Thought for Food
Dont'e Shaw is a guy with ideas. Lots of them.
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Taste for Adventure
When Jesse Shoemaker was just 7 years old, his mother Pat put him in the kitchen to cook dinner once a week.
“There were some basic guidelines so I wasn’t making macaroni and cheese and hot dogs every week,” he says. His family stayed out of the kitchen while he cooked. He progressed from peanut butter and jelly to more advanced dishes. “He did it with joy and he had fun,” Pat says.
Three decades later, he’s cooking for a living and making adventurous eaters happy with his eclectic creations at Goshen Brewing Co., whether it’s a blackened tofu sandwich or Brussels sprouts in a fish sauce vinaigrette.
Shoemaker never went to culinary school. He’s become a chef by reading a lot of cookbooks, listening to mentors, and following a vision to use local ingredients whenever possible to craft food that makes him and others happy.
He may not have become a chef without a set of food sensitivities in high school and college. It was easier to cook for himself than to try to find food that didn’t make him miserable. He worked at the Elkhart Public Library and explored its many cookbooks to get ideas from the Mediterranean and Thailand.
While studying at Goshen College, Jesse worked for Rachel’s Bread, a business then owned and operated by Rachel Shenk in the Goshen Farmers Market building. He didn’t cook or bake much there, but he learned how a food business should and could operate.
In 2011 he started working at Venturi, the lauded Neapolitan pizza restaurant in Goshen, and at neighboring Constant Spring, a bar and restaurant. He worked 30 hours a week at both places for a time before taking a larger role at the Spring and creating Wednesday specials. The response from customers to those forays into international food—including pad Thai, Korean pork belly and Ethiopian stews—was encouraging and taught him “this is something I like doing and I feel I could be good at,” he says.
Jesse Sensenig, who was laying the groundwork for Goshen Brewing Co., tapped Shoemaker as chef and Justin Ramer, who also worked at Venturi, as kitchen manager—to build the menu and run the new kitchen. In the months leading up to the opening, Shoemaker prepared Monday night meals for friends, trying recipes. Those were the basis for the first menu at Goshen Brewing Co., which opened in June 2015.
The team is committed to using local and organic food whenever possible. The pork comes from Jake’s Country Meats. The tomatoes come from Clay Bottom Farm and Sustainable Greens. Shoemaker learned the value of knowing the grower from his time at Rachel’s Bread. “A lot of times, the local stuff is fresher, the quality is better, especially for produce,” he says. “Another big part is just supporting the people in the community and supporting the local farmers. Those people are the people who come in and spend money here.”
Sensenig, Shoemaker and the others operating Goshen Brewing also have a commitment to treating people well. “I never went to culinary school. I only know about professional kitchens from what you see on TV or what you read about,” Shoemaker says. “Those seem like these pressure-cooker environments where everyone is stressed, angry. They seem like a pretty rough environment.” He saw Rachel Shenk take care of employees and customers amid kitchen stress, and he strives to create a workplace that is flexible and respectful.
The food is popular, particularly the pad Thai, available only on Tuesdays. The restaurant has gone from serving dozens of orders every week to hundreds, and the record for a Tuesday is more than 500.
The menu is eclectic and changes seasonally. Shoemaker takes what he’s learned from reading David Chang and Aaron Franklin and from working for Shenk and Venturi to create dishes that are full of flavor and adventure. Those often, but not always, take the form of smoked meats and Thai dishes, two things he loves. (He also fell in love with a woman who came to work at the brewery, Laura Hochstetler, and married her in May 2022.)
Relationships and passion are at the heart of how he prepares food. He loves buying ingredients from producers who become friends and preparing dishes with the team of 15 who work in the kitchen to delight customers. “It just makes me happy,” he says. “I like seeing when people are enjoying the food.”
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