When he’s not in one of his restaurants, Adam Hayes can often be found hunting quail or casting for trout
As much as he loves cooking, a perfect day for Adam Hayes is not necessarily spent in the kitchen. The chef, who co-owns the Larkin’s collection of restaurants with Kristina Murphy, loves to be outdoors. “That’s what energizes me,” he says.
His first foray into wild quail hunting came in 2018, when his friend, Steve Whitmire, owner of Brasstown Beef in North Carolina, invited him to go hunting with a group of other guys on a friend’s ranch in west Texas.
“Out there, I absolutely fell in love [with quail hunting],” Hayes recalls. It’s the repetitive rhythm of the day that he finds so relaxing. They wake up at 6a.m. and have coffee and breakfast before getting the dogs together (most hunters bring their own dog). “You boot up the dogs ’cuz there’s cactus out there they’ll step on, so they wear rubber boots,” explains Hayes. “Then you ride out on ATVs to the field you’re gonna hunt.”
At lunchtime, it’s back to the house, where Hayes is the designated chef. After lunch, everyone takes a short nap before heading back out to fields dotted with brush and knee-high shinnery oak. Come evening, Hayes often cooks up a big steak dinner (Steve from Brasstown Beef supplies the steaks). “We eat, we sip bourbon, and the dogs are all laid out on the sofa. Then we go to bed and get up and do it again. You do this for four to five days in a row, and you don’t want to leave,” Hayes says.
On the hunt with Adam Hayes
“We’re not just out there blasting birds,” he is quick to point out. The owners of the 7,000-acre ranch are conservationists, and the bobwhite quail they hunt are wild, not pen-raised. If the conditions are not right for the birds to reproduce in any one year, they don’t hunt.
After that experience, Hayes decided he wanted his own dog in the hunt. He purchased a German shorthaired pointer from a breeder in eastern Kentucky, a puppy he named Khaleesi. (“I was in my Game of Thrones era,” he notes with a laugh.) She has accompanied him to Texas for every quail quest he’s gone on since. and has proved equally skilled in bird hunting and cuddling.
Closer to home, catch-and-release fishing for rainbow and speckled trout reels him in. “You work hard in this business,” Hayes says of managing three restaurants plus a catering operation, “and for me, the best chill I get is going up to the Davidson River in Western North Carolina. I take a chair, sit in the river, then build a little fire [on the riverbank] and cook some stuff. Then I get out there and throw a fly.”
Now that the chef’s son is at an age [15] where he shares his dad’s love of the hunt, Hayes takes even more pleasure in getting outdoors. “The time with close family and friends, great food, and bird dogs is what I live for,” he says.
A Bird in the Hand
While many folks like to fry quail, Adam Hayes prefers to braise the birds he shoots in a broth that includes backbones from spatchcocked chicken he cooks for his family. “Then I pull all the meat off the quail—which is very tedious because quail are so small—and I strain the stock, reduce it by half and put all the quail meat back in there and let it cool overnight,” says the chef. “I like to make soup dumplings or empanadas or quail pies, and they’re all delicious. Or I make quail and dumplings, which is really good, too.”
