Jon Keeley has been a driving force at Michelin-starred restaurants, and he left them behind for a quieter life.
Now, as he prepares to turn 40, the executive chef of The Art Hotel and its Fire Restaurant & Lounge has a new, albeit no less ambitious, goal: turning the eatery at one of Denver’s top-rated hotels from a special-occasion destination into a neighborhood hangout.
If he is to succeed at doing it, Keeley will draw upon the lessons he’s learned in a two-plus-decade career, from knowing his customers by name to diving into local ingredients. And, now a father to a toddler, he wants to do it in a way that allows him not just to please his customers but helps him to develop the talent of teammates with similar passions — the same kind of chefs that he, too, once was.
“Up to three or four years ago, it was all about the way I felt when I got to make people smile. I love the reaction and the response of our guests. I still want to have that emotional attachment,” he said, smiling as he paused to explain his love for what he does. “But the way you do that too is working with local vendors and residents. And by mentorship … If I can make you feel at home when you’re not at home, I’m really passionate about that.”
The way Keeley’s career began admittedly didn’t point to his current depth and forward-thinking approach to cooking.After graduating from high school in the Boston area in 2000, he and three friends got in a car and drove to Florida. They decided that they’d find jobs wherever they ran out of gas.
The unplanned destination that launched Keeley was Kissimmee, the home of Walt Disney resorts. There, he began cooking for Portobello Yacht Club, a 320-seat, Italian-themed property. He impressed his superiors enough that the company paid for him to attend culinary school, first in Orlando and then in Dover, New Hampshire.
“[Culinary School] wasn’t at the top of my list of things I could get done” when graduating from high school, Keeley admitted. “In hindsight, I’m glad I did it.”
That education took him the Four Seasons Hotel Boston, where he spent close to five years working everywhere from the hotel’s banquet department to its in-house restaurant, Aujourd’Hui, then considered the finest restaurant in Boston by many. He addressed fellow kitchen workers with “Yes, chef” and “No, chef” and learned a great deal of professionalism. He also discovered that cooking could be formal, yet also very fun, in a supportive atmosphere.
From there, Keeley moved to a farm-to-table restaurant, Toro Boston, where he learned how to prepare dishes in newly bold ways and to use unique ingredients just because he could. He then became chef de cuisine at Bonsoiree, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago that served nine- to 15-course tasting menus. On Sundays, those menus were put together based solely on what the chefs found at the farmers market that morning.
Keeley was a chef on an upward trajectory, working with several prominent Chicago eatery owners to open new places. At Gemini Bistro, where he served as executive chef for the first time, he blended an elevated dining experience with the ethos of a neighborhood eatery, getting to know the guests and perfecting his definition of hospitality — a congenial atmosphere in which people enjoy great food.
But then his career diverged from the typical path of highly rated chefs. Feeling the need to clear his head, to get sober and to look hard at the wellness he needed to add to his life, he took a job leading the culinary program at Sun Valley Golf Resort in Wisconsin, located more than an hour from the nearest metropolitan area.
“I got really in touch with myself up there, with who I am as a person and who I am as a chef,” he said.
Keeley married his girlfriend and they had a son, Donovan, who is now 19 months old. He also took on a new level of creative control at Sun Valley,where people would fly in on private jets to play $300 rounds — and expected to enjoy their food while there.
Starting out with just a bar, Keeley expanded the food and beverage offerings to include a restaurant and a food truck that served tacos — specifically, tacos made of smoked pork shoulder that had been slow-roasted for 14 hours and topped with cotija cheese and crema. He had a 3-acre garden where he procured all the club’s produce, and he fell in love with the “slower pace of life.”
But, after his son came along, Keeley and his wife, Katie, decided they wanted to raise him in a more populated and maybe slightly faster-paced area, and in August 2021 he found The Art Hotel, a facility that has placed as high as No. 18 in the world in some magazine rankings. He always wanted to lead a food program at a boutique hotel — he’s attracted to both the intimacy of such a space and the larger audience that a hotel brings in — and he began trying to reposition a restaurant from one known largely for its happy hour and fourth-floor patio overlooking Broadway to one known for its culinary chops.
To understand what Keeley means when he describes the menu at Fire Restaurant & Lounge as one of “simplicity with elegance,” one needs look no further than its grilled Caesar salad, which resembles the classic dish in ingredients but not in form or in taste. Shaped like an ice cream cone, the romaine lettuce is topped not by bulky croutons but by panko breadcrumbs fried in salted butter to give them crispness with a brown-butter nuttiness. Keeley adds to that finely ground Grana Padano cheese, an herb trio and sugar-cured egg yolks that are dehydrated and then grated on top.
To see the influence of Toro Boston on his love of unusual ingredients, check out Fire’s grilled wings. He brines them in salt, sugar, spices and water for 24 hours, mixes them with a Togorashi Asian spice and places them into a tray for 90 minutes, producing a fall-off-the-bones feel that is finished with a flash-frying to soak in the tenderness.
He continues to take chefs down to the City Park Farmers Market with no plan, where they will take notes on the offerings, go back to the booth the restaurant rents there and make up a dish in front of attendees. He recently added cherries and apricots (separately) to breakfast yogurt bowls at the restaurant when they came into season among Colorado producers, and he’s worked up several recipes to incorporate Olathe sweet corn after discovering that vegetable since moving here.
He wants to make Fire more than just a special-occasion destination. He’s started Wine Wednesdays where he pairs wine with a prix fixe menu,and he hopes soon to launch Sunday family-style dinners, wanting to make it “the neighborhood restaurant of the Golden Triangle.”
Keeley brought one of his sous chefs and his kitchen supervisor from Wisconsin with him, believing the experience at The Art Hotel could develop them even further. Another one of his sous chefs came from a Denver sports bar where he was re-frying food; Keeley saw his talent and has worked closely with him on cooking techniques and recipe development.
After years of wandering down many paths, Keeley has found a home, and he wants to bring to it the best of his 22 years of growing up in the restaurant sector and learning to love local ingredients, local people and a locale that means more than just a meal to those who visit. Those who visit Fire might find themselves engaged in spontaneous, lengthy conversations with the chef at their table, pointing out those local ingredients and the origins of his menu items and just maybe being drawn in enough to come back again and again.
“When somebody has a certain vision, the biggest thing it requires is for like-minded people to have that same vision with you,” he said. “We’re hitting our stride.”
Position: Executive chef
Company: The Art Hotel and Fire Restaurant & Lounge
Age: 40 on Aug. 25
Education: Culinary degree from Atlantic Culinary Academy in Dover, New Hampshire
First job: Cooking at My Brother’s Pizza in Medford, Massachusetts at age 14
Trick of the trade: While working at high-end Bonsoiree in Chicago, customers would thank him and the kitchen staff with bottles of fine spirits. The chefs often would use the alcohol to make a sorbet with liquid nitrogen and serve it right back.
Odd fact: “When I was a kid, I was the pickiest eater on the face of the earth.”
Do you know a young professional making big moves? If you or someone you know is under 40 years of age, a recognized business leader and an active participant in the community, nominate them for Denver’s most prestigious recognition of up-and-comers.
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