Chef William Farrington began his foray into food in his personal kitchen breaking down whole pigs for fun and experimenting with new flavors and techniques. Once he decided to become a professional chef, William gave up a career, sold everything, and moved across the country to wash dishes for a small hourly wage, just to learn.

In Napa Valley, he attended the Culinary Institute of America and worked his way through some of the best kitchens with the intention of learning as much as he could as quickly as he could. Chef Will has been called the “swiss army knife” in the kitchen.

Chef William Farrington, voted Best Chef of the Emerald Coast in 2022, will host an intimate and immersive dining experience at M&P featuring sophisticated American food.

Why American food? Generally, nobody knows what American food is, or they assume it’s Meat and Potatoes. If you go to a fine dining restaurant in this country, it is usually Asian influenced, or Italian, or French. In almost every culture around the world, food is fundamental to people’s identity; it tells the story of who they are and where they are from. In most parts of America, we don’t identify food with that same ancestral connection. That is something we at M&P don’t understand.

We have every possible climate zone and terroir here in this country to harvest some of the best food in the world. Yes, we have a lot of meat and potatoes. Our goal is to show people what those foods are capable of, what they pair well with, and to hopefully inspire a community to think about American food as something we should be proud of.

M&P is a small immersive dining experience designed to bring people together over their love of food. Our vision is to present food to people that they are familiar with, but elevate it in ways that showcase the ingredient in its simplest form, and in its most versatile.

Chef William will operate an intimate dining experience with food that expresses a concept he has long been thinking about. We call it American Omakase. There is a trend in fine dining called Omakase, which is a Japanese concept that means “I leave it up to you.” In restaurant culture, it is a meal selected by the chef, and it is generally a multi course sushi tasting menu. We want to take this concept, but apply it to American food.

The menu at M&P will be ever-changing based on seasonality and availability. A menu item could be inspired by a technique we want to showcase, or by an ingredient, or perhaps just because it’s something we like to eat and it’s available that time of year, e.g., truffles, stone crab.

On many occasions throughout the year, we will have special dining nights with entirely new menus for one or two nights only to showcase said techniques, ingredients, etc. We will even give our kitchen staff the opportunity to come up with menus of their own as a “pop-up restaurant.”