John Brill, veteran chef at dozens of Long Island restaurants, dead at 63

If you’ve dined out on Long Island in the last 30 years, there’s a good chance you ate a dish created by John Brill. The chef, who lived in North Bellmore and died in his sleep Saturday at 63, ran dozens of restaurant kitchens during his career. There were the eateries where he was the executive chef, among them 105 Harbor in Cold Spring Harbor, Four Food Studio & Cocktail Salon in Melville, Fish on Main in Port Washington and Primehouse Steak & Sushi in Garden City, his last gig. And there were many more restaurants that hired him as a consultant, perhaps to get the kitchen up and running or to clean up a mess left by a departing chef.

“No one had his passion,” said Primehouse owner Art Gustafson on Tuesday. “He was passionate about the next dish, the next ingredient, the next cuisine.”

That passion made Brill a tough boss. “On the line, he was like a cartoon of an angry bulldog,” Gustafson said. “He would be screaming at you, but if you proved yourself to him, after service he’d pull you aside in a grandpa sort of way and say, ‘Hey, I like what you did tonight.’ Pretty much everyone who was terrified of him in the beginning wound up loving him in the end. Sweet and sour, that’s what I always said about him.”

Brill was born in New Jersey and moved to Florida as an adolescent. Always an imposing physical presence, he played Division I  football for and graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science degree in business management from Kansas State University, said his wife, Elizabeth Brill, before getting an associate degree at the Culinary Institute of America in upstate Hyde Park.

As a young cook, he worked in Manhattan kitchens including Gotham Bar & Grill and Mesa Grill. According to longtime friend Tom Vlahakis, Brill's first Long Island restaurant was Shenanigans, later renamed Dr. Periwinkle’s, in Oceanside. “It was the early '90s,” Vlahakis recalled. “I was living in Oceanside and the restaurant was under construction. I went in and introduced myself and offered to do his menu. After that, he always took me with him when he opened a restaurant. I was part of the team.”

In 1997, Brill opened Chesapeake Bay in Long Beach. He was a partner in that venture, but that was the last time he took an ownership position, preferring to be a chef for hire. “He loved the challenge of opening up places,” said Michael Imbriano, a sales rep for the wholesaler US Foods. “He didn’t like to do the same thing day in, day out.”

Imbriano tried for months to gain Brill as a customer when he was running the kitchen at Jack Halyards American Bar & Grill in Oyster Bay in 2013. “John was very intimidating,” he conceded. “When he met you he might not give you the time of day.” But once Imbriano managed to win him over, he became "part John's team. Over the years I opened at least a dozen accounts because of him. And we became close friends.”

In 2019, Brill was hired by Justin Aronoff to be executive chef at BLVD25 in Manhasset. The restaurant was shuttered after the COVID lockdown in March 2020 but Aronoff was tapped by then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to provide meals to front-line workers at COVID-19 testing sites throughout New York City and Long Island. “We were making 10,000 meals a week for close to a year,” Aronoff said. “It kept getting bigger and bigger, and John would hire all these guys who had worked for him. He’d get up every morning at 3 a.m. He’d never done anything like it and he just loved it. I never met anyone who worked so hard.”

Three years ago, Brill met his last professional collaborator, restaurateur Gustafson. “I was in line to pay at Ideal Restaurant Supply [in Carle Place] and I hear the cashier say to the guy in front of me, ‘Here you go, Mr. Brill.’ I had heard about this guy for so long, and here he was.”

Gustafson brought Brill on to run the kitchen at Primehouse and, last year, together, they opened Stone Street Wood Fired Grill in Garden City. He knew that hanging on to his chef would not be easy. “John liked to come, to conquer, to move on. But I said to him, ‘Why don’t we figure out a way to keep you interested within the company? I have four restaurants you can play with.’ ”

Big, brassy and with a menu ranging from rotisserie chickens and rib roasts to wings and burgers, Stone Street also honored Brill with a 5-foot-round table painted to match the tattoos on his extravagantly inked forearms.

Outside the kitchen, Brill was a devoted family man. Elizabeth Brill remembered her husband as someone who loved golf, loved the beach, loved his dog and “was the most loving father in the world.” Besides his wife, he is survived by their daughters, Olivia, 19, and Emerson, 16. A funeral was held on Monday at Bellmore Funeral Home in North Bellmore.