ALEXANDER CRAMER
Eric Rupert (left) and his son Kellen are moving their sweet new venture into the former Gail Ambrosius store on Atwood Avenue.
Eric Rupert isn’t usually the type of chef who believes in keeping secrets. In his nearly four-decade career working in Madison restaurants, he’s given away “millions of recipes,” he says. But don’t ask him how he makes NutKrack.
Rupert, the former executive chef at Epic Systems, has been making the salty-sweet roasted pecan confection for about 10 years, giving it away as holiday gifts for friends and family. Along the way, he experimented with the recipe and discovered a new technique that yielded a shockingly delicious result. “I accidentally did something, and it turned out super well,” Rupert says. “All I will say is that the process is counter-intuitive.” The “happy accident” was so tasty that Rupert ate an entire pound of nuts in one sitting. “That doesn’t happen to me,” he says. “That told me right away they were good.”
Later this month, Rupert plans to open a NutKrack retail and production facility at 2086 Atwood Ave. in the former Gail Ambrosius Chocolatier space. His son, Kellen Rupert, 23, is a partner in the business. An opening date and retail hours have yet to be determined. Starting out, they will sell the original NutKrack — and nothing else.
“People ask me, ‘You’re just going to have NutKrack?’” Rupert says. “And I’m like, ‘Have you tried it?’ It’s that good.”
Rupert recently stepped down as executive chef at Epic and took a different role in the company’s culinary department, which feeds upwards of 6,000 people per day at the Verona campus. The move will allow him to devote time to NutKrack while continuing to work with what he says is one of the best food service operations in Madison.
“We have multiple venues, we make everything from scratch and change the menu every day,” he says. “It is extraordinarily good food on a daily basis.”
Rupert has been working in kitchens since he was 13 or 14 (“I don’t think it was particularly legal,” he admits). He started out washing dishes and making hamburger patties at Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry and later washed dishes at the Ovens of Brittany on Monroe Street, where he learned how to bake and worked as a pastry chef. But it wasn’t until he saw the 1987 movie Babette’s Feast that he realized he wanted to cook for a living.
“I am not going to claim to know what an epiphany is, but I watched that movie and everything became clear,” he says. “If I [cook], things will work out. This is my path.”
At that time, Rupert was working as a baker at the Madison Club. He remembers approaching the head chef and telling him, “I have to cook.” He took an entry level position (and promptly took off the tip of his finger) and worked his way through the kitchen stations. After about a year he applied to L’Etoile (thinking he would never get the job). The restaurant hired him as a line cook; within five months he was named co-chef alongside Odessa Piper.
“Every day was just revelatory — the ingredients, the philosophy, the approach to food,” he says. “I didn’t ever want to go home.”
After two years at L’Etoile, Rupert opened his own restaurant, Kafe Kohoutek, in the historic train depot on West Washington Avenue. He ran the business for about a year before realizing that “it wasn’t [his] path.” The next few years took him to Atlas Pasta on Monroe Street, and the Opera House on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard before returning to L’Etoile in 2001.
Around that time, Sub-Zero/Wolf was developing a line of high-end residential cooking appliances, and the Madison-based company asked Rupert to launch a culinary training and cooking demonstration series. He ran the program until the economy tanked in 2009 and “people stopped buying high-end residential appliances.”
Suddenly without a job, Rupert “blindly” applied to Epic. “I didn’t know what Epic was doing food-wise, I just heard they fed people,” he recalls. Rupert became the company’s 29th culinary employee and after six months was promoted to executive chef. Today, the culinary team has more than 200 people.
Rupert’s approach as a chef is driven by more than just a desire to make good food — it’s about serving others. He sees his new NutKrack venture as an extension of this philosophy.
“That’s one of the things I’m looking forward to being a part of [the Atwood] community, being able to share our sense of great service,” he says. “I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way.”
