If it’s true that only six degrees of separation exist between every human on Earth, everyone’s third degree is Samantha Buyskes. At least, that’s how it seems.
Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates? Sam Buyskes. Ted Allen, the bespectacled host of “Chopped”? Busykes. Rosalía Chay, the chef who introduced a thousand-year-old Mayan tradition to the barbecue season of “Chef’s Table”? Yup. Anyone that’s eaten in a Cheesecake Factory in Atlanta, Boston, New York, Chicago, Pasadena, Redondo Beach, Woodland Hills or Marina del Rey? Well, they may not know Buyskes, but they owe her for their fettuccine alfredo.
After 36 years in the food and hospitality industries — 22 of which she spent in the Finger Lakes — Buyskes knows everyone. Her perpetual string of connections and colleagues stems from a life of constant evolution.
“I mean, that's what an entrepreneur is, right?” she said. “It’s somebody who has the ability to reinvent and to be flexible and rise above the storm.”
Buyskes was born into the storm of apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela was in prison, and the nation was convulsing to break free of state-enforced segregation. She remembers her mother, a fashion designer, shoemaker and jeweler, risking social and legal fallout by employing and raising money for African families.
Fifty-two years later, Buyskes is a mosaic of experiences that span thousands of miles and at least as many connections. At age 16, she started her first restaurant job at Ponderosa as a waitress, then quickly expanded to cashier work, washing dishes and working the line. A few years later, she worked as a server at a Cheesecake Factory in Atlanta. Management asked if she wanted to train the staff in a new Chicago location, which led to her traveling around the country opening restaurant after restaurant.
“I’m not (culinarily) trained or anything like that,” she said. “So my time with the Cheesecake Factory, I say, is my ‘college.’ I learned a ton about operations and consistency and quality and recipe development and opening and training and staff development. It was priceless.”
Her proverbial graduation took place after opening a location in Boston, where she found herself burned out in her twenties, working 80-hour weeks and looking for an exit. She started serving and bartending in a local bar whose clientele asked her to cook at their vacation homes in Newport, Rhode Island. She talked it over with a friend while “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” by the British soul and pop band Simply Red crooned from a nearby radio. click to enlarge
Considering her own auburn curls and taking a cue from fate, Buyskes dubbed her new company Simply Red Catering.
“That’s always been a part of what I bring to my life and my career, is the ability to pivot — and I hate that word,” Buyskes said, explaining that, for her, ‘pivot’ wears the pall of the pandemic.
During COVID, she left a brief, miserable stint at a Ramada to become a private chef for the exodus of quarantine-fatigued foodlovers who sought refuge from New York City and Philadelphia in the lake houses around Seneca. Her website houses a collection of customized menus that bear witness to her ability to pull together flavors, cultures and ingredients local to the Finger Lakes.
These private events are still an arm of Simply Red Events and Culinary Adventures, the umbrella covering Buyskes’s endeavors. Also included is FLX Farm to Fire, a traveling, open fire table inspired by her visit to a boucherie in Georgia (the state, not Republic — an important distinction that will become clear later), where she met an artist who builds barbecue smokers. For her, he built a live fire table — the same table that she convinced Daryl Hall’s staff to let her use on his show, “Live From Daryl’s House.” She also runs Simply Red Kitchen, a brick-and-mortar on Seneca Street in Geneva, where she preps for events and hosts regular pop-up dinners ranging from crawfish boils to ramen nights.
On the ‘adventure’ side of the business, Buyskes hosts culinary tours around the world. In 2025, she’ll shepherd small groups of guests through markets, cooking classes and kitchens in Peru, the Republic of Georgia, Turkey, Sicily and South Africa. When this article hits newsstands, she and about a dozen other people will be in Mexico for a 12-day journey tasting tacos al pastor in Mexico City, floating over the pyramids of Teotihuacán in hot air balloons and observing the Day of the Dead in an Oaxacan cemetery. Each anchor point of these respective itineraries is hosted by someone Buyskes met and broke bread with, metaphorically and literally.
“My soul is fed off of going to places that I haven’t been before … and connecting with locals,” she click to enlarge said. “I just have a knack for meeting the right people and being in places where I talk about what I'm doing and they’re like, ‘Oh you should meet so-and-so.’ And that so-and-so introduces me to so-and-so.”
One of the ‘so-and-sos’ Buyskes met during her many phases in the Finger Lakes was Michael Warren Thomas, who hosted a radio show about gardening, food and wine in the region for 26 years, earning him the moniker “the voice of the Finger Lakes.”
Thomas remembers interviewing her for the first time after her restaurant in Trumansburg, Simply Red Bistro, reopened in a new location at Sheldrake Point Winery (yet another pivot).
“I interviewed her about food and just found her to be endlessly creative,” he said. “If I wanted to become a chef, I think she would be one of the key people I’d want to work with to learn the ropes and become a smart chef — not just a good chef.”
Thomas, who has interviewed several hundred chefs and restaurateurs during his career, said Buyskes stands out not only because of her skill and savvy but how the ripples of her network buoy the place she calls home.
“It reinvigorates our region,” he said. “It brings some new blood, new people to the region. Some of those people stay, some go back to wherever they came from and talk about the Finger Lakes … She’s not paid to be a Finger Lakes promoter but she just is — that’s what she does because she loves the region.”
To Thomas’s point, Buyskes flows talent attention into the region and, when called for, taps the skilled here to lend a hand wherever it’s needed as an extension of the community she helped create.
“It’s really where I’ve planted my roots,” she said. “I’ve been here longer than I lived in South Africa. I’ve been here longer than I’ve lived anywhere in the United States.”
During the pandemic, Buyskes literally fed the people who have become her neighbors, working with the 501(c)(3) Blueprint Geneva to make 150 weekly meals for people in need. On Nov. 15, she’ll bring together FLX culinary talent for a tasting event at Bright Leaf Vineyard to benefit chefs impacted by Hurricane Helene.
“This is a community of people that I have found,” she said. “We lift each other up.”
Pete Wayner is a contributor to CITY.