Jason Santos grew up in the milieu of PBS cooking shows. Growing up in Melrose, amid a prototypical Gen X divorce—I’ve experienced one myself—Santos, the critically acclaimed chef of five restaurants, including the recently relaunched Citrus & Salt, spent afternoons with his grandmother. “My grandparents would pick us up from school, and I would go over to their house, and they would always have PBS on,” he says.
Back then, public television—and not the Food Network, which would launch in 1993 (Santos is 48, and grew up squarely in the 1980s)—was a hotbed of culinary activity, laying claim to big-name culinary personalities and television programs. “Julia Child is on. Jacques Pépin. Martin Yan, when I was seven, eight years old,” Santos says. His family, he says, was not historically culinary-minded. But by 12, he was taking home economics classes, diving into cooking. By 15, he was cooking. “I never had a job other than in a kitchen.”
Youthful kitchen endeavors aside, Santos’s actual culinary career began in Boston, under the tutelage of chef-restaurateur Andy Husbands. It was at Husbands’s esteemed Tremont 647 where Santos cut his teeth, before moving on to assume the position of executive chef at Gargoyles on the Square in Somerville’s Davis Square.
His work in Boston established him as a well-known chef on the scene, and, in 2010, he was tapped to participate as a contestant on the Fox-TV television hit show Hell’s Kitchen. During the intervening years, Santos kept in touch with Gordon Ramsey, the show’s host. Then, in 2020, Santos was offered a position as the sous chef for the show’s blue kitchen.
“Working with him is great,” Santos says of his relationship with the larger-than-life Ramsey. “He definitely is as good as you like to think. He’s got 34 restaurants, 17 Michelin stars. It’s insane being in his company.” (Santos also films Bar Rescue, a reality television show starring Jon Taffer, now in its ninth season, where industry experts attempt to bring failing establishments back from the brink in just one week.)
Behind the scenes, Santos says, there are a lot of competing qualities on these types of shows—people who would prefer to be on television to actually cooking, for one, or people so enamored with the glamour of niche ingredients that they have somehow missed the basics of kitchen skills. “A lot of people now, they only know TV, so they come out, and they say, ‘Oh, you use liquid nitrogen?’” he says. “It’s like, yeah, but you can’t hold the knife, dude.”
But Jason Santos is hardly disillusioned. To the contrary. He is a chef, I learned during our conversation, of many stripes and colors—a chef steeped in realism. A father to a two-year-old, Santos now lives in Burlington with his family. He has written two cookbooks (Buttermilk & Bourbon came first, in 2019, followed by Simple Fancy, in 2022). Like most chefs of a certain age and position, his attentions, loyalties, and duties are divided—among restaurants, obligations, and the puzzle pieces of an industry that can spread one thin. Would a third cookbook be coming? I wanted to know. Not yet, he demurred, though maybe Citrus & Salt would be on the way.
And there are, of course, the restaurants—five of them now. But when Santos isn’t preparing himself for the cameras, or writing cookbooks, or being a dad, he is preparing mise-en-place. I first met him, in fact, at the soft reopen of Citrus & Salt, which is just one of his new dining projects. The expansive space, which recently opened in the Seaport—the original, much smaller iteration, lived in Back Bay—is, as Santos says, “over the top,” with Instagrammable moments like vibrant murals, massive floral installations hanging from the ceiling, and neon pink backlighting.
Santos’s other emerging concept, ButterBird, in Watertown, seeks to fill what he sees as a need. “In Boston, there’s not a huge breakfast sandwich kind of thing,” Santos says. “We’re doing really amazing breakfast burritos. Sandwiches: You can get them either on toasted brioche or on our homemade biscuits. We’re open 8 to 8, and 8 to 12 is breakfast, and then we flip. The same concept just basically turns into fried chicken.” The fast-casual restaurant is meant to deliver delicious, high-quality sandwiches in the style of the New York bodega or the Los Angeles burrito stand.
For the kid from Melrose who developed a love of food from public television, this broad, rich, and incredible career is nothing short of staggering. “I’m just very humble at this point in my career, and very thankful that all my restaurants are very busy. That’s all I care about,” he says. “It’s just giving people jobs and making good food and having a good life. That’s it.”