He’d catered a wedding the night before and would be cooking at the Colorado Beef Festival that evening. But at 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday, Justin Freeman was at the City Park Farmers Market, stocking up on the week’s produce for Somebody People, where he has served as executive chef for the last two years.
In that time, he has drawn praise for augmenting the vegan restaurant’s menu with bold flavors that make the most out of seasonal produce grown by Colorado farmers. At Somebody People, corn ends up on the menu in three different ways, legumes are a part of a regular diet and a pantry full of vinegars and spices turn every dish into a joyride of flavor profiles.
Freeman, 38, isn’t vegan himself, though.
Neither is Monarch, his catering company, where he crafts sourdough pizzas and small bites for private events and at pop-up dinners. Whether chopping vegetables, kneading pizza dough or braising chicken, the New York native cooks food that is, in his own words, “in your face.”
“He’s got this great ability to build flavors,” said Somebody People co-owner Sam Maher, who compared the intensity of Freeman’s cooking to that found in Thai cuisine. “You consistently feel hot, sweet, umami, spicy.”
Freeman was at the farmers market to gather ingredients for a new menu he’d developed with Maher, who showed up minutes after. The two bought coffee and scoped out the vendor stands — easier for Freeman since he stands a head taller than most of the crowd.
“What are we getting?” Maher asked.
“Whatever looks good, I guess,” Freeman said.
Cucumbers were at the top of the list. Twenty pounds of them. Freeman and Maher had recently hosted Miles Odell of Odell’s Bagel as a guest chef at Somebody People and were impressed by his technique of toasting sesame seeds and grinding them with a Japanese mortar and pestle, unleashing their fragrance. They planned to try the same technique in a cucumber salad for that night’s dinner service.
Freeman filled two reusable bags he’d brought with cucumbers from Minoru Farm in Brighton and introduced himself to the farmer, Jade Sato. He picked up more cucumbers and a bag of shishito peppers from Brett Matson of Switch Gears Farm in Longmont, with plans to fry the peppers in tempura batter.
With the bags now weighing down his hands, Freeman stood on the grassy esplanade that runs down the middle of the farmers market and thought over what else he needed. His chest bared a tattoo of Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest and agriculture, her face poking out from his half-buttoned shirt. Why that tattoo? The goddess’s connection to the earth and her representation of the circle of life resonated with Freeman.
When cultures collide
Moving to Denver with his wife, Brittany Whaley, his son and their dog four years ago was a “huge change,” but one Freeman embraced. He’d spent his life in New York, raised by an Ecuadorian mother and Irish father in Queens and Brooklyn. His mother, Priscilla, cooked meals that lingered with Freeman and influenced his decision to become a chef.
His first job upon graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in New York in 2010 was as a line cook at the original Nobu, the famous fusion restaurant opened by chef Nobu Matsuhisa in 1994. The restaurant’s Japanese cuisine and Peruvian ingredients paralleled Freeman’s own mixed identity and the unexpected outcomes that arise when cultures collide.
“I wanted to cook food like this for the rest of my life,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic, contacts in the restaurant industry and Freeman and Whaley’s desire to raise a family brought them to Denver. Freeman helped open The Greenwich, an Italian restaurant in RiNo, serving as chef for two years before Maher’s wife and business partner, Tricia Maher, recruited him to work at Somebody People.
He built a name for himself through the restaurant and at Monarch, which launched in late 2023. This year, he’s held Monarch pop-ups at Odie B’s, ESP HiFi and Middleman. In June, he prepared a six-course meal at The Regular, where a 45-day aged ribeye was preceded by plates of spring onions, marinated peppers and grilled mushrooms.
Odell, who first met Freeman when they were both line cooks at Nobu, said the chef’s ability to collaborate and experiment have found fertile ground at Somebody People.
“It’s cool to see Sam give him some freedom in the kitchen to make his own dishes and really grow their food program,” he said.
A different menu every week
Freeman’s final stop at the farmers market was Croft Family Farm, out of Kersey. There, he grabbed beets, salad greens and dragon tongue — a long wax bean with purple-striped pods.
He found more cucumbers for sale, too, which he and Maher gleefully snapped up. Lemon cucumbers were $1 each and looked similar to Asian pears, while Armenian cucumbers were $7 a pound and, measuring 1.5 feet each, resembled green scythes poking out of produce bags.
From there, Freeman and Maher headed to the kitchen at Somebody People, 1165 S. Broadway in Denver, where they offloaded the morning’s bounty and prepared a snack before the evening’s dinner service.
Freeman tied on an apron, unfurled an olive-green wrap encasing his chef’s knife and set up behind a metal counter facing the empty dining room. When the restaurant is particularly busy, he said, he likes to work from this vantage point and observe people’s reactions to their orders.
“Somebody can tell you something is tasty, but honestly, I think seeing visual signs of a person enjoying something is a lot more telling,” he said. “I’d rather see a face [with] a pure smile afterwards.”
He chopped cucumbers into square chunks and scraped beets over a mandoline, slicing the root vegetables into paper-thin round coins. To his right, Maher used a fork to poke holes through the skin of bite-sized eggplants and crushed cucumbers with the flat of a knife’s blade.
Freeman combined the elements into a salad bowl, adding greens and radish pods from the farmers market and hand-tossing everything in za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice blend containing oregano, sumac, parsley and sesame seeds. He fried the eggplants, blanched from spending a few minutes in the oven, in tempura batter along with green beans, onions and the shishito peppers purchased that morning.
The salad — dressed in fresh citrus and olive oil — and the tempura were ready in about half an hour. Freeman sat down with Maher at a table and squeezed a lemon wedge over the fried veggies. Maher, who’d been munching on snips of beet leaves and radish pods while cutting ingredients, grabbed a shishito pepper and dunked it into a bowl of whipped tahini.
Maher is Freeman’s litmus test; if he likes it, it usually means it’s fit to serve. His executive chef’s omnivorous appetite suits Somebody People well, Maher said.
“I throw probably a different menu at him every week and say, ‘I need you to come up with ideas for this wine dinner or another event,’ and he’s able to just throw them together,” he said.
To Freeman, the intrigue in vegan cooking is finding ways to replicate textures, flavors and ingredients he grew up eating: the fats in butter, the way cheese hits the palate.
“Being a non-vegan who is cooking in the vegan world actually makes you really have to think about things,” he said.
Since stepping through the doors of Nobu, Freeman said he wanted his own restaurant, a place where his kids could run around and he could put together thrilling, textured snacks like the beet salad and fried shishito peppers he made from that morning’s haul. It’d be called Monarch, after the butterfly whose migration pattern and swarm mentality reminded him, he said, of his own “calling for home.”
Right now, that home is with the Mahers at Somebody People, and wherever Monarch the pop-up flutters to next.