Brady Duhame, who has been the executive chef at Saratoga Springs restaurants including 15 Church and Sperry’s, was a part of the culinary management team for NeoVista Hospitality Group, which revived Jack’s Oyster House brand in Albany.
Kim Otis/Courtesy Brady Duhame
In cooking, Chef Brady Duhame loved “making beautiful things for people,” his brother Sean Duhame said.
Owner of 15 Church Paul McCullough, front, and Chef Brady Duhame, on Sept. 10, 2014, in Saratoga Springs.
Michael P. Farrell
Chefs, from left, Brady Duhame of 15 Church in Saratoga Springs, Jim Rua or Cafe Capriccio and Ric Orlando of New World Bistro Bar, both in Albany, chat during the Wine & Dine for the Arts news conference on Oct. 15, 2014, at the Palace Theatre.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Growing up at 135 Nelson Ave. in the Spa City, Brady “Buddha” Duhame wasn’t a great student. Sports weren’t his thing either. However, there was another route available for him to reach success: making food.
His mother noticed that he would find joy in pulling out materials from the kitchen cabinets and seeing what worked. So she nudged him to go to trade school. He obliged “semi-willingly,” according to his younger brother, Sean Duhame.
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“And then from there, I’m telling you every weekend our kitchen was a wreck, so I think my mother was like, ‘What have I done?’” Sean said with a laugh.
What eventually followed was a culinary legacy built from gusto, cultivated in kitchens across the Northeast, including New York City, and cemented in standout Capital Region restaurants. Jack’s Oyster House, 15 Church, Max London’s and Angelo’s Prime Bar + Grill are among those on the list.
Brady died from complications with cancer on Thursday at his friend Julie Dwyer’s home in Schuylerville. He was 55 years old.
The same day, longtime friend and former kitchen mentee Deanna Trip thought about calling him to tell him that she’s putting his name on her menu for a zeppole recipe, a type of Italian doughnut. Trip owns Bagels By Dee in Catskill. She never did.
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“I just didn’t know he was still so sick,” she said. “I had literally texted him like a month ago discussing the new venture that I’m doing now.”
Brady meant a lot to Trip, who she called for advice over the last 16 years. She met him while working at the Old Mill Inn on Long Island while she was on break from culinary school in the early 2010s, and later worked at a different restaurant in Cape Cod where he served as chef.
About a year ago, she found a leather book Brady gifted her while she was working with him. It was inscribed with a page reading, “cuisine = passion” — a motto she heard a lot from Brady while working in his kitchen.
For him, that passion has been described as intense. Workers would know what their expectation was, Trip said.
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“I would hand him stuff and I knew it was going to come back,” she recalled. “But then the best part was after every shift, at least for me, we would sit, have a drink, and he would tell me, ‘I only push you like that because I know it’s in you.’”
Chef Toby Hill, who worked with him in Massachusetts in the middle of his career, said that Brady was a chef in “every aspect of his life” and sometimes felt like he wasn’t “in it enough” when he was around him.
Hill was in awe of the recipes, which Brady let him borrow. Notably, this included his brick chicken, a brick-pressed thigh and wing cooked evenly to a crisp.
“He’s a legend that deserved a whole lot more than he got,” Hill said. “Truly, and he’s literally the greatest chef that I’ve ever been in the presence of.”
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Brady’s training started at Siro’s Restaurant in Saratoga Springs, not far from his childhood home. He later was classically trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park before embarking into the rough-and-tumble New York City culinary world in the 1990s.
Brady worked to improve his craft among industry heavyweights in the scene, working at joints like Bouley, Picholine and the Park Avenue Cafe. At one point in 1999, his work at Vox was included in a New York Times review. “Brady Duhame, a graduate of Bouley Bakery, Picholine and Asia de Cuba, has devised a compact world tour of a menu that’s sneakily inventive when it works, pointless when it doesn’t,” the review read.
Sean said that his brother would often fall asleep on the train home to Queens, shower and go back to work in Manhattan. He loved the big city hustle and the “sport” of working on a team, Sean recalled.
“I just think he loved the performance and the act of it,” the younger brother said. “But really, what he loved was making beautiful things for people. Food was his love language as his art, but it was his way of connecting with people.”
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By the late 2000s, Brady was regularly taking executive chef roles, at least two of which were in New York City.
Then he came back to Saratoga Springs. According to Sean, he felt accomplished and was tired of the Manhattan scene. Plus, Brady loved his hometown.
And that love was reciprocated. Otis Maxwell, a city resident and former city Democratic Party chair, became enamored with Brady’s menu after becoming executive chef at 15 Church in 2014. He especially enjoyed the brisket-, short-rib- and sirloin-blended Brady Burger.
“Everybody now has a big high-end burger, but his was just amazing,” Maxwell recalled. “The meat was so tender, served with caramelized onions and a sauce he came up with, and it was just so good … I’m thinking about it now.”
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He followed him wherever he went after leaving 15 Church. Along with the food, this is partially because Maxwell and Brady became friends. The chef even used San Francisco area natives Maxwell and his wife as a test audience to try a ramen broth.
This summer, Maxwell owed him lunch, so he asked Brady if he had any time available to meet up.
“And he said, ‘Well, yeah, pretty soon, but I’m worried about my cancer coming back. I just got a bad report,’” Maxwell recalled. “That was in early July and now we’re late September. Things having moved that fast is just frightening and so sad because he is such a loss.”
Brady was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020. Sean said that his brother didn’t talk about it at first and struggled to confront it, but then went “headlong” into treatment with a double mastectomy.
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The chef was working at Sperry’s Restaurant, co-owned by former Saratoga Springs Mayor Scott Johnson at the time. Brady took a leave of absence for a while and returned to the eatery before health problems hit him again, Johnson said. The former Republican mayor thought the chef was in the clear by the time he got a job at Jack’s Oyster House in 2025.
“Brady had the unique capacity to have a good perspective on many things in life,” Johnson told the Times Union. “His talent was unsurpassed, but he also never forgot to have a good time along the way.”
A fundraiser will be held at Clancy’s Tavern from 1 to 4 p.m. on Oct. 4 to pay for Brady’s end-of-life care.
Dining and Cooking