Bijou Catering

My love of food and cooking was ignited at an early age and propelled by two major forces. The first was my maternal grandmother, who would lovingly spend time teaching me how to prepare her coveted recipes, and the other was my food obsessed parents who would regularly bring me and my brother to hot Los Angeles restaurants with them. With a deeply... instilled passion for food and cooking, it was no surprise that when I started my first job at the age of sixteen it was at a high end specialty food shop. A couple of years later, while attending college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I pursued a degree in sociology, but I ultimately realized that I was much more interested in food and cooking. To that end I got a job as a line cook at one of the top restaurants in Madison and by my senior year, as I took a full class load and worked two different restaurant jobs, there was no doubt in my mind that my calling was to be a chef. After graduating with a bachelors degree, I moved to New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America and from there I landed a job at the original Spago restaurant in Hollywood and then at Spago, Las Vegas. A few years into my Vegas stint, however, Id had my fill of that town and decided to move to San Francisco where I had accepted the position of executive chef at a new Cal-Italian restaurant called Zinzino. In my six years as the chef there, I received sparkling reviews from customers and food critics alike. I was named one of the top ten Rising Star Chefs in the San Francisco Examiner's annual list and later, I was invited to be a guest chef at the James Beard House as part of their Chef Discovery Series. After six challenging, yet highly rewarding, years at the helm of Zinzino I was burnt out from the demands of chaotic restaurant life and decided to shift gears to become the private chef for a family in Silicon Valley. I had a great time cooking everything from fine dining menus to baby food and grew to truly love the family. After more than a decade at that job I began ...Read More