Rising Star Chef Matthew Delisle of L'Espalier - Biography

Although the New Hampshire countryside is what gave young Matthew Delisle an early passion for local ingredients, he doesn’t look back on it for inspiration. Instead, the New England native lets those memories motivate him as he moves forward, creating new experiences with fresh material.

And forward momentum seems to come naturally to Delisle. By the time he graduated Harvard, he was already a culinary veteran, working in and running hotel restaurants all over the country. From the Hilton in Mystic, Connecticut, to the Four Seasons in Boston, to the Mandarin Oriental in San Francisco, Delisle had thoroughly cut his teeth. In 2004, he spent three months immersed in the culinary culture of Europe. Returning to Boston and graduating in 2010, Delisle was ready to create a culinary culture of his own.

He went on to join Frank McClelland’s acclaimed team at L’Espalier as a sous. Now chef de cuisine, Delisle strides in step with the restaurant’s emphasis on farm-fresh food (as in from McClelland’s own Apple Street Farm), not to mention seafood sourced, with Delisle’s help, from an increasing number of local Boston suppliers. And while the eclectic Delisle also draws much inspiration from books, ingredients, film, and philosophy, at L’Espalier, he’s creatively, newly reconnected to the great outdoors that first inspired him.