The Adventuresome Chef
Warren Lewis makes art in “stupid cold places”
By Jenna Biter
Sunlight streamed through the coffee shop blinds. Water droplets were condensing on the plastic to-go cup holding an iced mocha latte sitting neglected at the center of a four-top.
Warren Lewis was preoccupied. He wasn’t sipping, he was leading a whip-fast expedition to distant destinations, most of which he classified as “stupid cold places,” many of which were home to magnificent sharp-toothed beasts.
Foxes and walruses, bears and wolves chased each other off the silvery face of Lewis’ MacBook, forever frozen in his photographs but indelibly alive in his mind.
“When the bears come by, the wolves take off,” says Lewis, describing life in the closely watched, middle-of-nowhere border zone between Finland and Russia. Two autumns ago, Lewis traveled to the arctic hinterland on a special permit with a photography tour of four. “We didn’t see a wolverine,” he says, “but if a wolverine had come along, the bears would’ve taken off because wolverines have no sense of humor.”
Lewis readjusts his glasses, then clicks from one image of gray wolves to the next. The frame displays an astonishing blond wolf Lewis identifies as the pack’s alpha. “I saw him one day just for minutes, and that was it,” he says, still in awe more than a year later. The wolf stares from the screen with soft golden eyes that can harden cruelly in an instant.
It was restlessness, fate and the heart of an explorer that landed Lewis and his camera in that frostbitten taiga forest. “I always had to do things with my hands,” he explains, holding them up and open. In the 1970s, a camera came along to occupy his fidgety fingers. At the time, Lewis’ father had taken to photography as a newly divorced, middle-aged man in search of a hobby. Before long, the teenager had a Pentax Spotmatic camera of his own. A week into this new love affair, the kid developed his first photograph with a Willoughby-Peerless darkroom kit in the basement of his childhood home on Long Island, New York.
“The first image I ever developed was of a tree in front of the house,” says Lewis wryly, “because that was the first picture I took.”
He didn’t stick around the house for long. Dad had given him a camera, and with it, the license for a shy teenager to expand and explore his world.
“I never would have gone to a football game by myself,” Lewis says, “but all of a sudden, I had a press pass, and I’m on the sideline.”
Lewis scrolls through his photos, rediscovering Finland with each image frozen in time. Its pied crows are silly, intelligent, and permanently dressed in the full feather of tuxedo. Its ravens are less baroque; nevertheless, they seek attention. Their purply plumes blur more than Lewis would like. The bold birds don’t even flee a brown bear. Then again, neither does Lewis. One lumbered so near his blind he could smell the animal’s breath.
“He’s either going to eat me, or he’s not,” Lewis says with the nonchalance of someone sitting safely in a coffee shop. “I’m thinking, OK, well, I’ve got my camera, and I’ve got a lens I can use like a bat to whack him. I’ll aim for the nose. At the same time, I’m thinking, OK, what’s my aperture? What’s my shutter speed? Is it in focus? Get the eyes in focus.”
Lewis chose not to pursue photography professionally after graduating from high school. Instead, he studied engineering.
“I took a job peeling vegetables because I didn’t belong in engineering,” says Lewis, owner and chef of the eponymous Chef Warren’s, Southern Pines’ beloved turn-of-the-century-style bistro. “It wasn’t tactile enough for me. It just doesn’t suit the way my brain works — which is at 1,000 miles per hour — so I became a chef. And I met my wife that way.”
Lewis was working as a sous chef in a New York hotel when Marianne walked in. “We’ve been together ever since,” he says. That was 35 years ago. Since then, he’s worked kitchens up and down the East Coast and around the globe, from Australia to a few days at an Indian restaurant in Malaysia.
“If you’ve got a set of knives,” says Lewis, “you can work anywhere.”
In 1995, “anywhere” became the Sandhills, and three years later, the Lewises opened Chef Warren’s, whose walls display his original prints.
“You need something besides what you do,” Lewis says, parsing the balance between food and photos. “You need to have something else to focus on.”
He dives back into the laptop screen, reliving a staring contest in a Polish forest. “This is one of my favorites! So, I’m sitting in a hide, and this goshawk is sitting there,” he says, pointing to a dappled bird of prey perched on a mossy log. “A red squirrel is bouncing around doing red squirrelly things. I’m thinking, ‘Finger on the trigger, get ready to go.’ All of a sudden, they stare at each other.” Lewis holds his breath. The Eurasian red squirrel fluffs its tail and perks its fiery ears. “Then they turn and walk away.”
He spares an extra beat to admire the magic of a perfect moment forever accessible via the time machine of photography.
“Before, the photos never drilled into my soul,” Lewis says, preferring the solitary process of the art to the company of finished prints. That was until 2015, when he watched Kingdom of the Ice Bear, a seven-minute web documentary featuring nature photographer Joshua Holko’s journey to polar bear backcountry.
“Marianne was upstairs making dinner. It was noodles and sauce — super delicious dinner. She makes great tomato sauce,” Lewis says in an aside. “I shout to her, ‘Hey, there’s this photographer out of Australia that is doing this tour to the North Pole. Can I go?’”
“Sure, dinner’s almost ready,” Marianne answered.
Just like that, Lewis departed North Carolina the following July and landed, four flights later, on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago far into the Arctic Ocean, near the top of the world. From there, Lewis, Holko and a dozen or so other adventuring photographers boarded a former lighthouse tender called the MS Origo. For three-and-a-half weeks, the explorers endured dive-bombs from overprotective Arctic terns and the putrid odor of hordes of walruses. They tallied a staggering 17 polar bear sightings on Kong Karls Land, the choicest hibernation destination in the far North.
The mug of one of those 17 is immortalized on the patrons’ right as they enter Chef Warren’s restaurant. The bear feels close. “The correct response is too close,” Lewis says, confessing that the bear was only a room’s length away.
“So here’s the gig. I’m going to die, right?” Lewis asks dryly as he eyes the way-too-close closeup of the magnificent sharp-toothed beast. “This is the way to do it. I want a good story, right? I want my son, Ben, to have a great story. ‘How did your dad die?’ ‘Oh, he got eaten by a polar bear.’ Now that’s a great story.”
Lewis grins and clicks on, very much alive.
He breezes through dozens of images of European bison, another pack of gray wolves, and an Arctic fox curled up tightly to warm itself on a frigid day. An hour after setting out for far-flung locales, he’s satisfied. Lewis powers down his whirlwind expedition. Having returned to that four-top in a coffeeshop, he takes a sip of his warm and watery latte.
Jenna Biter is a writer and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jennabiter@protonmail.com. Explore Chef Warren Lewis’s photography at warrenhenrylewis.com.