Former Valley chef William Bradley basks in New York Times’ spotlight

Former Valley chef William Bradley, now heading Addison at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar in San Diego, gets some major love from the New York Times’ T Magazine this week in a glowing profile headlined ‘‘This is a Chef’s Chef.’’

This is cooking worthy of celebrity, but Bradley — a San Diego native from a blue-collar family, who began working in professional kitchens at 17 and came to Addison from a luxury resort in Arizona — is what you might call a chef’s chef, contented simply to cook to the best of his ability for guests he knows will appreciate it. He has little interest in producing glossy cookbooks or appearing on food TV, which he feels has removed some of his profession’s mystique. Not to mention competitions: “I don’t like to see people lose,” he says. “This business is hard enough as it is.” His is an old-fashioned brand of luxury, marked by an unabashed embrace of traditional fine dining and a rejection of trends.

Bradley worked as sous chef at The Phoenician’s Mary Elaine’s in the early 2000s before becoming executive chef at Vu at the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale, where he was nominated for the James Beard “Rising Star Chef” award three years in a row.

In 2006, he returned to his hometown to helm Addison, which became the only San Diego restaurant to earn both Forbes (formerly Mobil) Five Star and AAA Five Diamond awards.

Read the entire Times profile here.