Written by Alexandra Marvar
Photographs by Abigail Fenton
A nondescript building along Berkshire County’s Route 41 houses the Richmond post office on the right and, on the left, a mysterious door that tends to pique the interest of passers-by. It reads: Heirloom Fire. By appointment.
Inside is the tasting room and prep kitchen of Chef James Gop. The interior looks like something between Nikola Tesla’s laboratory and the prop department of a Hollywood film studio: lining walls and weathered wood tables are copper stills and mid-century Italian espresso makers. A steampunk-esque coffee system—which brews pour-over into a glass orb and through a maze of bent copper pipes—stands some five feet tall. In the back of the room, a rustic, aquarium-like meat locker of aging beef sides and hams, hanging like beehives, could as soon be a MASS MoCA installation as a curing room. A massive antique apple press. A retro, manual meat slicer. Along one wall, shelves of books and natural oddities: a milk snake in formaldehyde, the dauntingly sizable skull of a 38-pound striped bass.
Gop is a chef, cooking under the banner of Heirloom Fire, caterer and purveyor of special dining events serving “new American” cuisine, which he describes as seasonally driven and “specifically unspecific.” But why put him in a box? He’s a tinkerer. A craftsman. A blacksmith: The knife on his hip is one he forged himself, from railroad-tie nails he collected along the tracks at the back edge of the property, heated in a propane forge, and shaped into a blade. Its handle is carved from a resin-stabilized beef bone plucked from a scrap pile after one of his open-fire feasts. He’s not one to let things go to waste.
His meals also sprawl far beyond the concerns of a chef: Each is a multisensory event defined by theatricality and experimentation. He settles into a wing chair in the front of the tasting room. “I really believe we’re eating with our eyes first,” he says.
If “Game of Thrones” and “Deadwood” combined to produce a sequel, James Gop would be its leading man.
Take this year’s Valentine’s dinner, where he sought to embody love in its various phases, like attraction and afterglow. Desire was illustrated by a single perfect bite of duck breast—”just enough to make you want more.” The surreptitious removal of guests’ water glasses before serving them a veritable saltbomb of anchovies and caper butter on a Saltine would leave them parched and craving—until they were presented with a near-frozen glass of water, flavored with mint and cucumber peel, orchestrated to be “the best glass of water you ever had.” Other courses involved strategically aromatic toasted seeds and smoke-filled pillowcases.
Today, Gop lives in Stephentown, New York, with 17 chickens (who are each “like family” to him) and his dog, Arthur. As for neighbors, in the creek on his property reside some trout, an estimated 200 tadpoles, and some vagabond herons. From his cheese cave to his mushroom growing space, his home life—like his work life—revolves around food.
Gop’s meals sprawl far beyond the concerns of a chef: Each is a multisensory event defined by theatricality and experimentation.
But Gop didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a chef. As a kid in the Berkshires, he loved Halloween, and he loved the transformation of getting into costume. His fascination with theater began with a foam latex mask he ordered online. Could he make a better one on his own? As is his way, he dove down the rabbit hole. He asked friends if he could cast their faces and, before long, was sourcing obscure mask-making supplies from specialty shops across the country. By age 17 he had built a portfolio and convinced his parents to drive him to Los Angeles, where he would knock on studio doors and pitch his services in hopes of finding a job in the film industry.
His youthful ambitions of a career in special makeup effects didn’t pan out. And, over the years that followed, an interest in food gradually made its way into Gop’s life. He’d later take a job back home, at Guido’s Fresh Marketplace. This is where he began to tune in to the magic of fresh, local produce. January peaches began to taste, to him, like wet sand. December tomatoes, he realized, were as lackluster as crispy water. A friend encouraged him to consider culinary school.
I never wanted my own business. It just kind of happened.
By 24, he was in the grind of the chef’s life. And, not quite 15 years ago, his “next thing” presented itself: An acquaintance asked him to help out at a pig roast at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Cooking outdoors over fire, he fell for the process itself and stayed on through the season with a mentor who specialized in nose-to-tail, open-fire cooking, and bringing the festivity of a multi-tiered grill to culinary events.
He moved on from that gig, too, but was changed by it. “You become an amalgamation of every chef you work for,” Gop says. A few years later, he got a call from a contact who happened to be looking for someone with a very particular set of skills: “Know anyone who cooks over an open fire and wears chaps?” she asked. Her boss, the hotelier André Balazs, was looking for a catering company for a party on Saturday—six days away. Gop said he might know someone—that someone was him. (Chaps, as it turns out, are a great way to protect one’s legs when cooking a whole animal over a roaring fire.)
Gop is a chef, caterer, and purveyor of special dining events serving “new American” cuisine, which he describes as seasonally driven and “specifically unspecific.” There’s also The Forager’s Pantry, Gop’s retail line of small-batch pantry items.
The only potential catch: He didn’t actually have a catering company, nor any gear. What he did have was six days, a cousin with access to a machinists’ workshop, a wedding planner friend who could stage a room, and the moxie to say yes, dive in, and pull it off. “I never wanted my own business,” Gop says. “It just kind of happened.” Inside a week, this became Heirloom Fire’s first event: throwing an open-fire dinner for Uma Thurman’s birthday.
This was the spark that launched the outfit as it is today: catering for weddings and events, intimate and bespoke pop-up dinners, and an array of courses out of the Richmond HQ—pickling, preserving, foraging, and the like. There’s also The Forager’s Pantry, with its retail line of small-batch pantry pick-me-ups: housemade staghorn sumac vinegar, smoked strawberry jam, conservas of wild-foraged oyster mushrooms or Japanese knotweed.
Gop relishes finding ways to use knotweed—a nearly impossible-to-eradicate invasive plant—on the table, from jams to gin cocktails.
Knotweed—a nearly impossible-to-eradicate invasive plant—spreads, in dense stands, along roadsides and waterways across the U.S. from Acadia National Park to the Pacific Northwest, and Gop relishes finding ways to use this sustainable resource on the table, from jams to gin cocktails, even using its gnarly root rhizomes to carve centerpieces for his tablescapes.
“The idea of working with the invasives is like a purpose for me,” he says. And it’s one of myriad examples of taking his no-waste commitment to extremes, whether that’s making leftover vegetable skins into powdered seasonings, or putting empty cans through a heavy-duty shredder, melting down the scraps in a countertop crucible, and sandcasting the resulting metal into flatware for a future feast.
Each of these details—in the table settings, the ingredient lists, and the plating—plays into an Heirloom Fire diner’s experience the way lines in a script or details on a set give a great film or play its plot, and its twists.
“A recipe is good,” Gop says, “but a story is what makes everything.”
