SIDNEY — It was almost by accident that prize-winning chef Damian Bumgarner, of Piqua, landed in his culinary profession.
When he was in high school, he thought he would become a teacher. An after-school job at Little Caesar’s Pizza in Piqua began a series of events that changed all that, leading to his appointment earlier this week as executive chef at The Bridge in Sidney.
A Lockington native and 1991 Houston High School graduate, Bumgarner was recruited by The Bridge owner Kent Wolters. The chef has left The Caroline in Troy, which he had helped to establish in January 2008, to oversee the Sidney restaurant’s kitchen.
“He’s got some great background,” Wolters said of why he had gone after Bumgarner. “Damian brings a lot to the table from a flavor standpoint.”
While the most popular dishes at The Bridge — crab cakes and apple pecan chicken among them — won’t change, Wolters has given the new chef free rein to alter the restaurant’s menu as well as the kitchen operation.
“But those changes will be gradual,” Bumgarner said. “They won’t happen all at once.”
It was by winning a Chef’s Quest challenge in Dayton that he gave himself permission to think of himself as a chef several years ago. Seven chefs competed by invitation to prepare dishes from a mystery box of ingredients. After the first round, four were eliminated. Bumgarner’s rosemary grilled chicken, roasted portabello cap, sweet potato mash and garlic herb butter accompanied by a fresh spinach and leek salad with mango ginger vinaigrette kept him in the running.
In the second round, he presented the judges with an oat-crusted tilapia over sauteed, spiced lentils with a plantain and kale salad. They presented him with the first-place prize. He beat two Dayton chefs, one from l’Auberge and one from Jay’s Seafood.
“I was obviously very intimidated. The main ingredient was tilapia and I was going against a seafood place. I won that. That’s when I felt like, ‘Hey, maybe I am a chef,’” he said.
From the pizzaria, he had gone to the Piqua Country Club as a dishwasher. Promotions there moved him up the kitchen ranks to broiler cook. It was all new to him. As a child, he wasn’t one to hang out watching his parents or grandparents cook.
“I knew nothing,” he said. He learned by trial and error and with guidance by the country club’s professional chefs.
“”Dishwashers do a lot of prep work. There was a night when the kitchen was busy and they needed me to fry Delmonico onion rings. Instead of breading them with flour, I used cornstarch and I burned them. The Chef was all over me. The first thing I ever tried to cook in a restaurant, I burned,” he laughed.
Another time, again left to his own devices, he had fun making marinara sauce, adding some of this and a little of that. When the chef tasted it, he said, “It’s overseasoned.”
“I learned right then that more isn’t better,” Bumgarner said. “I learned that and I loved it. I loved food and I loved cooking and I learned I had a natural instinct for it.”
He and a friend, Steve Smith, who was a country club manager, sometimes talked about opening a restaurant.
“I’ll be your chef,” Bumgarner would say when Smith would voice his dream. So it was Bumgarner that Smith called when he was ready to open The Caroline.
“I was hesitant to call myself an executive chef,” Bumgarner said. “I’ve had no formal culinary training. I had a fear that someone would call me out and say, ‘You’re not a chef.’” But no one ever did.
He found a good formula for success: “What I pride myself on is using high-quality ingredients and not messing them up,” he said.
Bumgarner had not been looking for a job when Wolters approached him to move north. The challenge of training an inexperienced staff and the opportunity to put his stamp on The Bridge was too exciting to pass up.
For his part, Wolters knows Bumgarner has the skills to tailor the restaurant’s food to the community and to be consistent in providing a quality dining experience.
“The addition of Damian means we will continue to improve the level of our customer service, giving people a great dinner in a timely fashion,” he said.
By a quirk of fate, Wolters had also recently already hired one of Bumgarner’s childhood friends from Lockington, Russell McNeil, now of Jackson Center, to fill the new position of director of special events.
The Bridge has been in operation at 127 W. Poplar St. for five years. It is open for lunch Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and for dinner, Monday through Thursday from 4 to 9:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, from 4 to 10 p.m.
