EPICured

Todd Hall was born in 1962 to an unmarried Mormon woman in Salt Lake City. He claims that he never knew his father.

But he knew early on what, if not who, he wanted to be. In the summer after he finished ninth grade, he saw the Disney movie, Johnny Tremain, which takes place during the Revolutionary War.

In the movie, the lead character walks into Paul Revere's shop and tells him he wants so much to be a silversmith that he will work as Revere's apprentice for free.

Hall was only 15 and had an after-school job working in a Mexican restaurant. But he wanted to be a chef, so, with characteristic balls and bluster, he took Johnny Tremain's approach.

"I took the bus to the Hotel Utah, walked into the dining room, and said, 'I want to speak to the chef.'"

When Roger Cortello, the hotel's well-known chef, finally agreed to speak with him, Hall said, "I want to be your apprentice. I'll work for free."

Cortello, who is French, asked how old Hall was, and then snapped that he had already finished his own apprenticeship by the time he was 14. And he wanted to know how Hall had heard of the apprenticeship program that leads to chef accreditation--which of course, Hall had never heard of. But he agreed to take Hall on as an apprentice anyway.

Through the remainder of his high school days, Hall got up early to take community college courses, went to school, and worked in the restaurant.

"I never went to one prom or one football game in my entire high school life," he says.

He continued the college coursework after he finished high school and graduated from the apprenticeship program when he was 19, then went directly to work earning $24,000 a year.

He met Stacey at about that time. She was 16 and had just started to date when they met at a party. They have been together ever since.

"He looked like Mick Jagger," she remembers. "He already knew what he wanted to do and that really turned me on. And he had a lot of kindness, and I liked that too."

Hall walked home from the party with his dog, she says, and he told the dog that he was going to marry Stacey.

Stacey got pregnant when she was 17, dropped out of school in her senior year, married Todd, and had their first child, Chelsea.

Just as he had done everything else in his life--precociously--Todd Hall rushed into his first business failure. At age 24, he bought his first restaurant, a Salt Lake establishment called Armadillos.

"I went and bought myself $78,000 worth of back taxes," he says.
The restaurant's previous owners had disguised the extent of their debts, and when Hall inherited them, they drove him into bankruptcy. He and Stacey watched as the court auctioned off their washer and dryer and other belongings, then they loaded what was left into a U-Haul truck and headed for Phoenix, where Stacey's mother was living.

In short order, Hall landed a job as chef for La Hacienda, a restaurant under construction at the Scottsdale Princess resort.

The Princess sent him to its flagship resort in Acapulco for basic training. He spent two months in the kitchen, in the markets, and in private homes, learning about traditional Mexican food.

When Hall returned to Phoenix at the end of his Mexican tour of duty, Stacey picked him up at the airport, drove him through McDonald's to satisfy one craving, then out to Scottsdale where he satisfied another. He wanted to see how far along his new restaurant had come, and then, overcome with impulse and passion and moonlight and the promise of the future, he and Stacey made love amid the construction.

Within the year, Hall was on the fast track, moving first to the Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch, then 8700 in North Scottsdale, and by 1990 he was at L'Auberge de Sedona.

His restaurant reviews soared into the superlative range. Elin Jeffords, who was then writing for the Arizona Republic, gave Hall four stars for his "spontaneity meals," in which he would come out and chat with the diners, ask them what they felt like eating, and then compose something especially for the diner. Jeffords had ordered red meat.

"Chef Hall had taken a hefty chunk of beef and cut a pocket into it," she wrote, "which he then stuffed with just-cooked morels still tasting of the forest, the perfect medium-rare meat rested in a puddle of melty Danish blue cheese, strewn with mellow cloves of roasted garlic. His piece de resistance was a lid of barely seared foie gras atop the steak. It was an utterly magical combination."

By the next year, Hall had already moved to the neighboring Sedona resort, Los Abrigados, and the plaudits were accumulating. He was named a Rising Star of American Cuisine by the James Beard Foundation; in another James Beard award, Julia Child judged him to be one of the best hotel chefs in America. He won an Arizona competition in which chefs were all given the same box of foodstuffs and ask to create something on the spur of the moment.