“It all started with a mushroom.”

That’s how Chef Chuck Bandel describes his first mind-blowing culinary experience: at a job interview, nearly three decades ago. There would be others, in Michelin-starred restaurants in Spain and in a world-class museum, but those were years away. The imagination had just been ignited for the young man who would eventually master the art of food as the creative executive chef at Café Gala, in St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum. 

Museum cafés are places where visitors rest and rejuvenate and then push on, and too often the menus are no more innovative than salads, wraps, and something sweet. 

But a ho-hum dining experience would never be good enough for Café Gala in the Dalí Museum, at least not as long as Hank Hine is the executive director, a post he’s held for more than 20 years. Hine is also a connoisseur of food and wine who understands how they contribute to the museum experience. 

“Food is learning; food is about focus,” Hine says. “Food is about identity; food is about being someplace. There’s nothing we do that doesn’t include food.”

It is in this atmosphere that Chef Chuck Bandel creates dishes for the café and special events that do more than sustain. They pay homage to artist Salvador Dalí’s Catalonian homeland while reflecting the chef’s own evolution. 

But back to that mushroom. 

The Leto High School graduate was barely 20 years old—he’s 47 now—and looking for a job when he stumbled into the kitchen of Chef Tom Pritchard. Unknowingly, he was about to be taken under the wing of a chef-maker. Pritchard, who died in 2015, would become the architect of a burgeoning Tampa Bay restaurant revolution as the executive chef of Salt Rock Grill, Island Way Grill, and others. His influence still runs through some of the area’s notable restaurants, including Bern’s Steak House, where head sommelier Brad Dixon has his own Pritchard stories to tell. 

While Pritchard interviewed Bandel for a $7.25-an-hour pantry job at the Grill at Feather Sound, he sliced mushrooms. He moved like lightning, Bandel says, eyes and attention on the kid all the while, slicing through the tender mushrooms like a surgeon. He never looked at his hands, the knife blade moving up and down on auto-pilot.  

“I wanted to do that,” Bandel says, though it was more than just watching a pro expertly slice mushrooms that fascinated him. It was Pritchard’s passion. Fast forward to 2022 and that passion has stayed with him and morphed in unexpected ways.

When Art and Food Collide

Bandel’s evolution as a chef took flight when St. Petersburg restaurant impresario Steve Westphal hired him to run Café Gala. The new museum and café opened on the downtown waterfront in 2011, and Westphal knew Bandel from his work at one of Westphal’s other downtown restaurants, the Parkshore Grill. Parkshore Executive Chef Tyson Grant, also a Pritchard protégé, suggested him for the job. He’s been in the kitchen ever since. 

The Dalí is a stunning site with the protruding glass bubble dubbed the “enigma” pushing out of the building toward Tampa Bay. It’s made of 1,062 triangular glass pieces and built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Dine in the small café, and you can see the graphic architectural feature from the inside out. 

The gift shop is adjacent to the café and sometimes the line to order roasted carrot hummus (don’t miss it) or Costa Brava style deviled eggs (again, a must try) extends into the store. On the floor above the gift shop and café are eight of Dalí’s monumental masterworks, plus other pieces and the special exhibit hall. Over the years, works by Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso have been on view. On occasion, the special exhibits stretch the discussion of what is art, not unlike the surrealist works of Salvador Dalí, whose eccentric vision has always challenged us. 

In 2016, a food-centric exhibition stoked the fire for Bandel. “Ferran Adria: The Invention of Food” brought the famed Spanish chef and restaurateur to St. Petersburg. Adria’s El Bulli, which closed in 2011, was considered for a time the best restaurant in the world, and Adria is known as the father of molecular gastronomy. A series of sold-out immersion dinners conceived by Tampa Bay Area chefs thrust Bandel even further into the intersection of art and food. 

Just months before meeting Adria, Bandel worked a six-week stint in the kitchen of the two-Michelin-star Miramar on Spain’s Costa Brava under the tutelage of famed chef Paco Perez. It was there, he says, at the restaurant on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea and in Dalí’s boyhood backyard, that he again felt the passion he first knew alongside Pritchard. Miramar’s pristine kitchen gleamed with stainless steel and dozens of employees working toward perfection, some with tweezers as their implements. On the menu, selections are listed under “Memory, Territory and Culture,” possibly the most Dalí description of a food group ever. In 2018, Bandel would spend another six weeks in Spain, this time working at the three-Michelin-star Restaurant Martín Berasategui in San Sebastian. The Basque town is a mecca to food lovers from around the world. 

Mind blown yet again, Bandel gladly worked long hours, seven days a week, alongside a hundred or so like-minded culinary devotees. The kitchen there buzzes around the clock with cooks and apprentices working on dishes that feature local seafood, meat, and produce served in innovative and exacting ways. 

Bandel is itching to return. After two years of no travel thanks to the pandemic, he hopes to pack his bags again soon. His Café Gala menu, he says, is a diary of his travels in Spain. The fig and honey goat cheese stuffed poached pear mimics a poached pear he first tasted in Catalan. The cheese selection is inspired by his visit to a farm in the Basque mountains and the roasted beet dish was born in Southern Spain, though his version at the café is more complex with curry-spiced pistachios and a honey lemony vinaigrette. 

The Chef as Artist

By his own assessment, Bandel didn’t know anything about art when he got the job at Café Gala, named after Dalí’s wife and muse. He didn’t think too much about how the brightly flavored dishes of Spain might be reflected on the café’s menu; he had never traveled abroad. But not only did Bandel not know art, he didn’t know Hine, who is often involved with menu creation for special events. It was Hine who convinced curators worried about greasy fingers that it would be OK to serve paper-thin slices of Pata Negra ham in the galleries during the Adria show.

Hine says the Dalí has been formative for Bandel and he has watched his evolution by “leaps and bounds.”

“Originally, he was here to fill the responsibility of a suitable café experience at an affordable price,” Hine says. “And then he turned it into an extraordinary experience.”

Take the Tarta de Santiago, a Galician almond cake with roots in the Middle Ages and, by Hine’s own words, the best pastry he has ever had. He loved it so much, the Dalí scholar, who is also a poet, wrote an ode to it and it hung on the wall of the café for a time. The cake is simply decorated with a sprinkle of powdered sugar and the cross of St. James in relief. 

The Tarta de Santiago is on Bandel’s Instagram feed (@chuckbandel), as are dozens of his other creations plus travel photographs. He is food stylist and photographer, wielding his Canon 5D Mark 4 as expertly as his F.N. Sharp chef’s knife. The small kitchen at the Dalí is also his photo studio. Bandel says he learned the art of food photography by trial and error, but it is clear that he has an artist eye. 

His photo of fresh cheese with honey would look meh without expert styling and light to bring warmth and emphasis. The earthy plate by ceramicist Cara Janelle, an expat in Barcelona, cradles the nest of fresh cheese draped with honey and surrounded by dried figs, honeycomb, and walnuts. He has a collection of Janelle pieces because he likes how the matte finish of the rustic bowls and plates doesn’t produce a reflection in photos the way white dishes do. Now, Bandel is thinking like a food photographer. 

Bandel says it’s important these days for chefs to show their work on social media, building their brands and creating organic marketing for their restaurants. Mastering food photography lets them control the images, plus eliminates the need to hire someone. His food and travel photography was exhibited in the museum’s community room in 2019.

And now, he’s turned to watercolors. The early days of the pandemic gave Bandel downtime—a few weeks anyway—and he decided to teach himself to paint. He’s shared some of his work on social media and he envisions his charming illustrations of beets, carrots, and fish as accompaniments to handwritten recipes. This is yet another creative expression that got a boost from being immersed in art. Dalí created several paintings using food as devices to tie us to our beginnings and longings, and maybe none are so well known as Eggs on the Plate, Without the Plate (1932). In art, eggs often represent hope and the circle of life, and Dalí used them in this painting to express his memories pre-birth, when he was still in the womb.  

Bandel says walks through the galleries to study Dalí’s work and that of the artists in the visiting exhibitions, plus his own research and travels inspire his culinary creations—how else to explain Persistence of Manchego on the café menu? 

“The vocabulary of the Dalí is always about reinvention and unbounded creativity,” Hines says. “Chuck loves being in this milieu.” 

And those of us who dine in Café Gala can get a taste of that love affair and raise a glass of sangria to that long ago mushroom. 

IF YOU GO

The Dalí Museum, 1 Dalí Blvd., St. Petersburg, FL, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily (Thursday until 8 p.m.). The Museum is closed Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

Tickets are $10 to $29 and parking on site is $10.
Patrons can visit the gift shop and Café Gala without a ticket. The café is open during museum hours. For more information, go to thedali.org or call -727-823-3767.