BENTONVILLE—Matt McClure is a deliberate man. While sitting at a corner table at The Hive, where he is executive chef, he placed his coffee cup so that it fit with the arrangement of the table. And when he stood up, he moved the salt and pepper grinders to restore the symmetry of the table setting.
His attention to detail has played a large role in 14 years of following his passion for food. In 2000, he left his home state, Arkansas, for the New England Culinary Institute in Essex Junction, Vt., and for a long time, while he worked in kitchens in Boston, he thought he’d never come back.
But come back he did, and now McClure is receiving national recognition—he was named as a semifinalist for the James Beard Award of “Best Chef: South”—as a part of the burgeoning culinary scene Northwest Arkansas.
Since 2011, revenue from Bentonville’s hotel, motel and restaurant tax has increased by 23 percent to more than $1.1 million in 2013, according to financial records published by the Bentonville Advertising and Promotions Commission.
In 2008, Carl Garrett opened Table Mesa—a modern Latin bistro—and “brought something new to the downtown square that hadn’t been there before,” Cromwell said. “It started creating that experience economy that people are looking for when they’re looking for a destination.”The boom coincides with the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in November 2011, but Bentonville’s culinary scene was already in the making before the museum arrived, said Blair Cromwell, vice president of communications at the Bentonville Convention and Visitors Bureau.
From there, more restaurants that offered high-end cuisine and a unique approach to food began to open. In June 2011, Tusk & Trotter opened, followed quickly by Crystal Bridges in Nov. 2011, which has it’s own restaurant, Eleven.
Tusk & Trotter, which offers French cuisine and tips for pairing food and beer, and Eleven, where the food is coordinated to complement the art exhibits, both have chefs who emphasize cooking with local and in-season food.
“It’s really a food movement,” Cromwell said.
The movement has a few different “linchpins,” as Robert Harrington, professor and coordinator of the Food, Human Nutrition and Hospitality department at the University of Arkansas.
First, Crystal Bridges brings visitors from across the globe, and “travelers want to experience what is local and what is unique” in the food, Harrington said. “The second linchpin is that Wal-Mart is headquartered there. All of their suppliers have a presence and a corporate office there, and many of those people are from elsewhere.
“They’re interested in local foods, and coming from bigger cities—New York, San Francisco, Seattle—they’re used to a very strong culinary scene. With that, they’re willing to spend money for higher-end experiences and unique experiences and search those out.”
The 21c Museum Hotel, which houses The Hive, invites visitors to “Stay, Visit, Experience, Eat+Drink, Shop, Gather and Connect” on its site. It opened in February of 2013, and though The Hive is one of the newest Bentonville restaurants, and it has made a splash.
The James Beard Foundation announced its semifinalists for its Restaurant and Chef awards in late February, and after just more than a year in operation, The Hive made the list with McClure. He was one of the 20 nominees for “Best Chef: South” and the only nominee—in all 20 categories—from Arkansas.
“In a lot of ways, we’re kind of late to the party, but when you’re late to the party, you choose how you arrive,” McClure said.
McClure chose to arrive in a way that honors the land and community: by following a farm-to-table culinary style.
He works with local farmers to get in-season produce for The Hive, which boasts McClure’s “refined country cooking.”
“We have food that is interesting and different and yet it’s not,” McClure said. “It’s all recognizable.”
Though McClure was the only Bentonville chef in the running for a James Beard Award, he wasn’t the only chef who received attention from the James Beard Foundation during the last year.
In November, four chefs were invited to perform at the James Beard house in New York: McClure; Rob Nelson, chef at Tusk & Trotter American Brasserie; Case Dighero, director of culinary services at Crystal Bridges; Tammy Varney, chef from the now-closed French restaurant and bakery Meridienne.
The James Beard Foundation has “dinners there almost every night of the week. It’s as big as it gets for chefs,” Cromwell said. “That put us not only on local and regional radar for our culinary scene, but also on national radar.”
After finishing culinary school, McClure cooked at other restaurants that were on the national radar, including No. 9 Park, under Barbara Lynch, who’s won James Beard “Best Chef: Northeast” and Food and Wine Best Chef.
After he was through with his “fiery young 20s and mid-20s,” McClure came back to Arkansas in 2007 to cook at Ashley’s at Capital Hotel in Little Rock.
“Next thing I know, I was like maybe there’s something more to life,” he said of the return to Arkansas.
McClure made the move from the center of the state to Bentonville after having conversations with a partner at The Hive. By August 2012, McClure was appointed as the executive chef; now, he isn’t looking back.
“It’s very exciting to be in my home state to be able to cook at this level, to cook the food I’m proud of and to be able to live in a small town like this,” McClure said. “I’m not naïve to think that I have this dream job, but I don’t know if it gets much better than this right here.”
(Published on Arkansas Money & Politics March 24, 2014)
Kristen Coppola 