Close to a dozen staff whisked in, out and around the kitchen in downtown Sylvania’s acclaimed restaurant, Element 112. A pristine room of stainless steel surfaces and controlled temperature, the cooks never looked up. It was a Friday night, and the staff was in the midst of preparing hundreds of plates. Each nightly-changing tasting menu includes, for each diner, 10 surprise dishes made moments before they hit the table. And in a restaurant that sits 50 to 60 people, Element has a kitchen that does not stop moving until the last diner receives her last 3 desserts.
Two young men shucked oysters. Another finished 2 straight hours of chopping fresh beets. The chef de cuisine cut pork belly into equal blocks and remade an aioli, as it did not meld the first time. Two sommeliers strolled back and forth from the dining room, grabbing vintage wines from the cellar. In the center of it all was Executive Chef, Chris Nixon, who announced orders, tasted sauces, demonstrated techniques, fixed plate design, and reviewed every dish that left the kitchen.
Chef Nixon
Chris Nixon grew up in Sylvania, attended St. John’s, and then left Toledo to play lacrosse and study food plating at the College of Wooster, before enrolling in the French Culinary Institute in New York City. After just 2 months, he was tapped to work for Chef Tom Colicchio, famous for his TV appearances on Top Chef and for his James Beard Award-winning restaurants like Craft, where Nixon worked for over a year and a half.
Nixon left New York for a chef job in Coldwater, Michigan, a sleepy town of less than 11,000 people. After a couple of diners were so impressed by Nixon’s food that they offered to back him financially if he wanted to open a restaurant in his home town, Nixon moved back and opened Element 112 in the fall of 2012. During the restaurant’s construction, Nixon spent a month working at Noma, in Denmark, named the “World’s Best Restaurant” 4 out of the past 6 years by Restaurant magazine. He left Noma understanding that “top restaurants care about everything,” said Nixon.
A Dining Experience
Nixon describes Element 112 as a “very modern American restaurant.” The name is a reference to the periodic table, where the 112th element, Copernicum, is abbreviated with the Chef’s initials, “CN.” The name and the restaurant are a representation of Nixon’s personality.
Chef Nixon cares more about ingredients than style. “There are at least two perfect items on each plate,” said Nixon, referring equally to the quality of the raw ingredients as well as their preparation. Nixon is ethically scrupulous about what he puts on his plates. Many of the restaurant’s herbs are grown behind the building, where they compost their own fertilizer. “Our goal is we throw away almost nothing,” said Nixon.
Each farm is visited to make sure that vegetables are grown with the environment in mind, and animals are given good care. All of their beef comes from a group of Pennsylvania-based farms called Happy Valley Meat, where no cow is ever given a steroid. Each batch of steaks arrives with the name of the cow who provided them.
Chef Nixon served me two roasted diver scallops from Portland, Maine, seared with an orange glaze, served hot with local broccoli and house-puffed rice. I also tried a roasted beet salad with candied cashews, goat cheese mousse, and pickled celery leaves. Also on the menu that night were the gnocchi, as soft as a new pillow, served with béchamel sauce, bread crumbs, and parmesan from Italy. For dessert, the pastry chef, Elizabeth Gentry, who has worked at Michelin-starred restaurants in New York and Chicago, made celery sorbet with peanut almond cake and compressed apples, and a chocolate mousse cake with sour cherries, sea salt ice cream and candied cocoa nibs.
Each dish that Chef Nixon creates is beautiful and filled with bright colors and mind-melting combinations of texture and flavor. And like a chemical composition composed of elements from the periodic table, Chef Nixon told me that a great restaurant, “is a sum of all its parts.”
Element 112, 5737 Main St., Sylvania.
419-517-1104. element112restaurant.com
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Dorian Slaybod is an attorney happily living in Toledo.
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