Chef overcame abandonment and addiction to lead kitchen at St. Paul’s Golden Thyme

The Kentucky butter cake at Golden Thyme Restaurant & Bar in St. Paul is spongy, it melts in your mouth and it’s a recipe that illustrates how executive chef Adam Randall‘s complicated past made him who he is now.

His rough start began when he was 5 and his mom left him and his sister in an abandoned house. Hungry and desperate, he entered the kitchen.

“We had seen our mother cook spaghetti noodles and mix it with butter, and so that’s the first time I cooked anything,” Randall said.

When he entered the foster care system, his first foster mother was gone for dinner most nights. On Sundays, she was in the kitchen all day, making meals and teaching Randall how to cook and feed himself. Now, he can peel a potato — with a knife like she taught him — faster than any of the cooks in his kitchen.

But the butter cake? That’s from foster mother No. 2.

“I wouldn’t say she was a great cook ... but she was an adventurous cook,” Randall said.

Throughout Randall’s chef career, the butter cake ended up on five different menus, served five different ways, still made with a box of Duncan Hines.

At 14, Randall got his first job at the McDonald’s in Minneapolis’ Uptown. Then, when he was a freshman at Benilde-St. Margaret’s in St. Louis Park, he spent lunch periods working in the kitchen. Not quite the traditional brigade de cuisine he’s used to now.

Around that time, Randall met a girl named Barbara at the St. Louis Park Roller Garden.

“Our first date was the day after I graduated from high school in 1981, and we have literally been together since June 10, 1981. Yep, I remember the date. It’s a good date,” Randall said.

Their first kiss, at the same roller rink, was captured by a friend’s Polaroid camera. Twenty years later, the couple ran into the photographer at Target, and their friend mailed them the photo. When the garden closed, they went back one last time and re-created that memory.

“The truth is, we were truly destined to be together,” he said.

He got only 10 years with them before they died, but he considers them the closest to a true mom and dad he’s ever had.

“It takes a true individual to become a dad, and I’d like to say that I learned a lot from him as to how to be a dad,” Randall said.

Instead of culinary school, he went to the University of Minnesota to pursue a degree in psychology.

But the kitchen kept calling.

Randall left school and started working at a Leann Chin in downtown Minneapolis. That job led to a spot at a restaurant on the IDS tower’s 50th floor, where during his three years there, Randall benefited from a chef and staff who showed him how to cook everything from scratch.

It was Feb. 19, 1997, when Randall used the last of his money on bus fare to his psychiatrist’s office. The doctor told Randall that he could get him into a rehab on Monday.

“I said, ‘If I wait till Monday, I’m going to be dead,’” he responded.

With no money left for the bus, he walked in the snow to Fairview Hospital. And as he crossed the Mississippi, he dropped his weed, crack and crack pipe into the river, never looking back.

In 2008 when the economy tanked, he couldn’t get a job in a kitchen without a culinary degree. So after working 20 years in the industry, he went to St. Paul College. His degree landed him a job as executive chef at Abbott Northwestern Hospital.

Later in his career, Randall would start to branch out on his own, starting with the opportunity to open a restaurant where he had an ownership stake. It was called Caribbean Smokehouse in Stillwater, and while his food received great reviews, the restaurant shuttered in 2019. That same week, his birth mother died. He once again questioned his trajectory in life.

But the kitchen came calling once again. After just a few months at his new job, and with COVID-19 in its early stages, he got a phone call from Rosedale Center, offering him a stall of his own. It was tempting, so Randall took it, and named it Adam’s Soul to Go (now Tio’s Tacos) featuring barbecue and tacos.

He opened it with Turner Lee, one of his two sons, who took over when Randall went to Golden Thyme. At the Selby Avenue restaurant, Randall is dishing up New Orleans-inspired fare.

Lee knows that Golden Thyme is in good hands with his father, because for a restaurant whose mission goes beyond its four walls, they chose a chef who will always strive to fit what the community needs. Because that’s how he was raised. And St. Paul, where he was born, is near and dear to his heart.

“He is always learning and willing to adapt, and especially as a chef, that’s something that chefs don’t do,” Lee said. “He’s shown time and time again, he’s willing to learn and he’s willing to change and grow.”