CHEF PROFILES | NEW JERSEY

Brian Walter Is Cooking His Way Back to the Beginning

At 87 Sussex, Walter brings decades in New York kitchens back to where his story began

By Eric Barton | June 5, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

On his first day at the French Culinary Institute, 18-year-old Brian Walter spotted posters advertising an internship at the French Consulate in New York. The job paid about $200 a week and included room and board. Walter knew it was enough to attract plenty of ambitious culinary students.

Walter made sure he had less competition.

“So, through a little New Jersey ingenuity, I tore all the posters down,” he says. “I ended up being one of only two students who applied, and looking back, that was the moment my life changed forever.”

The move was entirely in character for a young cook who had already figured out that kitchens rewarded the people willing to go after what they wanted. That internship placed Walter under French Master Chef Luc Pasquier and beginning a career that would take Walter through some of New York’s most exacting kitchens, and eventually to 87 Sussex in Jersey City. There, his cooking brings together the discipline of classical French cuisine and the generous Italian-American hospitality he first learned around his grandmother’s table.

Walter at 87 Sussex

Walter grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, in a family shaped by faith, conversation, and plenty of noise. His mother, Rita Walter, was an actress who later spoke at Billy Graham crusades. His father was a Baptist minister and psychologist. His grandmother’s Brooklyn kitchen supplied another kind of education.

“There were huge pots of sauce, meatballs, sausage, baked ziti, bread on the table, and people talking over each other froChef Brian Walter 87 Sussex.jpgm every direction,” Walter says. “In our family, food was how love was expressed, and nobody walked into that house without being fed.”

Chef Brian Walter 87 Sussex year 2000 at the French consolate for Paul Bocuse's 70th birthday

His grandmother explained why each green belonged in a salad, why produce mattered, and why certain dishes required particular ingredients. Long before Walter learned classical technique, she was teaching him to look beyond a recipe and understand what made food work.

At the French consulate

Chef Brian Walter 87 Sussex Me and the Le Cirque 2000 Crew with Paul Bocuse

His route toward restaurant kitchens was not direct. During his freshman year of high school, his father became pastor of a church in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and moved the family west. Walter washed dishes and mopped floors at an Arby’s. But the transplant did not last. “My East Coast roots were a little too loud for Wyoming,” he says.

The Le Cirque team

Walter, right, with Luc Pasquier

He returned east to live with an uncle in Massapequa, Long Island, in a house on a canal. Walter cooked for his uncle and three roommates, sometimes filleting fish caught from their boat. Their reactions gave him an early glimpse of what serving people could mean outside his own family.

After his parents returned to New Jersey, Walter began washing dishes at Plainfield Country Club and Shackamaxon Country Club. The work was hot, wet, and relentless: garbage, deliveries, burned hands, bleach, onions, and floors that never seemed to stay clean. He loved it. “I remember watching the cooks during service and being fascinated by how fast and organized they were under pressure,” Walter says. “Even in chaos, there was rhythm and precision to everything.”

Zucchini flowers with whipped ricotta

At Plainfield, he met John Rellah, the first mentor to recognize that Walter might have a future beyond the dish pit. Rellah urged him to get to New York, advice Walter followed by enrolling at the French Culinary Institute.

The French Consulate internship then dropped him into a world of exacting technique and formidable chefs. Pasquier was patient with the young cook, eventually introducing Walter as his chef de partie before Walter fully understood the title. Walter encountered a level of cuisine he had previously known only from late-night television sessions watching Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, and Emeril Lagasse.

He next worked at Po, Mario Batali’s first restaurant, where rustic Italian cooking offered a striking contrast to the refinement of the consulate. Before turning 20, Walter had a culinary degree and experience in both kitchens. He used the Zagat guide to identify New York’s best restaurants, then hand-delivered his résumé to them.

Barramundi with tiger prawns and Essex cockles

Le Cirque called. Walter joined the landmark restaurant and used his two weekly days off to stage for free in other kitchens. He moved to Lespinasse under Christian Delouvrier. After Lespinasse closed following 9/11, he became a sous chef at Guastavino’s, trading intimate fine dining for a huge restaurant and event operation where he expedited service through a headset.

Duck breast with roasted apricots

Chef Brian Walter 87 Sussex Jersey City Steak Tartare with bourbon-cured egg

Steak tartare with bourbon-cured egg yolk

Then Rellah called again.

“You’ve trained enough,” Walter remembers him saying. “Come work with me at The Union Club as my executive sous chef, and I’ll train you to become an executive chef.”

Rellah kept his promise. Walter later took his first executive chef job at Acqua Ristorante, earning a James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef nomination. He led kitchens at Hamilton Farm Golf Club and eventually became executive chef at Carmine’s in Times Square, helping rebuild its team and systems after the pandemic. Along the way, he returned as executive chef to Shackamaxon, the same club where he had once scrubbed pots as a teenager.

Paglia e fieno

At 87 Sussex, Walter is consolidating those chapters into cooking rooted in classical French technique but informed by Italian family tables, rustic European dishes, and the intensity of old-school New York kitchens. He wants polish without chilliness and precision without losing the feeling that somebody is glad you came.

“I never want the food to feel cold or overly intellectual,” he says. “I want guests to feel taken care of from the moment they walk through the door.”

Walter arrived at 87 Sussex having already been named one of New Jersey’s top five chefs by NJ Life magazine, and the restaurant has since begun collecting recognition of its own. New Jersey Monthly included it among the state’s best new restaurants, while we named it one of the 12 best restaurants in Jersey City. The attention has given him something beyond another successful kitchen: a restaurant where the many strands of his career finally make sense together.

Halibut with blueberry beurre noisette

Now Walter is raising his sons, Damian and George, with his wife, Rosalina, in the town where he and his father grew up. After the French Consulate, Le Cirque, private clubs, television appearances, awards, and decades of service, his idea of hospitality remains close to where it began.

“I still love the same thing I loved as a kid, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn,” he says. “I love bringing people together through food and making them feel cared for.”