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He found his nicheSpecial to the arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.20.2008
Just before Christmas every year, Clear Channel Outdoor's Tucson sales manager Bill Hussey engages in a ritual of many years' standing. He meets a friend for a glass of wine at Kingfisher restaurant and picks up a seasoned, ready-to-cook prime rib prepared by his old friend, Kingfisher partner Jim Murphy. Every year, Hussey says, the roast is something different and delicious.
And every year, Murphy calls a few days after Christmas, to ask Hussey how he liked the roast — and to challenge him to identify the marinade or rub ingredients.
"I'm never close," Hussey says. "And that is our family tradition."
Jim "Murph" Murphy is partner, co-chef and principal public persona of two successful Tucson restaurants, Kingfisher in Midtown, and Bluefin Seafood Bistro on the Northwest Side. He's a man who has succeeded long term in the notoriously fickle restaurant business by a combination of good food, niche marketing and making the customers he always calls "guests" feel that each eatery is a second home.
"My husband says it's kind of like 'Cheers,' " the fictional Boston bar immortalized in the long-running TV show, said Phyllis Gold, executive director of Satori school for gifted children, which both Murphy offspring attend. She's been a Kingfisher regular for the past decade.
"You go in there, and he knows you. As many years as I've gone in there, the same people work there. And they all remember your name, because they've been there forever. . . . It's just an incredible atmosphere in a restaurant."
The public face of the Kingfisher and Bluefin partnership wears a beard, a build and tousled white hair that demand comparisons to Santa — if S. Claus wore a Kingfisher T-shirt and black-and-white checked chef's pants. He's a terrific story teller who is devoted to his family, delivering his two kids to Satori's program via minivan each morning and attending school events in the afternoon between restaurant shifts.
He's also chef through and through, an owner who nonetheless spends much of his time working as line cook in one of his two kitchens.
Murphy, who turned 47 last week, was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Phoenix as one of six children. A couple of famous chefs were friends and neighbors in D.C., where both Murphy parents worked on Capitol Hill.
Later, the mother Murph describes as "a great cook" encouraged her gang to experiment in the kitchen — in a disciplined sort of way. Anyone who wanted to make dinner had to draw up a menu and a shopping list first. "The good thing was, if you were cooking, you weren't washing dishes or taking the trash out," he recalls. She also offered many dishes that were not exactly usual in 1960s middle-class Phoenix cuisine: fish, roast leg of lamb, sprouts, fresh whole hams.
The exposure took. Three of the five Murphy boys ultimately trained as chefs (although only two remain in the business today).
As a teenager, Jim Murphy worked his way through Jesuit prep school by cooking and cleaning for the priests on weekends. In 1978, he moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona.
Murphy recalls being a spectacularly undistinguished history student. But he found his niche at restaurants, landing at the legendary Jerome's in 1982.
The early 1980s were heady days in Tucson, the first explosion of fine cooking by chefs who were excited by the idea of marrying Southwest ingredients to classical techniques. A striking number of the chefs he worked with or met in the '80s still dominate the local restaurant scene today, from Janos Wilder (Janos and J-Bar) to the brothers Doug and Mitch Levy (Feast and Cuvée). "A lot of what I do now, I learned then." He also met and married his wife, Jackie.
After various stops around the United States and Arizona, Murphy decided in 1990 to move from the school of hard knocks to culinary school. He enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, then the nation's top training ground for chefs.
The decision was characteristic of Murphy, who friends and co-workers describe as possessing a phenomenal memory, as well as an analytical bent. "I knew how to do it (cook)," he says today. "I didn't know what was going on."
Today, each type of food at Bluefin and Kingfisher comes with its own "Bible" of recipes and techniques governing everything from how to cook to how to organize each plate.
"Murph is really, really good at giving an explanation that's very technical — you do this because if you don't, this will happen or that will happen," said Marianne Banes, another veteran of the 1980s restaurant scene who today is the pastry chef for both Bluefin and Kingfisher.
In 1993, Murph was still at Hyde Park when he and three other partners decided to open the restaurant that became Kingfisher. "We knew how we wanted it done, but the way was to be the boss." They also wanted their own building. "We'd all seen too many restaurants with leases where it ends and there is nothing left but the bills. We wanted to build something that would be an investment."
So Kingfisher was bought and born. When the new eatery opened that fall, it filled a serious void in Tucson cuisine. The Old Pueblo sported resort food, plenty of cheap Mexican and fast-food places, and several innovative restaurants where chefs experimented with Southwest ingredients.
But Kingfisher offered American regional food — and fish! — aimed at the middle-class diner who wanted good food and good service at a manageable price. The partners also launched Tucson's first late-night menu, and persevered with the idea until it stuck. Kingfisher rapidly became popular with university students and faculty, theater and concert goers, and, late at night, staff from other restaurants who still drop by to eat such solid entrees as fish and chips ($11) or New England clam chowder ($6).
Banes says Kingfisher has lasted 14 years "I think, because the food is not too fussy. When you order a steak, like our signature New York strip, it comes with a butter sauce or compound butter. It comes with our mashed potatoes; it comes with our vegetables. But it's very straightforward. The food you order is right there, center on the plate, not hidden by a lot of things."
"I'm not a plate painter," Murphy says, simply.
Murph and fellow chef/partner Jeff Azersky keep the food — and the staff — fresh with such innovations as the annual Road Trip — a fortnightly switch to a different style of American food that draws diners in the normally dead summer months. He regularly challenges staff to come up with dishes that exist only in his mind, not a recipe book.
In the spring of 2005, the three remaining partners of Murphy, Azersky and Tim Ivankovich launched Bluefin. After a rocky start as an East Coast seafood house (choose your fish, choose its preparation, choose your sides), the fin evolved into a menu that combines classic dishes like clams casino with more unusual presentations, such as grilled ahi tuna served with a chickpea aïoli and pesto.
The two restaurants draw distinctly different clientele — Murphy says Kingfisher's is younger and more inclined to order a bottle of wine; Bluefin's is older and more a cocktail and glass of wine. Murphy and Azersky trade off, each working as line cook part of the week at each restaurant.
Longtime friends say that Murphy is a generous giver, but one who generally winds up at his stove, whether teaching Satori kids how to prepare a Thanksgiving feast, or cooking T-day dinner for the homeless at a local church. If you're fighting cancer and a regular, Murph has been known to deliver a meal to your hospital bed — even if you mischievously request a fall menu item in July. There's little room for interests outside kids and kitchen.
"I've always admired him because he works so hard and so many hours," Hussey said. "You've got to be there to make it work, and he does."
● Rebecca Boren is a Tucson-based freelance writer.
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