She was 28, in her first year running Lautrec, when the restaurant earned a Forbes five-star rating.
“I was taking my team to the Inn at Little Washington [in Virginia] for dinner. I wanted them to experience a restaurant where I had worked—a five-star restaurant,” Butterworth said. “It ended up being a celebration. The Forbes ratings had just come out,
and we found out that our own restaurant—Lautrec—had gotten five stars.”
The chef at the inn, Patrick O’Connell, told her he didn’t know of another female chef at a five-star restaurant.
“He did some research, and that’s when we found out that not only was I the first female chef to have a five-star restaurant, I was also the youngest,” she said.
Under Butterworth’s leadership, Lautrec has earned both Forbes and AAA top ratings continuously since 2009, and it’s one of only 30 restaurants in the world to hold both distinctions in each of the last 10 years.
If Butterworth has rocketed to the top of her field, IUP’s culinary school was unquestionably her launching pad. Guiding forces were everywhere on the academy’s Punxsutawney campus.
“All of the professors there were amazing,” Butterworth said. She specifically mentioned current faculty members Lynn Pike ’04, M’06, chair, Martha Blake ’05, M’09, and Hilary DeMane and faculty emeriti Albert Wutsch ’03, former chair, and Mindy Wygonik
’90, M’91, who taught computer, business, and other classes at the academy.
“They were all really impactful,” Butterworth said.
A little clairvoyant, too. They sensed she was destined for great things.
“From the very beginning,” Blake said, “she was extremely focused and really showed the kind of flame, the passion, that we see in our very special students. The ones you just know are going to do something, and it’s going to be pretty spectacular.”
Pike believes Butterworth’s willingness to evaluate her work objectively proved especially beneficial.
“I think part of anyone’s success is being able to accept where you have failed or had difficulty and to look at that and make improvements,” she said. “If you can critique yourself, take an honest look at how you’re doing, and then work to improve yourself,
that’s so important. I think Kristin has been able to embrace that and use that to catapult herself through the industry.”
Indeed, Butterworth’s rise in her profession was practically meteoric. After completing her externship in Arizona and graduating with honors from the culinary academy, she landed a job at Nemacolin and went from cook to sous chef within two years. From
there, she helped open the Georgian Room at Georgia’s five-star Sea Island resort, where she worked her way up from cook to sous chef, was hired as sous chef at the Inn at Little Washington, and joined Lautrec in 2010, assuming responsibility for
managing the restaurant.
“He did some research, and that’s when we found out that not only was I the first female chef to have a five-star restaurant, I was also the youngest.”
In the veritable blink of an eye, the Northern Cambria native made the leap from small-town girl who enjoyed cooking for her family to cooking for the rich and famous, some of whom arrive at Nemacolin via the resort’s private airstrip. Since taking the
reins, she has strived to remove perceived stuffiness from fine dining. A pancake order at Lautrec is accompanied by bourbon barrel-aged maple syrup served in a vintage Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle, name-dropping in a fashion that invariably elicits
giggles from diners. A meal of charred octopus, wood-oven-roasted bison, or Hokkaido scallops is capped by a visit from an old-fashioned candy cart that features everything from imported truffles to goldfish crackers. Even the most humorless of diners
will crack a smile as servers invite them to select their favorites.
“A lot of times, fine dining has a certain pretentiousness to it, and people don’t feel comfortable,” Butterworth said. “So my goal is to make sure that it’s comfortable and relatable to everybody. This experience shouldn’t be, oh my gosh, I don’t know
which fork to use. It should be fun.”
Butterworth has garnered plenty of praise for both her casual approach to fine dining and her skill and creativity in the kitchen. She is, for example, a three-time semifinalist for a James Beard award as the premier chef in the Mid-Atlantic region.
“It’s a huge honor even to be considered for it,” Butterworth said. “It’s great for the restaurant—it recognizes my team and the amazing things they’re accomplishing, so it’s not just a nod to me. One person can’t run a restaurant. I’m lucky to have an
amazing team behind me.”