Get to know our chefs
John Richard
Chef Laconia Country Club
Chef John Richard is a culinary professional with 40 years of experience in the hospitality industry, running professional kitchens and working with highly respected chefs. Previously the Corporate Chef and Co-CEO for NH's largest independent restaurant group and the owner of The Holderness General Store on Squam Lake, an upscale deli and catering operation. He also owned the Coe House Restaurant in Center Harbor, which NH Magazine voted as one of The Hottest New Restaurants in NH. Chef Richard is currently on the culinary team at Laconia Country Club.
Dunstan Smith’s first job was in college working at the “Atlantic Super Value” grocery store in the rotisserie chicken department. He grew up in the Atlantic Maritimes region of Canada. At 20 he read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and recalls that it changed the course of his life. He began an apprenticeship at the famous, fine dining, farm to table restaurant in Back Bay, L’Espalier under Frank McLelland for a few years, and then worked at a few other fine dining restaurants in MA.
Eventually, he became disillusioned with the disconnect between the “farm to table” fine dining, quit his job and began to travel in the United States, Canada, and around the world. It was a trip to Southeast Asia that made him realize that farm to table cooking in commercial kitchens was completely disconnected from where the food came from.
Dunstan finally landed in NH and in 2014 began volunteering at D’Acres a permaculture, educational farmstead in Dorchester, NH. In 2016 he became a full-time resident contributor and chose to learn animal husbandry, sustainable agriculture practices, and how to cook true seasonal, local food. He has since traveled extensively around the globe, most recently spending time in kitchens in India and southeast Asia, learning cooking methods, food rituals, and the flavors used by the chefs and cooks with whom he has spent time.
In 2019 he started Nourish food truck, cooking “globally inspired, locally sourced” food. The truck sits in summers at Longview Farmstand in Plymouth, NH situated between the edge of beautiful color-filled rows of U pick flowers and the produce-filled farm stand. He loves the daily connection with the farmers, Regina and Nate at Longview, and finds joy looking out at the families enjoying delicious authentic table-on-farm cooking at picnic tables under the fruit trees facing the food truck.
Dunstan Smith
Owner and Chef at Nourish
Executive Chef Jeff Woolley graduated, with distinction, from the Culinary Institute of America in the early '90's. From that foundation, and over the past 30 years, he has gained experience working in some of the finest kitchens, and with some of the most talented chefs, in the country. Chef Woolley is currently the Executive Chef over all dining operations at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
From his roots in Buffalo, NY to a decade spent in the low-country of South Carolina, Chef Woolley’s focus, even before it became trendy, has been to seek out the finest, fresh, seasonal local ingredients and to utilize them in straightforward, yet artistic presentations. This drive has led Chef Woolley to partner with numerous local farmers, even having had the opportunity to select varieties of produce to be grown specifically for his menus.
More recently, Chef Woolley has been concentrating on plant-based and vegan offerings, partly in response to guests’ desires, but also in part because of his own consciousness around personal health and the environmental costs of commercial food production.
Operating from the mindset that food can be both humble and extremely special, Chef Woolley takes great pride in focusing on the marriage of years of experience and new ideas, quietly contemplating research, patience and art, with the goal of providing every guest with an exceptional experience and an incredible, unpretentious meal.
