Steve McHugh

The Path

The early kitchen years at Brennan Family Restaurants in New Orleans established the pace and discipline that underpin Steve McHugh’s career. Work in the kitchens at Stanley Jackson and Chris Brown in New Orleans added repetition, control, and the kind of muscle memory that forms from constant service. A further stretch in the kitchens at John Besh Restaurant Group in New Orleans and San Antonio widened the scope without loosening the Gulf South connection that still threads through his cooking. The move from kitchen labor to authorship took shape in San Antonio. Since 2014, Steve McHugh has been founder and chef owner of Cured at Pearl, owner of Cured, owner of Landrace, and leading culinary direction of Spurs Club at Victory Capital Performance Center. Those dates mark the shift from training and refinement to building restaurants with a clear point of view. Cured, especially, is where preservation becomes structure: an approach centered on transformation, timing, and the measured use of ingredients that have been handled with care.

The Work Today

House-cured meats, pickles, and preserves remain central to Steve McHugh’s current work at Cured at Pearl, Cured, and Landrace in San Antonio. The method is straightforward and exacting: local farmers, preserved product, and a kitchen identity that gives equal weight to technique and pantry. The food reads in layers—salty, bright, rich, and driven by acidity—showing how preservation can carry as much expression as freshness. That consistency gives the restaurants a steady center. Rather than chase novelty, Steve McHugh’s cooking stays with ingredients and the patient work of turning them into something durable. The local farm connection is part of the operating rhythm, not just the sourcing line: a direct relationship between place, season, and food designed to last beyond the day it is made.

Signature

Steve's signature dishes include Charcuterie Plate, Bison Tartare, and Foie Gras Crepe Cake. Each one shows a different part of the same craft. The Charcuterie Plate is the clearest expression of a charcuterie-forward kitchen, built on cured meats and the discipline behind them. Bison Tartare moves toward a more elemental precision, while Foie Gras Crepe Cake brings richness into a more structured form. Together, they show a chef working between preserved and fresh, rustic and refined, dense and delicate.

In Their Words “I really \"stumbled right into\" becoming a chef.” That phrasing lands with understatement. It suggests an entry point that was not planned as a fixed career map, but it also points to what followed: years of repetition, service, and decision-making that turned an accidental start into a defined restaurant practice. In Steve McHugh’s case, the result is a kitchen language built around preservation, sourcing, and control.