Rick Ciszewski is a familiar face to many. Hilltop’s chef is likely to have catered a wedding, cooked at a restaurant or prepared food at a church event you attended.
If you have eaten at Anchor Bay, Conley’s or Cranberries, you’ve probably enjoyed his food. He’s been cooking for more than 40 years.
He got his start watching his grandmother cook from scratch, including bread and raised doughnuts (his favorite).
“It evolved from there,” he said.
He used to hang out at the Mead Inn kitchen – “before the towers were built,” he said. He helped decorate the food for Easter brunch. Promised a job when he turned 16, he quickly went from dishwasher to fry cook. “It just took off from there,” Ciszewski said.
“I just like working with food,” he said, noting he actually enjoys when things stump him. He said he enjoys the challenge of finding a solution.
For example, he was hired to cater a wedding with no kitchen. So, they rented the Biron Town Hall to cook the food and transported the food to Cera Park. He wound up grilling jerked chicken kebabs to serve 200. “That wedding was a challenge,” he said, “but it just came together.”
He said he uses trial and error a lot of the time, noting every kitchen is different and what works in one might not work in another. He also alters recipes to make them healthier at home and work. His grandmother’s raised doughnuts are hard to do, though, because of all the sugar. He’s cut out sugar at home, instead using maple syrup or honey to sweeten recipes.
His favorite thing to make is turkey on the grill, but he’s partial to anything grilled.
Ciszewski paused for a moment to think of something people might not know about him. “I had brain surgery when I was 18 months old,” he said. “Spinal meningitis.” His 110-degree fevers caused nerve damage which resulted in deafness, he said. Doctors in Marshfield drilled holes into his skull to release pressure in his brain.
He has been married to Deb for 38 years. They have three children, two grandsons and two step-granddaughters. One son is following in his footsteps as a chef.
Everything about Ciszewski comes back to food and his love of it. If he had time for a bucket list, he would want to go to an authentic Hawaiian luau to see how they cook in the ground. “That would fascinate me,” he said.