Meet Chef Robbie Tutlewski

Restaurant: Little Donna’s, Baltimore, MD

Niman Ranch Products: Beef, pork

Like many people drawn to kitchen careers, Chef Robbie Tutlewski grew up in a household that revolved around food. His parents both cooked, and he says his father had an encyclopedic knowledge of good food. But it was his Yugoslavian grandmother Donna who was the heart and soul of the family kitchen. She cooked every day—bread, soup, salads, and full meals, and she shared everything with her own family or anyone else who happened by. Friends, neighbors, relatives—it didn’t matter. “The big thing everybody knew about us was the food, especially my grandmother’s cooking,” Tutlewski says.

Even so, it took a while for Tutlewski to open his own restaurant. He spent his high school years as a dishwasher, but decided when he graduated he would work in the local, Gary, IN steel mill for a year to make some money. But the work was hard and dangerous, and at his mother’s suggestion, at 19 he went to Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. It wasn’t until he was living across the country from his family and his older sister passed away that Tutlewski began to appreciate the most important lesson he learned growing up, that food was a way of giving.

“I always appreciated my family and the food background we had,” he says. “As I grew as a person, my family really started to become a big part of my life again, even though they weren’t with me.”

But it still took another 15 years for Little Donna’s to come to fruition, and in that time Tutlewski worked for a varied group of chefs and restaurants, including Claudio Urcioli and Chris Bianco in Phoenix who introduced him to Niman Ranch. But it was Niman Ranch’s YouTube channel that allowed him to feel like he was getting to know the farmers and ranchers that produced the meat.

“I thought, ‘wow, this is a really great product.’ It’s a larger company, but they’re bringing something to the market that people are expecting,” he says. “I think Niman is one of the only companies out there that gives you an all-natural product that you really wanna eat. They take care of their animals, they feed them well, and it’s just a wholesome product.”

The menu at Little Donna’s (named after his late 4-foot-something grandmother), is, as Tutlewski describes it, a combination of Midwestern tavern food and his grandmother’s recipes. Take, for example, the pork schnitzel. “That pork schnitzel is something I grew up on,” he says. “It was always in the fridge. And we made palacinke, little Polish pancakes. The batter was always in the fridge, so if you were hungry, you just fried up a pancake really quick.”

Tutlewski uses Niman Ranch products in his meat loaf and meatballs, in his Thursday evening tavern steaks, and in the aforementioned pork schnitzel. But his two favorite Niman Ranch cuts are the rib eye and pork shoulder. “A rib eye is an easy thing but you need the right meat. When I got the Niman Ranch ribeye the first time all I had to do was not forget it in the oven, and it did its thing,” he says. “Same thing with the pork butt and shoulder. You braise it, you smoke it, you pull it, you make carnitas out of it, and it does the work for you.”

After his cooking odyssey around the country, Tutlewski and his wife are happy in their Baltimore neighborhood of Upper Fells Point. “We moved here and it’s just worked out,” he says. “I knew nothing about this place, but now it’s home. It’s a great city.”