From Clef to Chef

Like William Shakespeare, Joe Abuso ’83 knows that music and food have a lot in common. The Bard describes music as the food of love; Abuso believes music and food must have balance, symmetry, and asymmetry to please the senses. Just as extraneous notes can ruin a musical work, too much seasoning can spoil an exquisite dish.

Abuso himself has the right combination to know what he is talking about. He used to play bass with the Houston Symphony before he became a gourmet cook and opened his own catering business, and he sees parallels between his two passions.

“I think there’s a lot of overlap between music and cooking, at least conceptually,” Abuso says.
In preparing food, Abuso has been playing presto for the past decade. His Abuso Catering Company opened 12 years ago, with no staff to speak of. As business picked up, he moved his company to a new location on Stella Link, which has provided a bigger kitchen and room for 12 full-time employees. Abuso Catering now earns more than $2 million in sales annually.

Joe Abuso ’83

His high-end food service caters to the who’s who of Houston businesses, nonprofits, and universities: Baker Botts, Goldman Saches & Company, the Houston Ballet, the Houston Grand Opera, Baylor College of Medicine, and Rice University, to name a few. He caters weddings, parties, receptions of all sizes, and private dinners. The food he concocts is a sybarite’s delight. Featured among the menu items are chardonnay poached jumbo shrimp with cassis mustard sauce over fresh watercress and broiled breast of moullard duck with roasted shallots and chanterelles.

“One of the things that sets us apart from other caterers in town is that we’re the only one with a sommelier on staff,” Abuso says. “That’s me.” Because of his knowledge of wines, Abuso is able to offer “wine dinners” in which he matches different wines with every course.

Before the passion of cooking took hold of Abuso, music was his life. He was born in Long Island, New York, to an Italian family who enjoyed listening to Puccini, Verdi, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. In high school, he learned to play bass and decided that, someday, he would play in a professional orchestra. He pursued his undergraduate degree in music at Florida State University, and while at a summer workshop at the University of Cincinnati, he met Paul Ellison, a Rice University double bass professor, who encouraged Abuso to study at Rice.
As a graduate student at the Shepherd School of Music, Abuso lived like a monk, enclosed in a cell-like practice room for seven hours a day with the mission of perfecting his musical skills. “Joe was a wonderful and challenging student,” recalls Paul Ellison, the L.S. Autrey Professor of Double Bass and chair of the string department at the Shepherd School. “A diligent, curious, and uncompromising musician, he never settled on his choices without examining all the options.”

When Abuso graduated in 1983, he landed a job with the New Mexico Chamber Orchestra in Santa Fe, and he later played with the North Carolina Symphony. Then, “like an act of God,” Abuso says, he got his big break: the Houston Symphony hired him. After three years, though, he discovered that he was ready to pursue other interests. “All my life, I just wanted to get into an orchestra, and then I just didn’t want to do it anymore. It got real repetitive,” he explains. “I couldn’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life.”

Instead, Abuso envisioned himself working with food. He took the discipline he had acquired as a musician and applied it to cooking. A friend of his, Robert Del Grande, who is the owner of the upscale Houston restaurant Café Annie, allowed Abuso to work in the kitchen at very low pay. “I figured I would do it for a year,” Abuso explains, “and if I liked it, I would pursue it as a profession.”

He liked it so much that, after his stint at Café Annie, Abuso attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), which is housed in a Jesuit monastery on the Hudson River just north of New York City. As part of his culinary requirements, Abuso served an internship at one of the best restaurants in the Southwest, the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas. Abuso returned to the CIA, and in addition to taking cooking classes, he also studied to be a certified sommelier.

When he graduated in 1993, Abuso got his first job as head chef at the Elk Canyon Ranch in Montana. He only stayed a year there. “I grew up in New York, and Montana didn’t have enough people,” he says. “It was too pretty out there.” So he and his wife, Leslie, packed their bags and went on a three-month trip across the country, starting in Napa Valley, California, and ending in Savannah, Georgia, as they looked for a place to open a restaurant.

After doing some research, they decided to open a catering business in Houston. “Talk about no money,” Abuso says. “We couldn’t get a loan to save our lives. We were still in debt from the CIA and everything else.”
Abuso made arrangements to share a kitchen with a downtown restaurant, and he used his truck as the only delivery vehicle. “I did all the selling. I did all the cooking. I did all the cleaning,” he says. “Some days, I was pushing a buggy around Fiesta, buying food, and then driving back to the restaurant, where I cooked.”
All his hard work has paid off. He is so busy that he hasn’t been able to slow down, not even to play his double bass. “When I start working less, if that ever happens,” he says, “I would like to start playing again.”

For now, though, Abuso will have to be content with making music through his cooking.

—David D. Medina