John Ross: A North Fork Food Pioneer Shares His Story

For more than half his life, John Ross of Southold has devoted his life to fresh, good food. This passion-turned-job essentially fell into his lap and became a career that still has a legacy to this day — years after he retired and closed his restaurant, Ross’s North Fork Restaurant, on Main Road in Southold.

Unofficially (but officially), Ross has become a major pioneer in what is seen today in restaurants across the North Fork of Long Island — especially in relation to the constantly growing wine industry.

A chef, author, professor and friend to many, Ross’s story on the East End is a long one that started way out west.

Early Beginnings

Turning 80 years old this July, Ross and his wife Lois first arrived in Southold in 1973. Born in Chatham, Ontario, the Ross family moved to a suburb of Detroit, leaving immediately after high school graduation in 1962.

“When I left, I knew I would not be coming back,” he said.

Ross eventually enrolled as an English major at the University of Michigan, where his love of poetry started — something that would also follow him years later as a writer and in the hospitality industry. To make some extra cash, he took a job cooking at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, his first time really being behind a grill and oven. He didn’t have much interest in cooking as a kid.

But school wasn’t for Ross at the time. Studying at a popular college at the height of the Vietnam War, he decided to drop out and go back “home” to Canada, packing up a bag and riding his motorcycle north to Winnipeg, a city in Manitoba.

“It was an emotional time for me because many young people were running away to Canada to get out of the draft,” he said, adding that he eventually took a job cooking at the airport there. “But I didn’t want to be tagged as a draft dodger … that bothered me, and I missed my girlfriend, so we agreed to meet at a bus station in Omaha, Nebraska.”

He took the same motorcycle back to the States, met Lois at the predetermined rendezvous point, and soon after, they got married by a justice of the peace for barely $20.

Ross took several jobs while in Nebraska, eventually becoming a line cook at an Italian steakhouse.

“It was a great restaurant,” he said. “They cooked everything from scratch.”

About a year later, he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard, leading him to the East Coast to train at Cape May, New Jersey, and he was later stationed in New York Harbor. He started traveling the world — Cuba, the Florida Keys — and while on board, he started cooking for the sailors on the ship.

“Cooking on a ship was quite an experience,” he said, laughing.

Ross soon decided to enroll in the Coast Guard’s commissary school in Connecticut to better his skills in the kitchen, then he was transferred to Jones Beach — one step closer to his soon-to-be forever home out East.

“I discovered Long Island seafood, and coming from the Midwest there wasn’t much seafood … what was out there was frozen and not very good,” he said. “I really fell in love with the fresh clams and everything else.”

The Coast Guard let him explore other areas of New York, like Governor’s Island, Little Italy and Chinatown, where he’d visit the local markets and learn as much as he could about food. After his discharge in 1970, he decided to enroll back at school and took on hospitality and culinary arts at Cornell University.

“I was very frightened of going back to school, I’d been out of school five years. But I worked like crazy man,” he said. “It paid off, and I ended up graduating at the top of my class.”

While at Cornell, he made connections with other chefs and business owners, including one that owned a place in East Hampton, called Squires, where he was given a job during the summer.

“I fell in love with the East End. I’d never been there before, but the food there, too,” he said. “And that experience is when I decided that I wanted to be a chef and own my own restaurant.”

Another friend he made at Cornell owned a restaurant in Southold that he was looking to sell.

“I didn’t even know there was a North Fork,” he laughed. But in 1973, Ross met the friend at his store on Main Road and decided to buy it. Today, it’s Founder’s Tavern.

Ross’s North Fork Restaurant

Ross said that at first, they didn’t know what they wanted the restaurant’s identity to be. There was one thing he was entirely sure of, though, and that was everything needed to be fresh.

“I wanted to cook from scratch and I wanted to deal with only fresh food,” he said. “That was kind of an innovative thing back then, because the food service industry was headed in the other direction with frozen and processed foods.”

The shop didn’t have much of a freezer — just a tiny one that held a carton of ice cream. So all the food needed to handmade, made the day of, which made him, and his team, create daily menus that were constantly changing.

For 27 years, he and his wife would type up about 20 copies of the day’s menu on a typewriter. His process was the original “daily specials” mantra seen at most restaurants today.

Ross said this impromptu changing of the menu was good for him, since the restaurant didn’t have a single style of dining.

“I didn’t want to be anything phony. I wasn’t Italian. I wasn’t French. I wasn’t Californian. I was just John Ross,” he said. “So, I ended up calling my cuisine ‘food and wine of the North Fork.’”

The same year as he opened Ross’s in 1973, the first winery was opened by the Hargraves in Cutchogue. Long Island’s first vineyard. He became friends with the Hargraves, then the other families who started to plant and create wines nearby. He started pairing his dinners with the local wines, which gave him that identity he was looking for.

“I got very involved with the wine people for my whole career, and it became a huge part of my life,” he said. “I kind of became famous for it — not just farm to table cooking, but for supporting the wine people.”

As the years went on, more restaurants opened and closed, celebrity chefs used the same model that he created decades before and the wineries became a tourist destination. But Ross stayed humble and modest, doing what he loved to do and supporting his community along with it.

“I never really became rich. We paid our bills and lasted for 27 years until I sold it in 2000,” he said.

Ross received his MBA at night and became an assistant professor at Suffolk County Community College’s Riverhead campus in North Hampton, teaching what essentially now is the famed culinary program, staying at the school for 14 years.

If that wasn’t enough, Ross took his original interest in writing and poetry from his early college days back and published a series of books and articles. His first, “The Food and Wine of the North Fork,” became a hit that told the stories of restaurants of its time.

“I wanted to honor these restaurants,” he said.

Then came “The Story of North Fork Wine,” and “The Poetry of Cooking,” in which he published some of his recipes with accompanying poems all about food. Last year, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the wine industry on Long Island, he published a smaller booklet about his career, his restaurant and what the North Fork looked like when he became a business owner there in the early 1970s, titled “Chef John Ross: Celebrating 50 Years on the North Fork.”

“My wife calls it my obituary,” he laughed.

Now a father of three and grandfather of nine, Ross is technically in retirement. But he still makes dinner every night in his Southold home’s kitchen. He smokes meat in his backyard during the summer and still makes sure that whatever he is serving is fresh, local and delicious.