Let’s start with a brief history of Niche. From what I understand, there were 3 distinct phases of the restaurant.

I think there’s been about 10 phases of Niche.

When you opened the restaurant, it was more casual, right?

Yeah, it was actually called Niche, an American bistro. The original inspiration was to have a sleek, modern space—kind of inspired by a lot of the restaurants at that time in places like Spain and New York. One of my favorite restaurants in NYC was called the Tasting Room. It was awesome, casual and upscale food. Completely unpretentious.

Back then, there weren’t a lot of restaurants doing both those things. You had the bistro, which I love, and then you had fine dining. There wasn’t a lot in between that. We wanted to jump in there...about 11 years before our time. It’s just become a thing over the last couple years.

And somewhere in there, it evolved into a pretty modern restaurant.

That was a slow, gradual process. Year 2, I’d say. 2006 or 2007. My mom got really sick, and I went into this weird funk. I went into the corner of the kitchen and started cooking on my own. I just detached. It was just how I was dealing with things, and that’s the moment when Niche got really modern. We had two menus: a casual menu and a 5-course tasting menu. We’d played around before that, but it was our first time doing something drastic.

That’s when we started to get known for being a modern restaurant. It went in waves. There were times it got really modern—too modern. At one point, we switched to a 7 or 12-course tasting, and that was crazy modern.

Some of the plates I’ve seen were beautiful.

I’ve always been more artistically focused. Food started for me as a craft, but started becoming an art outlet for me, as well. There were some artistic expressions in what I did early on. One of the things that I’ve been more known for and good at is pairing unlikely flavors. I feel like that’s a mix of science and art.

I’m not a very good home cook—I try, but my wife is better. When I think about food, I’m always thinking outside of the box, but when you want to eat at home, you want food that’s in the box.

Was the evolution of the restaurant driven by a need for more diners, or because that’s just what the kitchen wanted to do?

It was just because we said, “This is cool.” We didn’t make any money. Literally. We just were pushing, trying to keep people interested. That’s always been more important to me than the money, to a fault (laughs). I want people to dig what we’re doing and have fun with it.