Bon Appétit Management Company

Not all kids want to be firefighters or astronauts when they grow up. Some want to be chefs — or so a group of students at Grout Elementary School in southeast Portland, OR, told Bon Appétit Executive Chef Mark Harris when he spent Career Day with them.

On Sunday, July 10, join the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) and dozens of Bay Area chefs and food luminaries, including Bon Appétit’s Oracle – Redwood Shores Executive Chef, Robbie Lewis, for cooking demonstrations and seasonal tastes at the first Summer Celebration. The event will be held in the beautiful,  historic San Francisco Ferry Building from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., with more than 60 local chefs, businesses, and sustainable farmers providing tasty treats and drinks for guests to enjoy to raise money for CUESA. Bay Area locals might only know CUESA as the hosts of the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. In truth, CUESA provides much more as part of its educational mission, including free cooking demonstrations, low-cost kitchen skill-building classes, the new Schoolyard to Market program, and scholarships that help sustainable farmers become leaders in their […]

Executive Chef David Anderson demonstrates how to separate the ham and loin in his hog butchery demo Bon Appétit Executive Chef David Anderson from the Stanford Graduate School of Business believes that an animal’s life is worth more than two pork tenderloins. After the recent Northern California Chefs’ Exchange focusing on butchery at Cisco – San Jose, in San Jose, CA, he had this to say about how we use animals in our cooking:  

At the Second Annual North vs. South Champion Chef Competition hosted by Bon Appétit at Washington University in St. Louis last month, competitors from opposite sides of campus came out in honor of Bon Appétit’s Low Carbon Diet Day and competed in an Iron Chef-style competition with a focus on low carbon cooking. (Read more about what that entails here). Composed of BAMCO chefs and student sous chefs, each team had exactly 30 minutes to cook the most delicious, low carbon meal for a panel of expert judges, which included area chefs from Winslow’s Home and Eclipse Restaurant, as well as Ligaya Figueras of Sauce, St. Louis’ premier culinary magazine.

In this new Bravo Beat series for the Bon Appétit blog, we’ll spotlight some of our star staff, starting with Hamidou Cisse, Bon Appétit sous chef at Lesley College in Cambridge, MA. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the soft-spoken, genial Hamidou came to the United States in 1992 from Germany.

TASTE Restaurant Pasty Chef Lucy Damkoehler speaks with the Chef’s Collaborative about her doughnuts Lucy Damkoehler began baking way back in fifth grade, when she would help her father knead and shape dough for bread as a hobby. She’s now a distinguished pastry chef for Bon Appétit Management Company’s TASTE Restaurant in Seattle, where her desserts have captured the hearts and bellies of restaurant diners far and wide, including my own. A few weeks ago, Lucy presented her latest doughnuts to a room full of chefs, farmers, and good food lovers at the Seattle Chef’s Collaborative Bakers’ Meet and Greet. Doughnuts cannot feign being a health food, but making them can be healthy for the community if the ingredients come from local, sustainable producers. Like the rest of the TASTE team (and Bon Appétit companywide), Lucy goes all-out to celebrate […]

By Toni Ansuini, General Manager, Brocade Brocade Executive Chef Ryan Smith explains the fine arts of butchering a chicken.  Bon Appétit chefs are not only skilled at cooking from scratch and using all parts of the animals, they believe in sharing that knowledge. At Brocade in San Jose, CA, Executive Chef Ryan Smith recently led a culinary demonstration and class on classic culinary techniques of butchering for 25 guests. Butchery has become popular again as more people want to be assured of their food supply chain. The benefits of butchering meat at home include knowing the direct source of the meat and reducing risk of contamination from processing. But even dividing a whole chicken into breasts and thighs can be intimidating to people, so this was a chance for the audience to learn the necessary skills.  Ryan demonstrated how to […]

Something magical is happening at Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH. No matter how small or dark or drafty the location, the vegetables and herbs planted by Bon Appétit Sous Chef Chris Brunst just keep growing and growing, producing food for Dascomb Café.

Executive Pastry Chef Ian Farrell (right) was first bitten by the sourdough bug about five years ago, when he grew a wild yeast starter from the skins of organic grapes. Now he lives his passion for hand-crafted wild yeast breads daily at Oracle in Redwood Shores, CA. Almost all the breads, sourdough or otherwise, for every café on this campus are made from scratch daily at the Oracle Bakery.

By Cara Brechler, Marketing Manager In the early fifth century, when some monks were busy inventing Shaolin Kung Fu, other German monks took a vow of deliciousness instead and created the pretzel. Last week, in honor of National Pretzel Day, the chefs de cuisine at one of our Silicon Valley campuses celebrated this humble concoction with freshly baked twists as well as crusts and breading using the dough, bringing the pretzel to new dimensions of tastiness. Kevin Means at the Paradise Café offered a pretzel-encrusted pork loin, a bratwurst dog in a pretzel bun, and freshly made warm pretzels sprinkled with a Tuscan-infused salt (rosemary, chili pepper, lemon, and garlic). Over at Café 17, Octavio Barrera had a line all through service for his Pork Loin Schnitzel with creamy whole-grain mustard gravy. Jorien Schulze from Lakeview Café made fresh pretzels with two dipping […]