Welcome to the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. I’m your host Chris Spear. On the show, I have conversations with culinary entrepreneurs, and people in the food and beverage industry who took a different route. They’re caterers, research chefs, personal chefs cookbook authors, food truckers, farmers, cottage bakers and all sorts of culinary renegades. I myself fall into the personal chef category, as I started my personal chef business Perfect Little Bites 10 years ago. And while I started working in kitchens in 1992, surprisingly, I’ve literally never worked in a restaurant.
On this weeks show I have Ryan Dumapit. He has a degree in pastry arts, and food service management. But Ryan doesn’t have a singular path in the food industry. In fact, he also went to school for IT, and has worked for a point of sale company, as well as a fitness company. We talk about many of the positions he’s held including being a district manager for a contract food service company, and working logistics for a large grocery chain. He also partnered with a mutual friend of ours on a catering project called called Fil Amazing Foods, and has his own desserts company called CaSey B’s. Unfortunately, due to the Covid pandemic, both of these ventures have been put on hold for a while.
Ryan is a first generation Filipino American, so we talk about Filipino food, and his experience growing up. He also talks about about job choices, and the struggle of doing something you love for career, vs having a job that can pay the bills.
And if you want to make sure you catch every episode of the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast, go to chefswithoutrestaurants.org to sign up for our mailing list. The link can also be found in the show notes.
If you want to support the show, our Venmo name is ChefWoRestos and can be found at https://venmo.com/ChefWoRestos. If you enjoy the show, have every received a job through one of our referrals, have been a guest, been given complimentary Chefs Without Restaurants swag, or simply want to help, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.
Welcome, everyone. This is Chris Spear, your host of the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. On this show, I have conversations with culinary entrepreneurs, and people in the food and beverage industry who aren’t working in traditional restaurant settings. I’ll be speaking with caterers, personal chefs, food truck operators, chefs working in research and development, distillers, cookbook authors and all sorts of culinary renegades. At the time of this recording, I’ve actually released 73 episodes of the show so far. I’ve made a lot of changes over the past year, and wanted to go back and update this first episode for people who may have been starting here first.
I started the show in November 2019, and it was co-hosted with Andrew Wilkinson who operates a mobile woodfired pizza business called Pizza Llama here in Frederick, Maryland, where we live. The podcast was actually Andrew’s idea, and I’m so grateful he gave me a kick in the butt to get this thing going. But when the world started to spin out of control in March due to COVID, Andrew stepped back and hasn’t been a part of the show since. So if you’re listening to the earlier episodes, you’ll hear him up until about Episode 30 or so.
So, what is Chefs Without Restaurants anyway? I have my own personal chef business called Perfect Little Bites, which I started about 10 years ago as a side project. I’ve been doing it full time now for a little over four years. As I started to figure out things, and how to run my business, more and more people were asking me for advice. I spent a lot of time talking to people on the phone, and having meetings over coffee. Then I realized that there was a better way to do this, and decided to start a networking group, which I called Chefs Without Restaurants, where we could share best practices, resources and gig opportunities. The group quickly grew to over a couple hundred people. We were interacting in Facebook groups, on Instagram, Twitter, and pretty much everywhere else on the web. We even did a couple of meetups, and a few collaborative pop-up dinners.
Last November, Andrew was helping me with a job, and he asked why I didn’t have a podcast. I hadn’t really thought about it before. I knew nothing about podcasting, but I thought we could figure it out. I’ll admit that the first few shows were a little rough. I didn’t know anything about audio engineering, and I didn’t do much, if any, editing. But we had some great guests, and I think it’s still worth listening to those early shows. As time permits. I’ve been going back and editing and re-uploading a few of those episodes. Some of our guests so far have included certified master chef Rich Rosendale, who led the United States culinary team at the Bocuse d’Or in France, Tu David Phu, who was on season 15 of the Bravo TV show Top Chef. We’ve had Jamie Simpson who’s the executive chef of The Culinary Vegetable Institute, and chef liaison at The Chef’s Garden. We’ve also had Aliza Eliazarov, who recently released a book called On the Farm, which takes a closer look at the heritage animal breeds taking center stage on sustainable farms and homesteads. I really hope you take a deep dive into the archives, and listen to all of our shows.
I also want to direct you to the website ChefsWithoutRestaurants.org. Every week, I’ll be putting the newest episode there. But you can also find links to all of our other social media platforms, as well as how to sign up for the Chefs Without Restaurants email list. I’d love for you to sign up for the email list. It’s the best way to ensure that you’re going to find the newest episode every single week when it’s released. I really appreciate your time, and I hope you enjoy the stories, and the tactical information shared on the show. I’m going to leave you with an audio clip from the show I did with Matt Jennings a few months ago. As always, thanks so much for listening, and have a great week.
“You know, unfortunately, our industry has been built on these, like, top 20 list,s and the awards, and the accolades…and who’s going to get the cover of the next Food & Wine? And who’s going to get this and who’s going to get the feature article, and who’s going to get the TV show. And, you know, I think while there’s value in some of that stuff, it definitely, you know, warps the perspective of perhaps what your real goals should be. And for me, I mean, like that was the case. And and I think it was a combination of the realization of that, at the same time as like, it was like all these colliding factors. It was that, and then it was my family. My family was certainly being very vocal about like, wait a minute, this is actually not cool that you’re working 80 hours a week. You know, I’ll tell you what, looking on this side at restaurants as of September 2020, I’m not jealous of much. ” -Matthew Jennings
Thanks for listening to the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast, and if you’re interested in being a guest on the show, or sponsoring a show, please let us know. We can be reached at ChefsWithoutRestaurants@gmail.com. Thanks so much.
If you want to support the show, our Venmo name is ChefWoRestos and can be found at https://venmo.com/ChefWoRestos. If you enjoy the show, have every received a job through one of our referrals, have been a guest, been given complimentary Chefs Without Restaurants swag, or simply want to help, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.
On this week’s Chefs Without Restaurants podcast, I speak with Philadelphia pastry chef Monica Glass. Upon graduating from Penn State, Monica moved to New York City to embark on a career in public relations. But after a brief stint in the corporate world, she realized she felt more at home in front of an oven than behind a desk. Monica set out to improve her culinary skills with an apprenticeship under Deborah Racicot, executive pastry chef at New York City’s Gotham Bar and Grill. After seven months of moonlighting as an extern, Monica enthusiastically joined the team at Gotham Bar and Grill full time. She continued to develop and refine her skills, working with chefs Michael Laiskonis, Eric Ripert and Ken Oringer, to name just a few.
In 2015, Glass moved back home to Philadelphia to accept the role of Corporate Pastry Chef with Constellation Culinary Group, where she oversaw the pastry program for company operations from Massachusetts to Florida for 4 years. After working in high prestige, high volume kitchens for the past 15 years, Monica is now embarking on a new adventure on her own consulting with restaurants, bakeries, cafes, brands, and food and lifestyle publications, as well as navigating the virtual class landscape and building a brand herself.
If you want to support the show, our Venmo name is ChefWoRestos and can be found at https://venmo.com/ChefWoRestos. If you enjoy the show, have every received a job through one of our referrals, have been a guest, been given complimentary Chefs Without Restaurants swag, or simply want to help, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.
On this week’s Chefs Without Restaurants podcast, I speak with Sam Hefter, the chef and owner of Hefter Catering in Kansas City. Sam’s catering business focuses on upscale taco bars. We talk about how he came up with that idea, and why he doesn’t think he’s going to expand beyond tacos. We get into the set up, overhead and profitability of his catering business, and also discuss doing tastings with clients.
Sam is very open about how he started, and continues to run his business, and would love for people to reach out to him if they have any questions about starting their own catering business. He can be reached by email at heftercatering@gmail.com, and all of his social media links can be found below.
If you want to support the show, our Venmo name is ChefWoRestos and can be found at https://venmo.com/ChefWoRestos. If you enjoy the show, have every received a job through one of our referrals, have been a guest, been given complimentary Chefs Without Restaurants swag, or simply want to help, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.
On the podcast this week I have chef Brendon Hudson. He’s owner and chef of Liliahna catering company. Brendon was recently voted Best Chef by Baltimore Magazine’s readers poll.
We discuss the state of the catering and personal chef business, the rise of the micro-wedding, the Thumbtack platform and more.
If you want to support the show, our Venmo name is ChefWoRestos and can be found at https://venmo.com/ChefWoRestos. If you enjoy the show, have every received a job through one of our referrals, have been a guest, been given complimentary Chefs Without Restaurants swag, or simply want to help, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.
