It's a long way from Livingston, Mont., to Southern California. More than 1,200 miles.

It's an even longer way from peeling carrots at a bare-basics dude ranch outside the tiny town of 7,000 to garnishing red-beet risotto with fresh black truffles at the chic Four Seasons Aviara Resort in Carlsbad.

Just ask Bruce Logue. The new chef of Vivace has traveled that road, with many interesting and self-defining stops along the way.

"I was only 14 years old when I started working summers in the kitchen at the guest ranch," he said, beginning his story on a sunny afternoon in the Vivace kitchen.

"It was really hard work, and it was so cold in the mornings. I only got to go home on weekends."

He learned little about sophisticated cooking techniques but a lot about working hard.

"The chef was a first generation Italian-American, a pretty hard-core New York chef. He kept telling me, 'Don't make the same mistake I did ... get a formal education.'"

The next stop on the career highway for Logue was the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont.

Armed with a degree and a passion to learn more about fine dining and to introduce others to new foods, Logue cooked in a series of restaurants around the country.

"I looked for towns that were interesting and chefs who could teach me a lot," he said, annotating the travelogue.

Jackson Hole. "I skied every day till 2, then worked until late at night. It was an ideal living situation for a guy in his 20s."

Atlanta. "I went to work with Jean Banchet (renowned former chef-owner of Le Francais outside Chicago). The food was great, but what went on behind the food was horrible. He was a tyrant. He never talked to us.

"From the other French guys, I learned all about the hierarchy in a kitchen ... and all the classic cooking techniques."

Boston. "Being chef at Bricco (in Boston's Italian North End neighborhood) gave me a real introduction to Italian food. But working one year at Radius was one of the most defining cooking experiences of my life. You don't go to a restaurant like that to work your way up in the kitchen.
You go to play with the best ingredients you can imagine and to watch really talented chefs like (chef-owner) Michael Schlow, who won the James Beard award (Best Chef, Northeast) the month before I arrived."

New York. "I decided I wanted to experience New York City, and I lucked out. Friends of mine in the Babbo kitchen called me when a place became available. With Mario (Batali), I fell in love with Italian food and discovered that it's my real passion. It's kind of this soul thing."

About eight months ago, Logue added San Diego to the itinerary and set out to share "this soul thing" with his staff at Vivace.

Huddled with several cooks on a recent afternoon, he stressed the importance of using seasonal ingredients as he created a salad of bitter chicory with shaved fennel and blood-orange segments.

"We'll reduce the blood-orange juice and add it to a vinaigrette with extra virgin olive oil and shallots," he explained to everyone at the counter. "And maybe we'll add some coppa," he added, referring to the Italian-style salami he buys from Mario Batali's father, Armandino, who owns Salumi in Seattle.

Flavors in focus

With his boyish face, dusty blond hair – at least what there is of it; shorter is easier when you ride a motorcycle to work every day – and bluish eyes that dance behind tortoise-shell glasses, Logue looks more like a high-school linebacker than an up-and-coming chef.

The 30-year-old has a bracelet tattooed on his wrist and what he calls "weird cycling socks" on his feet. The tattoo, inscribed with the name "Bludo," is a memorial to his Rottweiler, who died of cancer at age 7 while Logue was living in New York.

The socks – a nod to his mentor, Mario Batali of orange clogs fame – come in lots of colors and patterns. Today's are white with a flashy red-and-black print border.

Logue and eight cooks do all the planning, preparation and cooking for the dinners that are served nightly to about 100 guests at Vivace. There are no prep cooks, no potato peelers to feel like second-class citizens. Instead of Jean Banchet hierarchy, there's Bruce Logue teamwork.

Servers, too, are part of the team. Each afternoon at 4:45, Logue and his cooks plate the night's specials for the serving staff to taste.

He also prepares any dish he feels the servers need to understand better. Servers and cooks gather in the kitchen, tasting one dish, tossing the used forks into a large silver bowl and moving along to the next creation.

All the while, Logue talks about the dish, asks questions and invites suggestions for wines that would work well with it.

Today's focus is an Italian fish called branzino (a type of sea bass) that will be garnished with fennel, fingerling potatoes and poached garlic.

"Blood oranges are just peaking," Logue enthused while inhaling the aroma of a cup of just-squeezed juice. "So I like to put them in everything I can." The beneficiary this day was the branzino, pan-seared on the skin side until crispy, cut into two pieces and layered with a rich puree of fresh fennel and olive oil.

"We'll finish the plate with a blood-orange citronette," he told his crew. "We call it that because we don't use vinegar, but rather citrus juices."

Nods all around from the gathered group. Murmurs of approval. Hmmmms of revelation.

At Vivace, Logue has taken to calling his food Interpretive Regional Italian Cuisine, a mouthful of mumbo-jumbo that sounds like it was dreamed up by PR types. And, in fact, Logue admits that he and members of the Four Seasons team came up with the descriptor in a powwow.

But in one appreciative diner's opinion, a far better description would be Italian From the Heart.

That certainly describes his pork or wild boar that is brined, cooked over a wood-burning grill, then served with braised red cabbage dotted with pancetta and fresh chestnuts.

That sums up his simple, sublime fresh asparagus, too. The spears are "burnished" on a flattop grill, then topped with a soft-centered three-minute egg and shavings of fragrant Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Logue's Italian "soul thing" also comes through in a pristine olive oil-poached halibut that balances the pure flavor of seafood from Alaska's icy waters with the sweetness of fresh white corn and the earthiness of chanterelle mushrooms.

"I like to lighten things up but still be true to Nonna," Logue explained, citing the universal Italian grandma as his inspiration. "My food must retain the essence and the tradition of every dish, what Mario (Batali) calls the essence of Nonna."

It would be a mighty fussy grandma who didn't approve of Logue's al dente risotto, tinted pink with a puree of red beets and flecked with bits of roasted beets and shaved truffles; or his simple dish of penne tossed with superb cherry tomatoes and basil.

To-do list

To accompany Logue's menu transformation, Vivace has undergone a discreet makeover. The seating has been changed, giving diners more comfy, overstuffed banquettes and a better view of the fire in the handsome stone fireplace.

A new bar-lounge, Brioso, has been created at the entrance to Vivace, enabling guests to sip wine and nibble bite-sized panini either as a prelude to dinner in Vivace or in lieu of that dinner.

Both areas boast the rich fabrics, dramatic floral arrangements, expert lighting and elegant table settings that have long made Vivace one of San Diego County's most beautiful restaurants.

"Everything is scrutinized in a restaurant of this caliber, and there are so many details to deal with," Logue said. "It's very exciting."

Logue views the latest stop on his career highway as a long-term layover. "Oh, yeah," he shouted when asked if this job is a keeper. "Taking a great restaurant like Vivace and making it better is a real challenge.

"Going to work for a well-known chef in New York City is easy. But here I have to deal with everything."

"Everything" includes ordering foodstuffs, maintenance of a large kitchen partially shared with other resort restaurants, training staff, and the creation and pricing of a daily menu.

"I actually sit down and write the menu out every day, translating Italian expressions and writing food descriptions that people will be interested in," he said.

When he's not searing sea bass, arranging paper-thin peach slices under a cloud of mascarpone and amaretti dust, or writing menus, Logue might be tending the robust garden at the Oceanside home he shares with his wife, Anna, or riding his cherished motorcycle.

"Anna deals more with the flowers, and I do the tomato plants and cantaloupe and garlic and radicchio and herbs and... " Logue's voice trailed off in amazement at the concept of a year-round garden. "I have an eggplant that's still producing and just might make it through the winter."

Days off often find Logue zooming through the countryside around Palomar Mountain on his Italian-made Aprilia motorcycle, riding mountain bikes on neighborhood trails with his wife.

Most people may eschew a busman's holiday, but Logue's idea of a dream vacation is renting a house in some far-flung part of the world and cooking lunch and dinner every day for dozens of visiting family members and friends. The last such adventure was a month in Biarritz, France.

"I loved it – the shopping scene, the great ingredients, and cooking simple, market-driven meals. It was a great trip.

"But," he added with a chagrined laugh, "I'm still paying for it."