photo by: Richard Gwin

Betty Jane Moore has celebrated her past five birthdays at Pachamamas. At this year's celebration on Feb. 14, former Pachamamas pastry chef Jay Tovar-Ballagh dropped by to give Moore a bottle of white wine and chocolate truffles with raspberries.

Juan Carlos Tovar-Ballagh, chef de cuisine at Hank Charcuterie and former Pachamamas pastry chef, died Thursday in his Lawrence home. He was 27.

Tovar-Ballagh’s longtime friend and colleague Vaughn Good, owner-chef of Hank Charcuterie, was still trying to process the news Tuesday morning while sharing stories of the “creative and dedicated” chef he first met as a kid in fencing club some 20 years ago.

“It’s been pretty hard,” said Good, who declined to give any details surrounding his friend’s death. “Jay was a big part of the soul of this place, and he really helped shape this place.”

During Tovar-Ballagh’s tenure at Hank Charcuterie, the one-time “small artisanal butcher shop” evolved into a “full-fledged restaurant,” Good said. Earlier this year, the eatery started serving dinner — “that was a big one for him,” said Good. “Jay was really into creating composed dishes.”

And in July, Tovar-Ballagh helped Good and the rest of the Hank crew celebrate the restaurant’s one-year anniversary.

“I was just happy he got to see a lot more of our goals be accomplished,” Good said of Tovar-Ballagh. “We’re going to push on and make sure that everything we do from now on will be done in Jay’s honor.”

As a young boy growing up in Lawrence, Tovar-Ballagh would often experiment in the kitchen, but as he admitted in a 2011 Journal-World article, his bread-baking efforts with the microwave weren’t always successful. “Terrible” was the exact word he used.

But at Pachamamas, where the budding chef climbed the ladder from line cook to pastry chef in less than two years, Tovar-Ballagh thrived. Specializing in pastries and breads, Tovar-Ballagh created the dessert menu at the upscale restaurant, which closed earlier this year.

It was a role he took to quickly, says Ken Baker, former chef and owner of Pachamamas. In 2012, Tovar-Ballagh was nominated for Food and Wine Magazine’s Best New Pastry Chef.

“He was very quiet — and I don’t mean quiet in a bad way,” Baker said. “He was focused, always inside his own head, a nonstop thinker and always looking to the next thing he could do and how he could do it better.”

“He had the bug” for food, Baker recalled. “And he had it bad.”

In his short life, Tovar-Ballagh worked only two jobs: painting houses with his father and food production. He left manual labor behind permanently — shedding “the other job like one would a winter coat on a hot summer day,” the 2011 Journal-World article read –after securing his position as a line cook at Pachamamas in 2009.

“Watching him work was a joy,” Baker said of Tovar-Ballagh, who lacked formal culinary training and spent his career constantly striving to advance his skills and knowledge.

Outside the kitchen, where the chef exhibited the kind of “precision” and “methodical” style one might expect from a perfectionist, Tovar-Ballagh was a fun-loving, loyal friend who would spontaneously ask Baker to shear off his “ridiculously long, thick locks” one night after a few beers. “It was an ordeal,” Baker recalled with a laugh.

He was also the kind of guy who would create a special dessert for one longtime customer every year on her birthday, each time stepping out of the kitchen to give his well wishes.

His several notebooks, in which he jotted down recipe ideas throughout the years, are still around. Baker said he’d like to bring some of those recipes to life in a benefit for Just Food, though he’s still ironing out the details.

Baker’s lost a lot of people in his life. But Tovar-Ballagh — “he’s one that I can still hear his voice. Like, I could call him up right now,” Baker said, the emotion evident in his voice.

“I think I just want people who knew him to learn from this that you only have one shot, and our day could be up tomorrow,” Baker said. “And this was not his time.”

Memorial services will be held at 2 p.m. Friday at the Barnett Family Funeral Home, 1220 Walnut St., in Oskaloosa. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorial contributions be made to Just Food and sent in care of the funeral home: PO Box 602 Oskaloosa, Kan., 66066.