Cooking for People you Love
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: InGrano
At InGrano, head chef Samantha Detroy cooks with love, leads a close-knit team of four, and believes a kitchen has to feel like home.
At most restaurants, the workday begins with a rush. At InGrano, it begins with breakfast: eggs on toast with pickled shallots, made by the sous chef while the morning prep gets going. That small daily ritual tells you almost everything about how Samantha Detroy runs her kitchen. Samantha is the head chef at InGrano, the intimate West Annapolis restaurant owned by Adam Pusateri, and for her the kitchen isn’t just where the work happens. It’s a second home.
“We spend 16 hours a day in a place,” she says, “so we have to make it our home.” At InGrano, that’s not just a figure of speech. The kitchen is strung with Christmas lights and photos; one of her cooks hand-drew the restaurant, and the drawing hangs where everyone can see it. The day never feels as long as it sounds, she says, because the kitchen feels cozy.
Head Chef Samantha Detroy
From a morning workout to the last table
Samantha’s day begins at 7 with a workout, moves to food prep at 9:30 and then transitions to the slow, satisfying work of menu development. Lately that means an octopus dish she’s been refining to add to the menu soon. Orders are in by 5, and then the kitchen is cleaned to prepare for service. The 4:30- to-5:30 happy hour is a favorite stretch: half off a whole side of the menu, cocktails and wine, and a run of small bites she calls “so cute.” When the last table clears at nine, the team cleans up together, and more often than not, someone turns on the music.
Cooking for people you love
Two years in at InGrano, Samantha talks about food the way some people talk about family. The best advice she ever got has become her own compass: if she ever wakes up not wanting to cook, it’ll be time to do something else. So far, that morning hasn’t come.
“You can only cook for people that you love, and love to cook for people. They go hand in hand.”
To her, that sense of passion is something diners can taste. “I think that customers can definitely tell when the food is made with love versus made for consumption. I think those are two different things,” Samantha reflects.
A team of four, front and back as one
Ask Samantha what success looks like beyond the numbers, and she points straight at her team. The InGrano kitchen runs on just four people, in close quarters, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. What she’s proudest of is how completely the front and back of the house work as one, something she says she rarely found earlier in her career. She traces that culture back to leadership. Having once been a line cook without the tools she needed, she’s determined that her cooks and the wait staff always have what they ask for. The result is a shared joy that’s hard to put into words. Even on the nights they stay late to polish glasses and scrub floors, she says, the music comes on and the energy is good.
Iguanas, violins, and tomato pearls
There’s a playful, science-loving streak under all the warmth. Samantha’s cooking leans into technique like espumas, gels, and reverse-spherificated tomato pearls, and she lights up describing it. Her advice to anyone starting out is simply to go all in: follow a few recipes, don’t be scared, and let the craft pull you forward. Mistakes included. “Mistakes shape us and help us learn,” she says.
Off the line, she’s just as creative: she’s played the violin since third grade, loves interpretive hula hoop dancing, and shares her home with a four-foot pet iguana. Her creativity, it’s clear, runs well past the kitchen.
Find InGrano
Samantha Detroy, Head Chef • Owner, Adam Pusateri
17 Annapolis Street, Annapolis, MD 21401 • Open Mon–Sat 4:30–9:00 p.m., closed Sundays
