Justin Petruce has always liked mixing things together, long before he became a chef and did it for a living.
He’d say to himself: “I wonder what would happen if I did this.”
And it wasn’t always about cooking.
One of those experiments turned salt from white to purple, thanks to a mixture of peroxide and some other ingredients he doesn’t remember.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’” said Petruce, who recently was hired as executive chef at Sbraga & Co. in Brooklyn.
Petruce, 35, started cooking as a kid, but it took a while before he realized he wanted to create dishes for a living.
In fact, his father saw that possibility before Petruce did. He left a Johnson & Wales University brochure on his oldest son’s bed when he was in high school.
Petruce was 15 or 16 — a year or so before he got his first job cooking — and hadn’t figured out a career path.
“I just looked at it (the brochure) and I was like, ‘That looks stupid,’” he said, with a laugh.
Petruce went to college for a while, bouncing around majors. There was drawing, then general education because he didn’t know what he wanted to do and then he thought about music production.
A thread that was consistent during Petruce’s college years was working as a cook. Ultimately, he dropped out of school because he was working so many hours.
Being a chef as a career finally made sense when he was manager of an Italian restaurant in North Carolina.
Turns out the Johnson & Wales University brochure wasn’t stupid after all. He went to the culinary school at the university’s Charlotte campus.
His internship at Moto in Chicago proved invaluable, a place where he learned a lot about the value of critical thinking.
“You don’t just do something because someone tells you,” he said. “You have to understand why it’s happening so if a mistake is made, you can figure out why it happens.”
Along the way, he found some mistakes can turn out to be a positive. Times where he could say, “I just messed that up but it’s kind of awesome.”
Like when he mistakenly discovered adding corn starch later in the process of making a butter creme custard dessert makes it burn. But burning it makes it taste like a toasted marshmallow-flavored custard.
Petruce began his job at Sbraga & Co. the first week of December. He knew owner Kevin Sbraga from Philadelphia, where they both operated restaurants.
Petruce and his brother, Jonathan, opened Petruce et al. in March 2014. The experience taught him how difficult it is to open and operate a restaurant.
It wasn’t easy leaving the business he shared with his brother, who is 14 months younger. “We’re almost Irish twins,” Petruce said.
But after his girlfriend gave birth to their son, Atlas, Petruce began looking for a job further South. Her parents live in New Smyrna, his are in North Carolina.
“I decided to leave the partnership and start my family near family,” Petruce said. (His brother continues to run the restaurant.)
His family, including Bart, their Boston terrier mix, moved to Murray Hill.
Petruce said Sbraga wants to revamp the menu, concentrating more on smaller dishes instead of larger ones and adding a little more focus on the raw bar.
He works five or six long days a week, starting at 9:30 a.m. and trying to leave 12 hours later, though there’s usually more to do.
Those hours are a mixture of cooking, testing new dishes and teaching the restaurant’s 18 cooks, 10 of whom work on any given day.
“I’m not just a guy that makes food,” he said. “I consider this position as a teacher as much as anything.”
Petruce is admittedly a little shy in public, but when he’s in the kitchen, somebody else takes over. “I say I black out when I get to work,” he said.
His first memory of cooking dates back to when he was 4, standing on a bench next to his great-great-grandmother’s stove in northeast Pennsylvania. She was from Salerno, Italy, and didn’t speak English, but she was an expert in the kitchen.
She never used a cutting board, instead cutting everything in her hands with a little paring knife, never cutting herself.
Petruce has learned that art over the years. But he remembers not being so lucky when he taught a summer cooking camp for 9- to 11-year-old kids in the wealthy Philadelphia suburbs. Movie director Spike Lee’s son was one of his students.
“They gave them knives and that worried me a little bit,” he said.
But Petruce was the only one who cut himself, slicing the back of his thumb while showing them how to put their knives on a sharpening steel. It didn’t hurt much, but there was a lot of blood.
“They were all horrified,” he said.
Petruce doesn’t cut himself much anymore, but he still enjoys mixing things together.
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