Chad Clift - Three Tips to Top Your All-Time Bowling Score

​Chad Clift is the head chef, owner, and founder of Swanky’s in Mossy Rock, Washington. As someone in the food business, his job is very stressful most of the time. Clift takes his stress out on the bowling pins at the local bowling alley. Over time, Clift has become famous to the locals at the alley and its proprietorship. Clift has risen from a newbie bowler to one of the best in the local amateur bowling leagues in Mossy Rock. Here are his three top tips to beating your bowling score:

• Find your mark on the lane and concentrate on it. You need to put your bowling ball in the “pocket,” the place in the lane just behind the first pin and in front of the second pin. Chad Clift is right-handed, so he aims for the arrow on the lane just to the right of the center arrow. Almost all balls hook at least a little bit, whether you’re putting spin on the ball or not. If you try to put the ball right down the middle, you’ll find yourself facing split after split. 

• Tweak your approach so that your opposite foot lands in front of the lane. A good way to test a bowler’s skill is to watch her follow-through. For years, Chad Clift came off balance during his follow-through, and it cost him.

• Speed makes it easier to pick up stragglers. To pick off those pins that refuse to go down, it’s usually easier to toss the ball with some pace. Think about the velocity of the ball as it’s leaving your hand and try to throw harder.

Chad Clift lives and works at Swanky’s in Mossy Rock.

Chad Clift - On Creativity in the Kitchen

Most chefs will tell you that creativity in the kitchen is how they stay in business. Chad Clift certainly uses his creativity, developed over years of preparing his own Japanese dishes as a child with his father and as the head chef and founder of Futoji Aji, a restaurant in Seattle. From a business standpoint, the way you have to keep customers coming to your doors to eat is to freshen up the menu and offer them new tastes and textures often. Trying new ways of pushing the boundaries of a particular cuisine can be a great way to draw more guests and to keep a chef’s artwork flowing. Art is nothing without creativity and experimentation. Food preparation is no different.

Chad Clift

 However, there is a fine line between using one’s creativity in the kitchen to create new and exciting dishes within a traditional cuisine, as Chad Clift knows. Pushing too hard on what traditional Japanese food is, for example, won’t always create the most edible dishes. Customers will pay to try new things, but not if they’re inedible. Clift, therefore has to carefully choose which experiments are worth pursuing and which simply won’t work. Combining random ingredients in a bowl isn’t a good way to experiment with people’s taste buds.

Where does this quandary leave chefs like Chad Clift? They have businesses to run and they have to give their clienteles what they want, yet they also have to find new ways to refresh the menu and use their true skills to create bolder, better tastes. One way chefs balance these dueling needs is by employing a team of specialized, skilled assistants and associate chefs at their restaurants to help them make decisions and test out their ideas before they reach customers’ plates. More than simply having brains and sets of taste buds analyzing the same experimental dishes, this makes the entire process of building a menu and creating new dishes a team activity, employing the specific skills of several professionals all working on the same problem. The head chef isn’t alone in his or her work and critical decision-making processes.

Chad Clift and his team work hard at Futoji Aji to create the best, boldest Japanese dishes for their customers in Seattle’s International District, where many Asian food options abound. This fierce competition makes it necessary to constantly evolve the menu and bring in new tastes and ideas to the traditional Japanese cuisine that Clift learned from his father growing up in Seattle. Clift learned to challenge the standards of Japanese cooking at culinary school and during his time working as an apprentice in a San Francisco Thai restaurant. Clift hopes that his process will continue to bring in more diners and express his creativity.

Chad Clift - Three Things to Know before you Skydive for the First Time

One of the many passions of Chad Clift includes skydiving, a pastime that he has grown fond of in recent years. He has been running the community upscale restaurant Swanky’s in Mossy Rock, Washington for over 15 years, and skydiving has a relaxing effect on him. Still, there were many facts that he wished he had learned before he took his first jump off of a plane. Here are his top three facts he wished he knew:

• Yes, your skydiving partner is certified and experienced. To be a certified skydiving partner, you have to have jumped hundreds of times and you have to pass many tests and exams to do it professionally. They always prepare you in the event of any emergency.
• Emergencies happen in the air. Chad Clift was worried about every possible thing that could go wrong skydiving before he took his first jump from a plane, don’t worry, the skydiving instructors always tell you what to do in rare cases involving instructors passing out or somehow incapacitating themselves in the air. You’ll be fully prepared to land safely even in the extremely rare event of an emergency.
• The scariest part of skydiving isn’t jumping from a plane. Chad Clifton knows that the scariest part of skydiving is actually riding up to jumping altitude in a small plane that seems sketchy but is actually safe. Jumping out of the tiny aircraft might actually be relieving in a way.

Chad Clift has jumped out of many small planes that don’t seem safe, and he loves it. He recommends skydiving to anyone who wants an intense adrenaline rush.
​

Chad Clift - How to Break into the Food Industry

Chad Clift took an unusual route to break into the food industry. He moved to New York City and attended Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts after he graduated from high school—which isn’t unusual, but then he did something extraordinary: he moved back home to found the community five-star restaurant Swanky’s in Mossy Rock, Washington. Here’s a more conventional track that you can use to break into the food industry:

• Get an apprenticeship. Chad Clift went to school to learn from top-notch chefs in a classroom and mock kitchen setting. He worked briefly as an apprentice to a top chef in New York before he returned home to Washington. Most chefs start their career apprenticing for more experienced chefs because the time with an expert who trains them gives them an excellent resource for references in the future and they can tell you about job openings themselves.
• Learn a wide range of skills. Retail workers call this being cross-trained. If you know how to make and do a wide range of things, you’ll find more opportunities in different areas of the food industry.
• Communicate and network. Working as a chef, as Chad Clift knows, is just like any other job. Opportunities will be there for those who have friends in the industry. Clift got much of his initial funding for his project in his hometown from connections he made in chef school.

Chad Clift took his culinary industry skills and used them to open a restaurant that would help everyone in the community he grew up in.
​

Chad Clift - Founder and Owner of Swanky’s

Chad Clift earned a Culinary Arts degree from one of the top chef schools in the United States. In 2000, Clift graduated from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in New York City. Clift, rather than remain in New York and work in one of the main global nodes of the food industry, moved back home to his small town of Mossy Rock on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. He wanted to serve his friends and family with the best food he could create rather than a city of strangers across the country. Clift wanted to found a new kind of restaurant, one that was known in the community as a place where people could meet and forge relationships while enjoying some of the best food in the area.

Chad Clift moved back home because he wanted to give the people he loved access to the best food he could create. Clift found himself cut off from everything he knew in New York City. He was in the Mecca of culinary culture in the United States and could have found what he thought was his dream job in one of the many upscale restaurants in the city and begun his career. Instead, Chad Clift returned home to found Swanky’s, an upscale restaurant that everyone in his community can find something they want to eat at.

Chad Clift built his business to be a community service, not an exclusionary eatery. He crafted the menu to give everyone an option for good food.
​

Chad Clift and His Passion for Sushi

One of Chef Chad Clift favorite foods to prepare and eat is sushi. This Japanese seafood staple is one of the many offerings at his new Seattle Restaurant. Not all seafood uses raw fish, and some variations are completely vegetarian. Sushi is the type of cuisine that is open to interpretation, or the whim of the Chef who is creating it.

 

Sushi has one common characteristic that crosses all of its many forms, and that is the use of rice. Sushi rice, also known as sticky rice, is prepared in a certain way to create a product that holds together. The proper creation of sushi rice is labor intensive. After the brown or white rice is steamed, rice wine vinegar is added and the rice is stirred with a paddle to cool it while creating a unique texture.

Sushi may be served in many different ways. The most common method used in many restaurants around the world is Maizushi, or the sushi roll. In this method, sticky rice and a combination of fish and/or vegetables are rolled in nori and sliced into circles. In Japan, the birthplace of sushi, it is actually more common to eat sushi as Chirashizushi. Through this preparation, a bed of sushi rice is spread across the bottom of a bowl and then layers of thin sliced raw fish are fanned on the top. Chad Clift loves all forms of sushi from the more conventional to the creative Western variations that have become popular.
​

Chad Clift Makes Great Pho

In the city of Seattle, Pho is one of the most popular dishes served in many restaurants. Chef Chad Clift is serious about his Pho, and makes a superb version of this Vietnamese noodle soup. Pho, pronounced “fuh”, is named after the rice noodles that are included in every variation of the dish. Traditionally, Pho is a combination of broth, noodles, herbs, and meat. In the Asian country of Vietnam, Pho is considered to be a street food, sold by vendor off of their traveling carts. In the United States, Pho has become a trendy alternative to the typical Asian takeout option.
                                  

While Western countries have only recently caught on to the Pho craze, in Vietnam, it is a staple meal. Southern Vietnamese residents eat Pho for lunch or even breakfast. In Northern Vietnam, Pho is enjoyed any time of day of night. After the conclusion of the Vietnam War, many refugees from the country were displaced, and forced to emigrate to other lands. As these Vietnamese peoples moved out of their home land, they took their cooking methods with them. This lead to the introduction of dishes like Pho to nearly each continent of the globe.

The Pho that Chad Clift makes is one to remember. He starts with a rich and hearty beef broth that is seasoned with the traditional spices of ginger, clove, and star anise. While he sometimes makes Pho with chicken as the main source of protein, he prefers to use a good cut of beef, such as brisket.