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Boston Globe

Chris Anderson was Dwayne ‘The Rock' Johnson's personal chef. Now he's rocking the kitchen at Clover.

Advertisement It started off when I was young. I grew up in Missouri. I call myself 'Midwest Boy.' My parents were always really hard workers. Growing up, I filled my time with two things. One was playing basketball — I just loved the competitive grind and refinement of working out every day. Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up Two was, I wanted to work. At 13, one of my first jobs was at a fruit stand. I worked there on the weekends and after school. The owner had this tremendous passion for produce, and he would wake up at 1 in the morning and drive down into St. Louis, where the river was, and all the big farmers' markets, and he would scope out the best produce. My favorite food memory is the first time I had a perfect, ripe, in-season white peach. I also remember him cracking open a watermelon. It really got me excited; every day, I wanted to try and eat everything. My next few jobs were in local restaurants around town. I loved the grind, the hard work, the physicality, and nature of the business, working with my hands and producing something. How did you get hired by The Rock? I got a phone call from Johnson & Wales saying that they had an inquiry from Dwayne Johnson, The Rock. He was looking for a chef with a nutrition background. They asked me if I wanted to represent Johnson & Wales, and I did. Shortly thereafter, I found myself moving to Florida. Advertisement Did you have to audition with food? What was that like? I flew down and interviewed with the family, cooked for them for three days, and then flew back. They went through the interview process with other folks, and it was a long waiting period. At some point, they got back to me and offered me the position to come down. I had made a big menu, and they brought their family over — I have to be somewhat cautious of NDA stuff — but I cooked a slew of different family-style offerings that were all lean and in the spa cuisine spectrum. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson attends the UK Premiere of "Moana 2" at Cineworld Leicester Square on Nov. 24, 2024, in London. Tim P. Whitby/Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for The Walt Disney Company Limited Did you have to work all day, every day? It was five days a week. Whenever the family would travel, I would travel with them to support him and his lifestyle. He's very into his body and image. It's his brand, so he takes it seriously. A lot of that was precision, making sure he had access to food all day long that was within his prescribed macros. He really showed me what discipline, hard work, showing up every day and being consistent is — really, what's achievable and attainable in a lifetime. I did that for four years. It was an amazing job. But there was also a part of me that wasn't settled. I'm pouring all my energy into helping one of the most amazing people on earth, but I wanted a bigger impact, and I wanted to affect more than just one person or one family. I really wanted to build something bigger than myself. Advertisement My girlfriend, now wife, lived in Boston, and she didn't like Florida. I ended up coming up to Boston, proposing to her, and settling down, and I came across Clover. It aligned with my ideals of wanting to change the way people are eating food and to help better people's lives. I started in 2008, and I was one of the first employees on the food truck. A customer gets a sandwich from the Clover food truck in April 2014. Lane Turner/Globe staff Did that feel like a gamble, to go from working for a celebrity to a food truck? It was a huge gamble, but there was this burning desire. I was young at the time, so I had a huge appetite for risk and didn't have a lot to lose. I didn't want to come into a big corporate company; I really wanted to come in and build a company from the ground up. Let's talk about the genesis of Clover, because you've been there since basically the beginning. There's been a lot of changes. There were bumps in the road. There were some bumps in the road. Anybody who's in this business knows that it's not an easy one. You wake up, and you're constantly tackling the headwinds in front of you — but you have a passion for the business and in what you do, and you're constantly trying to evolve and figure out what's next. The pandemic really hit us hard in the sense that our locations were in the city and city environments, and at that point, the majority of folks in the area were working from home. It put us in a challenging position, but it allowed us to then expand. The primary focus in 2019 was restaurants, and our customers were coming in every day to the office. … Some folks were eating with us two, three times a week. Some people were eating with us two, three times a day. When COVID hit, people were not even coming to work, or they were coming to the office once a week, and it gradually came back over time. But we had to meet people where they were. Advertisement We went through a rapid innovation period over the last four years where we developed a meal box program and came up with a subscription service. We had different boxes: plant-based burgers, plant-based pizza, grain bowls, salad bowls, soup boxes. People could sign up for boxes, and we would deliver them once a week, and depending on what box you signed up for, it would either feed two to three people for a small box or four to five people for a large box. We could start to meet their food needs at home. We expanded into third-party delivery quite extensively. We developed a big, expansive corporate catering program so we could reach people in the office, because we were finding that a lot of people who were coming in two or three days a week were super-focused and didn't leave the office. We started making meal boxes for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, and the Super Bowl. Anything that was celebrated with food, we would take that opportunity to meet people where they were. It was a rapid innovation and expansion. It was a lot of fun for me, because we've been focused on restaurants so much, and that allowed us to make all these other really wonderful creations in the plant space, like plant-based burgers, grain bowls, salad bowls, and tacos. Advertisement How does Clover stay viable in the landscape with so many healthy, fast-casual places? Why do people keep coming back? That's a great question. I think, now more than ever, the landscape is extremely competitive and saturated. And I think at the core of what we do is: We make delicious and the most amazing food. For us to stay competitive, we have to source the best ingredients and be extremely innovative on the culinary side. That's a lot of hard work, and it just revolves around our supply chain, our local farmers. We have a whole list of those guys: Verrill Farm, Brookford Farm, Next Barn Over, Winter Moon Roots. It's really developing partnerships with those guys so that we know what's coming off the farm, and we know what they grow best to taste the best. Then we can time the menu and innovate where we have gaps and put out food that we know is going to highlight those vegetables and be amazing. A chickpea fritter sandwich at Clover. Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff/file You know, sometimes folks try to call us a vegetarian restaurant. But our standpoint is always: We're trying to make the most delicious food that just happens to be vegetarian. Over 90 percent of our customer base is meat-eaters, so it's really making that craveable food that's really exciting for folks. Ayr Muir was the face of Clover for so long. What was that transition like? There was so much going on when we were filing for restructuring, and there were a ton of changes being made — trying to look at restaurants that did or didn't make sense anymore. We had to close a few that we couldn't renegotiate rents on and restructure personnel. It was all about being honest, transparent, and open with everybody. We met a lot within the team and as an entire company, and we were going down a path that none of us had been on before. It was day by day, week by week, month by month, and we just talked through every step. What we didn't want to change was the core of Clover, the food and supply chain. We didn't want to skimp or change any of the products. I was buying great-quality ingredients and making delicious food. That was a non-starter. From there, we renegotiated a lot of leases and operated really lean as a team. The third part was reaching people where they are: How do we sell more food? That's where we evolved into different business verticals. Did working for The Rock influence your menu development at Clover? Protein was a major focus with him, and a lot of that translates to our customs at Clover. Folks are wondering if they eat enough protein when they dine with us. It's always part of our development criteria. Our pita alone has 10 grams of protein because we use 100 percent whole-wheat ground fresh from Maine's Grains. We then layer on different beans, pulses, and other plant-based ingredients to make sure we're at a level that people feel good about. It's one of the hurdles we look at during the invocation process. Let's talk about your life in Boston beyond Clover. Where do you eat when you're not working? My wife went to culinary school with me. She's a real estate agent, now very successful, but she loves food. She cooks dinner for our family almost every night, because I come home later. She's the best cook, really. I also love Oleana and Sofra. Every detail is spot on. One of my most memorable dinners at Oleana was a vegetarian tasting, and everything was so complex: the flavors and the textures. Every bite was just delicious. My family loves ramen and pizza. We love to order from Old School Pizza in Wellesley and Little Big Diner for ramen in Newton. What do you wish our food scene did better? Even in the suburbs, it's challenging that we don't have as many restaurants offering vegetables — you still see a lot of things that aren't vegetable-heavy. I would love to see the local farms and produce working more with the local mom-and-pops and getting away from the mainstream food supply. What's your favorite food to eat for pure pleasure? Anything braised. I love braised, whether it's meat or vegetables. I just love the complexity of flavors. And we have a garden in my backyard that my kids love to play in, so it's not so much a guilty pleasure but anything with tomatoes: black tomatoes, blue tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, purple tomatoes, all the varietals. We have an obsession with tomatoes in our family. You know, I have never heard of a blue tomato. Oh, we have black, blue, yellow, green, and — I call them zebra. One of the first tomatoes my son ever picked was a black tomato. It has outrageous flavor. Tell me a secret about Clover. Is there an off-menu item that only insiders ask for? Is there a fun factoid that nobody knows? Give me a little veggie dirt. We've evolved so much. We had a secret menu that we didn't talk about a ton, but we used to have a Russian-style barbecue sandwich, with seitan. We'd take our classic barbecue seitan, and we would add pickled cabbage to it, and people just loved it. The very first thing I made for that box program was a Romesco sauce. I eat it with almost anything. It ended up being the most sought after and requested thing. We got endless emails for it. Probably another secret menu item is our cheesy grits. We'll bring it back every once a while to satisfy those customers. It's one of the things that we got the most emails about after we test-launched. What food would you never eat again? Do you have a food that you absolutely hate? I always tell people that I don't discriminate against food. I eat everything. I'm trying to think of some funky, fermented stuff? But I love pierogies. I grew up Polish. Interview was edited and condensed. Kara Baskin can be reached at