Chef Eric Carter checks out of President Hotel, rolls into Barrel 31

New Year’s Eve is traditionally a holiday about endings. And so it was for Eric Carter, the 38-year-old executive chef at Providence New American Kitchen, the two-year-old dining room inside the President Hotel at 1329 Baltimore.

Carter’s last working day at the hotel — where he had overseen the cuisine for nearly five years, including several in the short-lived Drum Room restaurant — was New Year’s Eve. The following week, he started work at his new job: executive chef for the 10-month-old Barrel 31 at 400 East 31st Street.

Barrel 31, which is operated by Chris Ridler (Sol Cantina, the Drop), opened last spring as a “whiskey-themed gastropub.”  Carter’s planning to keep that concept intact, though he’ll introduce his own menu in late February. A couple of popular items from the current menu — the shepherd’s pie and the duck-fat fried chicken — will probably survive the transition, Carter says.

Those are heavy dishes, Carter agrees, perfect for cold winter nights. But the new menu will have a different focus: “It will be fresher and lighter with more regional ingredients,” Carter says. “It will read simpler, but I don’t want to scare anyone off.”

The long hours required as a hotel chef were the impetus for making the career move, he says.

“It was not unusual to get calls to come in at 4:30 a.m.” Carter says. “That was part of the job, I understood that, but it did wake up my wife and baby daughter. And we’re expecting our second child in three weeks.”

Carter isn’t unfamiliar with Martini Corner; his resume includes a one-year stint at the Drop, directly across the street from Barrel 31. 

“There are different challenges in this kind of venue,” Carter says, “but there’s still room for a lot of creativity.”