Richard Langston

Being downtown and being in a hotel gives us the opportunity to meet and serve a wide variety of people from different parts of the country and all over the world. The owner of the hotel says he has a hotel with a restaurant in it. I jokingly tell him that we have a restaurant that happens to be attached to his hotel. Melinda and I both care so much about hospitality, and it all goes back to family.  

“Melinda and I both care so much about hospitality, and it all goes back to family.”

I grew up in a really small town in Louisiana. In the South food is a big part of your family, and even as a kid I was interested in it. There were Sundays where there would be 20-25 people at my grandmother's house for Sunday dinner - fried chicken and peach cobbler – and I would help my mom and my grandmother cook dinner when I could and when they would let me.

For my 26th birthday my wife Melinda actually got me the application to fill out for the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. By that time I had a business degree from LSU and we had made it out to San Francisco. I thought I wanted to be an accountant, but quickly got very disillusioned with the corporate world. So here we are, I have a one-year-old on my arm and decided to quit a lucrative accounting job to go to school five days a week. The first day I came home, Melinda asked how my day was and I said, "Oh my God they let me grill eggplant!” And I knew that I was doing the right thing.

“Oh my God they let me grill eggplant!”

We moved to Boise in '92. I went to work for Amore restaurant and was the chef there for three years. We opened Richard's bakery in Hyde Park in 1996, then shoehorned it into a restaurant. It was 20 seats. Tiny. We opened another place across the street in 1998 and eventually sold those. I had a brief hiatus at Micron as their executive chef, feeding 12,000 people a day — again proving that I didn't work well for other people. We found a space and opened Cafe Vicino, across from the Boise Co-op, in 2007. We owned that place for 10 years before opening Richard’s downtown at The Inn at 500.

“I grew up seeing how to throw a good party, which is what we do every night.”

I grew up seeing how to throw a good party, which is what we do every night. When people enter the restaurant, they immediately sense that we're all about hospitality and that comes from me and Melinda. We want our staff to want our customers to feel welcomed and taken care of and offered an experience – just as we do. It requires a lot of attention to detail. If you have to ask for a utensil in our restaurant, I'm offended. The dining room is beautiful and comforting; not too loud. It's just lively enough that you can have a good time, but at the same time it's quiet enough that you can have a conversation.

In planning a dish or a menu, sometimes it's very spontaneous and off-the-cuff and sometimes I can labor over it for days or weeks. But I want to always come up with a very cohesive dish that has really good elements. I try to get really great ingredients that speak for themselves without trying to dress them up too much. Tangible taste and food, but also those intangibles – atmosphere, feeling, and ambiance – that's the highest compliment you can pay me. 

“– atmosphere, feeling, and ambiance – that's the highest compliment you can pay me.”