A letter of recommendation from Trotter could get you into any kitchen in the world, Ingram said. He used it to move to the Inn at Little Washington, a remote resort-style restaurant and hotel helmed by Patrick O’Connell and one of the very few restaurants in America with three Michelin stars. It’s also where Ingram met his wife, Elizabeth Woodhouse.
Building Four Square
After a food tour of Europe and a nationwide search for where in America to open their restaurant, Ingram and his wife moved to Durham. They considered Seattle and Austin, but saw a Triangle region in the late 1990s on the verge of exploding. It ended up doing that and then some.
First, Ingram served as executive chef of Fearrington House in Pittsboro, before he and Woodhouse opened Four Square, a fine-dining restaurant built in a century-old mansion in Durham.
“Four Square was an all-out assault on perfection,” Ingram said. “Everything I had learned I was going to apply it to this restaurant, from the cooks, waiters and dishwashers. Everything was on the table.”
With Four Square, Ingram aimed to launch a neighborhood restaurant that leaned toward fine dining. With white tablecloths in the dining room, he thinks maybe he leaned too far that way. The menu was constantly changing and refreshing, as he experimented with tasting and a la carte menus that were remade every month.
In a 1999 review, former News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox placed Four Square in the Durham dining pantheon of Magnolia Grill and Nana’s, awarding it four stars, the maximum at the time.
“We excited our clientele,” Ingram said. “I felt the love when I walked in the dining room.”
Ingram would go on to open two other restaurants in the Triangle, the modern [One] in Chapel Hill and the gastropub G2B in Durham.
Four Square and [One] each closed in 2016, but for different reasons. With [One], Ingram said the partnership had fallen through. But with Four Square he needed to take a breath.
“Four Square closed because I got tired,” Ingram said. “It was the kind of tired that comes from an entire lifetime of working and very few breaks. I needed a sabbatical.”
On that sabbatical, Ingram said he rediscovered a truth, that for all the kitchens across America he had worked and the countless dishes he had created, his love of cooking was still simple.
“If you’re cooking every day at home, there’s not a lot of difference,” Ingram said. “It felt the same, I was able to be creative and recharge my batteries and work with chefs around town. I never shut it down all the way.”
‘The most enjoyable part’
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, it kept Ingram out of the full-time kitchen longer than he would have liked. In the years between Four Square’s closing and The Durham, Ingram would sometimes work shifts in the kitchens of his friends and proteges. He said those shifts tapped into his glory days in Charlie Trotter’s and Emeril’s, but that he knows his job is different now.
“Working the line is the best part of what I do. It gives me so much joy,” Ingram said. “I understand my job is not to work the line, but that is the most enjoyable part. It’s the adrenaline we all crave, the madness of the restaurant life that keeps us all on the line.”
The appeal of The Durham, a hotel that is one of the tallest buildings in the city from which it takes its name, is that the spotlight will always be broader than himself, Ingram said.
“It’s not all about me, I don’t have to be everything all the time,” Ingram said. “Four Square was very personal. You can’t do that job without showing that sort of emotion. At the hotel there’s a huge support net and others deserving of the spotlight.”
On what many hope is the waning side of the pandemic, Ingram is recharged and eager to return to Durham’s dining scene. He remembers a time before Durham was dubbed “The South’s Foodiest City,” but is comfortable embracing those grand expectations.
“Hopefully we’ll reach a lot of people and show them the beauty of the business,” Ingram said.
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 8:00 AM with the headline "One of Durham’s rock star chefs returns to lead one of the city’s most acclaimed kitchens."
