Juniper's Daniel Poss on Building Hardcore Respect in the Restaurant Kitchen

The St. Louis chef wants to mentor tough and capable cooks without the toxic abuse he endured coming up.

Daniel Poss grew up around Nashville, where he began cooking in restaurant kitchens after touring as a drummer with an indie hardcore band. Poss then relocated to his wife’s hometown of St. Louis, eventually joining the staff of Juniper restaurant in June 2021. He took over as executive chef in May 2022.

What was it like growing up in Nashville?

I lived in a little town called White House, about 25-30 minutes north of there. I was always playing music my whole life. Everybody is a musician in Nashville.

As a kid, I would go down for the summers to my grandparents’ in Ohatchee, Alabama. My grandfather and my grandmother, they grew everything. They didn’t raise chickens—they would go to the grocery for flour and eggs—but everything else on the farm sustained their living. I grew up picking corn, shelling beans, pulling turnips out of the ground, preserving, canning, drying walnuts, drying and hanging apples up. Everything you could possibly think of in Southern preservation methods.

This was a family farm?

Yeah. My grandfather had maybe a hundred acres. He raised hogs when he was younger. But raising hogs is hard. They’re pretty aggressive. I don’t think his body was up for that as he got older. But I didn’t appreciate any of this at the time, so I went off to be a musician.

What do you play?

My main instrument is drums. I always wanted to do the cool stuff, but I’m very classically trained. I studied with Phil Collins’ drummer, Chester Thompson. I was going to Middle Tennessee State University on a music scholarship. But I decided to drop out, go on the road, and try to be a rock star.

I did that for three or four years solid. A hundred or two hundred days a year. Van and trailer, van and trailer. I got lucky one time, and I was on a bus. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the hardcore indie circuit back in the early 2000s—our band was called the Boomerang Gang. We toured with artists like As Cities Burn, Underoath, Jonezetta. A lot of the bands with Tooth and Nail Records. We were in negotiation for a deal ourselves, and then a lot of drama happened, and blah blah blah, we broke up.

But I’ve been on the road with country artists too. I’ve played everything—touring musician, studio musician, all of it.

Did the breakup of the band make you decide to go into food?

Yeah. Back then if you wanted to learn about cooking, the Internet was there, but there was no Instagram or whatever. If you wanted to see what the fuck somebody was doing with food, you had to buy their books, or you watched the Food Network. Watching those shows sparked something in me. I decided to go to cooking school, but I ended up wishing I had never done that and instead just started working. I could have been introduced to my mentor earlier in life and followed him around Nashville, which I ended up doing anyways.

Who was your mentor?

His name is Ashley Quick. Ashley is hands down one of the most talented people that I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the people that sparked the passion in me—or really the discipline. You have to have passion, but it’s all about discipline.

Because of Ashley, I really dove into it. Not just cooking in general, but really exploring Southern cuisine. Ashley had worked at the Fat Duck, and he was just on a whole other level, more so than anyone I’d ever seen before..

How did you meet him?

So another guy that I also credit with getting me into cooking also worked at the Fat Duck. His name is Scott Witherow. He owns a company in Nashville called Olive & Sinclair Chocolate. He was one of my first teachers in school, and we ended up becoming buddies. When it came to internship time, he was like, “You need to meet my boy Ashley.”

Back then, like 2008 or 2009, no one else in Nashville was doing much of anything good. It was really behind the times. Ashley was at a place called Andrew Chadwick’s, which is now Husk restaurant. I interned and staged over there for almost a year. It was way ahead of everything else in Nashville at the time.

Ashley would go through a kilo of truffles in a season. All the ingredients I was introduced to there were amazing. And just watching Ashley do his thing! Then Andrew Chadwick’s closed, and I followed Ashley to my first paid line cook job at a place called Flyte. I still didn’t know shit. I was literally thrown to the wolves, a real sink or swim thing. But I thrived, man. I got off on it. I fucking hated it and I fucking loved it at the same time.

At my station alone, at one point of the menu, there were like 120 pieces of mise en place that I was responsible for. It was the “come in at nine in the morning, but don’t clock in till two in the afternoon” kind of shit.

“That’s the era I grew up in, and learned in. I’m thankful for every goddamn bit of it, because it’s put me a cut above everybody else. But when I mentor others, I’m all about teaching and sharing, because I wasn’t fortunate enough to do it another way.”

That’s the era I grew up in, and learned in. I’m thankful for every goddamn bit of it, because it’s put me a cut above everybody else. But when I mentor others, I’m all about teaching and sharing, because I wasn’t fortunate enough to do it another way. In my personal circumstances, I’m a recovering addict. I’ve been sober for almost four years. All that got in my way. Yes, I got to go work in Italy for a while, but I didn’t get to go work at the Fat Duck. I didn’t get to work at the French Laundry or Eleven Madison. And so I put myself around people who had those experiences.

Another one of those people is Sean Brock. I’m sure some people look at me and say, “Oh, he just wants to be like Sean Brock.” Man, I don’t want to be like Sean Brock. He does his thing and that’s cool. And I’m very thankful for his influence and the short stint I did at Husk. When Sean opened the Nashville Husk, he was also opening two other locations. I was drawn to his cooking, but I met that dude exactly one time.

It sounds like you’re saying Ashley Quick influenced and inspired you more as a cook, while Sean Brock influenced and inspired your interests in food.

Sean’s story is very, very inspiring because we both suffer from addiction. To watch him flourish and do what he’s doing—it gave me hope to get sober because I wasn’t sober yet back then. To watch him do the best food that he’s ever done in his life, and as a sober man and a father of two, is so advanced, so huge. I have two kids myself and another on the way right now.

You moved from Nashville to St. Louis because your wife was working there?

Yeah, my wife is from here. We met in Nashville. She was out on a birthday trip, and we long-distanced for a year and a half. I met her and never, never stopped leaving her alone. I moved up here and opened Grace Meat + Three with Rick Lewis. Did that for almost five years. It’s a beast of a restaurant, and my soul was getting sucked out, to be honest.

What do you mean?

When I say it was a beast, it’s just fried chicken and sides, fried chicken and sides. And with that you’re doing $10,000 days. It’s just volume volume volume. It’s a great product. But you’re cooking for the masses, and some of your soul tends to go out of it when you’re cooking for that many people.

The reason I moved over to Juniper was I needed a place that reminded me of the South and working at Husk. I had a buddy who hooked me up with the Juniper chef Matt Daughaday. Him and I, we’re like two peas in a pod. The owner, John Perkins, didn’t even know me. He met me one time, and then he flew me and Matt down to the Charleston for an R&D trip. And man, I haven’t stopped since.

I absolutely love what I do, and my staff—they’re absolutely the best. They all followed me from Grace. I have to take care of myself in my mental state first, but I’m also always concerned and worried about others around me. I’m always pouring it in to these people that show up and bust their asses every day. I don’t need a fear-based kitchen. If somebody’s struggling with something, we’re going to have coffee whether you like it or not, and we’re going to talk through this.

“I don’t need a fear-based kitchen. If somebody’s struggling with something, we’re going to have coffee whether you like it or not, and we’re going to talk through this.”

So you came up in the stereotypical hardcore borderline abusive restaurant kitchen culture?

It was “Shut the fuck up, head down, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.” Even at Andrew Chadwick’s when I was just an intern, I had to shine my shoes every day. You could eat off the fucking floor because I polished it till it was pristine. It was a very, very different culture. It was fast paced. It was hard. I don’t put any of that on my staff now, but at the time I fucking got off to it.

Given that you came up in that kind of culture, how do you impart those skills, that toughness, without the toxic abuse?

That’s a great question actually. All of that stuff is ingrained in me, so I’m trying to find balance. My expectations of what I want out of everyone are extremely high, but at the same time, they’re not crazy expectations. I’m trying to figure out how to mentor people in this field without putting them through what I was put through.

My executive sous, Izzy Morse, is a 24-year-old badass. She’s rare. She’s so fucking rare. And it’s crazy because she’s like the hardass mom in the kitchen, and I’m like the gentle dad. She’s just like, go, go, go, go, go! And she takes on so much stress. Even the other cooks, when they get stressed and start saying, “Oh, chef, we don’t have this, or we’re low on that,” my response is just, “Bro, chill out. It’s all good.” I’m not going to fucking light you up. I’ll make an adjustment. If I have to go to the store, I’ll go to the store.

Sure, we have some hard teaching moments. If I have a problem with something, I’m not going to motherfuck my cook. I’m going to motherfuck my sous chefs—in a nice, respectful way. I’ve created this aura where they can handle me being bad, but when I’m disappointed?

It’s worse, right?

Oh, it’s 100% worse! I don’t want to lead a kitchen like a tyrant. It’s about putting people in places where they’re strongest, and then slowly focusing on weaknesses. We all are striving to get better every day. But instead of trying to get 100% better every day, make yourself 1% better every day. You slow down to go faster. I tell that to my front of house—”You guys need to slow the fuck down and take your time.” Because if you’re going too fast, and unsure of something, you’re going to make even more costly mistakes than going too slow.