Profile: Anthony Nelson

By Dawne Belloise

Just before the big Covid shutdown in Crested Butte, Anthony Nelson arrived for an interview at 9380 at the Elevation Hotel. It was February of 2020 and three weeks later, after being hired, he found himself at the end of the road with his chef job on temporary hold, but he feels it was the best thing that could have happened for him. 

Instead of working the culinary aspects of his position, he essentially busied himself by cleaning and organizing the restaurant. Anthony says the job at 9380 was a means to an end. “I knew it wasn’t my forever place, but I knew Crested Butte was where I wanted to be.” He lived in the Elevation for the year he spent there, which gave him time to figure things out. After some adventures of comings, goings and returning, five years later Anthony is the chef at Two Twelve, one of CB’s newest eateries.

He had come to Crested Butte after spending four years in Virginia at his friend’s restaurant. Knowing he wanted to get back to the Colorado mountains, he was interviewing in several towns. He had never been to CB but driving in from Denver, he came to what he describes as, “this adorable little town at the end of the road and I fell in love with it.” 

Anthony grew up on a large, family cattle ranch in Yuma, Colorado, where they had 700 head of cattle and grew potatoes, hay, pinto beans and corn. As a ranch kid, he fixed fences, hauled hay bales and bottle-fed calves. “Looking at it now, I’m hugely grateful that’s how I was raised, understanding where food and animals come together. I don’t think I appreciated it much at that time,” he says. He also values the acquired work ethic. “The appreciation of the time it takes to make things happen. You have to get the job done, it’s not an eight-hour day, it’s however long it takes to get what needs to be accomplished done. It’s a different mindset of looking at work.” Anthony has carried that work ethic with him throughout life.

 In high school, Anthony was largely into sports, playing football and baseball and made the Colorado National Wrestling Team. He spent a lot of time with his family at their condo in Steamboat Springs, snowboarding in the winter and enjoying the summer activities. “I’ve always loved the Rockies and knew that I wanted to be in the mountains. It was always such a comforting place for my soul.” He graduated in 1995.

Anthony wanted to be an artist and enrolled at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where they had a liberal arts program. “It was a hippie school and it was set up without grades. It was seminar-based and everything was a discussion. We’d present our project and get critiqued by the whole class, like a peer review situation. It was very non-traditional. I think you can miss the nuance of everything you’re doing if you’re just pushing for grades,” he says of the experience. Anthony graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s in liberal arts with a focus in visual arts.

After graduating, Anthony moved to New Orleans, where he fell in love with the city. “I had visited there during a women’s rugby team tournament, when I was one of their coaches in college.” Although Anthony wanted to be a visual artist, he wound up cooking in bars to pay the rent. “I found a real aptitude for it,” he tells and discovered he really enjoyed it. With encouragement from friends, he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the prestigious school on the Hudson in upstate New York. He arrived there in 2002 and graduated two years later. 

Anthony did a three-month internship back in New Orleans at Restaurant August, a high-end southern creole establishment, then it was off to Las Vegas where he cooked at Nobu. “I started as a tempura fry guy and kept working at it. By my last year there, I was doing the Omakase menu, which is the chef tasting menu.” Always on the pursuit for something new, he went further west to a little wine bar in Sebastopol, California, which didn’t pan out for him, and after a year, he moved on. “As a cook you work a year here and year there to learn cuisines and techniques. You might work for a certain chef to understand how they see food. You don’t really stay, you move on to learn more until ultimately, it feeds into guiding your palette, which is always changing to what you want to express.”

 Anthony returned to Las Vegas as purveyor of a high-end mushroom company, Mikuni Wild Harvest, selling to Las Vegas restaurants. “We were buying from foragers based out of Canada. I had just stepped out of the kitchen for a minute to try something else,” which didn’t last very long because his art was calling him. Anthony took another brief detour to Lake Havasu for a year before moving to Nashville in 2011 to pursue cooking again. Anthony had never been there, and he felt it might be an interesting place to explore for a while. “It was quite an amazing, fun and alive town,” he recalls. “There’s so much to do and there were always shows to go to and sports. I’m a big football fan. It was a big party town too so there was a lot of that.” He was rolling sushi for a restaurant called Virago. “I love Japanese. I can eat raw fish every day,” he grins. He stayed for five years, working at two farm-to-table restaurants.

 When one of his friends from culinary school was opening a place in Marshall, Virginia, Anthony signed on as executive chef with the regional and seasonal farm-to-table restaurant named Field and Main. “I was out by farms in a very rural area and there was plenty of small farms producing amazing products. I was buying whole hogs. It was also the big wine country of Virginia.” They did special monthly dinners paired with the wines they wanted to present. It was a full-service restaurant open five nights a week. He stayed for four years before moving to CB in 2020.

As much as Anthony adored Crested Butte, he was motivated to move to Aspen for the experience. “The Little Nell has always been a thing in hospitality in Colorado.” He worked there as the hotel tournant, doing banquettes, production and generally making things happen, but he quickly realized, “Aspen was never going to feel like home, there’s really no community, but here, I sit on a bench in CB and within five minutes 10 people I know walk by.” Anthony adds, “I’ll never have the money to have community in Aspen and I don’t want that.” 

Anthony returned to CB in 2022 and was hired at Uley’s for the winter. That year, they received national recognition and the honor of ranking sixth in on-mountain dining in the entire U.S. from USA Today. He had heard that local enterprising entrepreneurs Kyleena Falzone and Jeff Hermanson were doing a project called Two Twelve, a restaurant featuring a live fire hearth where everything is cooked over a live fire. “They were doing a lot of interviews and I wanted to be part of the team. I did the tasting for Jeff, Kyleena and their team,” he says, and he was hired. The restaurant opened in July 2024. “I have a really amazing team and a really good flow in the kitchen. We have elements of fire in almost every dish. Kyleena is really inspiring and the one who had that drive and push. It goes back to that work ethic.”

 Having worked in a variety of different cuisines, from rolling sushi to farm-to-table, including French, Italian and Southern, Anthony says he finds his voice is based in seasonal and regional cuisine. “Using the guidelines of what is available seasonally in a certain area, I like to pull from my repertoire of cuisines.” He calls it elevated comfort food. “It’s accessible and something people can understand. Every cuisine can bring a certain comfort level that you don’t really think about because they’re different cuisines. There’s something about making dashi and miso soup that’s as comforting as chicken noodle soup. They can all live on the same page.”

Anthony says that in 2017 he was an unhealthy 350 pounds. Having changed to a healthier lifestyle, he’s now 170 pounds. “And I’m five years sober. In this industry, there’s the gluttony of food, drugs and alcohol which has damaged and derailed a lot of careers. I wanted to become my best self.” He says he cooks what he preaches, and his healthier lifestyle is reflected in his menu of clean food. Many of his dishes are gluten free, vegan and vegetarian. “In general a different paradigm of how health and food relate and are intertwined and how it can be done by using seasonal regional products to create something that is nourishing as well as exciting for people.”

Anthony is happy to be in Crested Butte. “I’ve lived all over the place and this is the first place that feels like home,” he says. “This is my comfort place, my place of solace, being surrounded by mountains, the beauty of mother nature and the harsh intensity of it. It’s perfect and it’s real to me. Everything about moving here and being here has been life changing. I live in gratitude for where I’m at.”