Chef Brady Duhame.
We lost a good one last month when Brady Duhame passed of cancer, at age 55. He was a friend and also a major influence in uplifting the local fine dining scene, and I miss him tremendously.
Here is an appreciation I wrote about his time at 15 Church. Brady was trained at Culinary and worked at major Manhattan restaurants before coming home to his birthplace. While he was constantly innovating with side projects, Brady’s wheelhouse was taking classic recipes and taking them up a notch into something extraordinary.
At a memorial celebration, his brother Sean described the moment Brady got hooked on cooking. Brady was 14 and mowing the lawn when he cut down a stalk growing near the fence. He took it inside to his mother and she said it was rhubarb and opened Joy of Cooking to the page on rhubarb pie. They spent the afternoon making that recipe and you could not keep Brady out of the kitchen after that. Sean also shared that, though he was an experienced cook himself, he would pretend to be a novice when Brady came home from his big time gigs in NYC so he could get some time with his older brother.
Saratoga Springs is a tight knit culinary community with many restaurants clustered in a small footprint. FOH and BOH people tend to rotate among the restaurants depending on seasonal demand and other issues, so everyone knows everyone. All worked with Chef Brady at one time or another, and all loved him as a friend. There were two tearful but joyful wakes, one private and the next filling a portion of Caroline St, and it was good to come together and share our memories and our fellowship.
Brady did not go down without a fight. He was working on a line of artisanal pastas, and I got a message in July apologizing for a how-to video he had not yet completed. I said we should get together for lunch and a few days later he messaged he would need to take a rain check because his cancer symptoms were coming back. That was the last I heard from him.
Rest in power, Chef Brady Duhame.
