Processed Food, Faux Meat, Culinary Nostalgia, and Reading the Room with Tony Moore of Winning at Work

Happy New Year everyone. This is Chris spear and you're listening to Chefs Without Restaurants, the show where I speak with culinary entrepreneurs and people working in the food and beverage industry outside of a traditional restaurant setting. I have 31 years of working in kitchens, but not restaurants and currently operate a personal chef business throwing dinner parties in the Washington DC area. You might have noticed that I took a couple of weeks off for the holidays. I hope yours were fantastic. Mine certainly were though the COVID did hit me the week of Christmas. So that's some of what impacted my decision not to release some episodes. But I'm back. And this episodes a little different. You might have heard my episode a few weeks ago with Tony Moore from the winning at work podcast, I got some really great feedback on our conversation, and I wanted to share the other side of it. I had mentioned that I was on Tony's podcast, which came out a few months ago. So I asked Tony, if I could share some of that episode here. I cut out the beginning of it because a lot of it's my origin story. If you've listened to this podcast for a little bit, or even if you haven't, you probably have some idea of how and why I started my personal chef business. So I wanted to get right to the heart of the episode. Because Tony works in the CPG. That's consumer packaged goods space. Some of our conversation centers around that. I talked about my favorite processed foods, you know, the brands that I'm loyal to, even though they're not all natural. We also talk about vegetarian goods, specifically processed proteins like Beyond Meat. We discuss other topics like the nostalgia of food, and the importance of reading a room when you work as a personal chef, meaning every party is different. And I talked about how I tried to adapt based on the vibe. You know, are these people who want to hear the spiel about where the food comes from? Or is it a drop the plate and run kind of dinner? I think there's some gems in this episode and I hope you get a lot out of it. I'm going to be continuing to drop both solo episodes and guest episodes for you this year. If you have any feedback, you can reach out to me on Instagram and threads at ChefsWithoutRestaurants or shoot me an email at chefswithoutrestaurants@gmail.com Thanks so much for listening and have a great week. Are you a personal chef looking for support and growth opportunities? Look no further than the United States personal chef association. with 1000 members across the US and Canada. USPCA provides liability insurance certification lead generation and more. Consumers can trust that their meal experience is insured and supported by USPCA apply now for USPCA membership and save $75 on premier provisional preparatory and corporate memberships, as well as $25 on student memberships by using code HappyNewYear24 at uspca.com/join. Plus, hireachef subscriptions are available to list your personal chef business at hireachef.com. To learn more about membership, advertising or partnership opportunities, call Angela at 1-800-995-2138. Extension 705 or email apratherer@uspca.com. It's now or never and that was seven years ago, just about now November 6 2016 was my last day of work at the job I'd been at for 10 years.

So you freed yourself seven years ago,

freed myself in some ways shackled myself in other ways. No, leave it Yes, I left the job. Yeah, in 2016 to go out and do this personal chef thing on my own full time.

So I was I was thinking, Okay, if if I wanted a personal chef to come in and cook, the first I guess there's a number of thoughts that come to me, first of all, you know, who is this person that I'm you know, letting into my house? What do they specialize in? You know, are they going to cook what I want? You know, just kind of what that dynamic was? And I was thinking, you know, that's probably kind of a hard business to advertise. I would feel like that's a kind of that classic kind of word of mouth. What have you found is really, really works for for chefs in this space. Word

of mouth is obviously huge. Reviews are huge. And you you talked about branding, right? That's what it is. Before perfect little bites was a personal chef business. It was a blog. It was a food blog. And for a number of years, people refer to me as a blogger and I kind of hated that. I saw it as like a pejorative term like, No, I'm a chef. I'm just using it because it was so new. I mean, I started the blog, perfect little bites in 2010. And I wanted it to be you know, content that we talked about content marketing and all that stuff, but that's what I was doing. Because I do customize dinners and they're all personalized. I wanted people to kind of be able to pull the curtain back and see what I was doing. And this is my thought process and this is kind of what I like and it's not for everyone it was almost to exclude a certain population. As you know, I like to dog on the Cheesecake Factory in the Olive Garden button. If that's your culinary preferences, I am not for you. So maybe having me have a whole roasted pig's head on a table is going to have some people opt out. But the reviews are, you do that. So I have done some of those head to hail dinners. And for a while one of my actually, before I revealed myself because I was working a job and was afraid people like my bosses, were gonna find out that I was moonlighting or whatever. My avatar was me holding a raw pig's head in front of my face. And then I was kinda like, why am I not getting more calls for dinners? You know, but I was afraid to put my face on the internet. Yeah, maybe it's a turnoff. And it actually didn't stop people from hiring me. And then you got to the point where it was just like, I'm gonna do my thing. And it is what it is, you know. But yeah, it all comes down to branding and positioning, like, where are you in the market? I wanted to be high end I wanted, you know, my dinners have always started at a minimum of $100 ahead. When there's people out there doing$30 dinners for me, I always wanted to bring linen napkins bring my own China, have it be an experience, you know, instead of going out for your wife's birthday, have me come in and do that. So just I from a very early on in this. I listened to a lot of business, big Gary Vee fan, you know, listening to those people and talking about, you know, what makes you stand out? And how do you convey your story to people. So for me, the storytelling was in place long before I even started cooking for people. You

know, Chris, I, it just hit me that what you're doing really does play to the Instagrammable boldness of today's society and content, I'm going to tell you, there is no way of chef comes over and puts a beautiful meal on the table. And there's not an accompaniment of great photos that are plastered all over that person's Facebook or Insta, whatever it is, like hashtag, home chef hash. I mean, that I would think that in and of itself would just create so much buzz from everybody like, hey, where did you do this? How did you find him and done it? No, no, absolutely.

And you know, one of the things is with, like business social media pages, they say keep them for business, you know, you don't, you should have your personal and your business separate. But for me, it was important to have some elements of my home life because I think this is so personal, you're inviting me into your home, isn't it great to see me out in the pumpkin patch with my kids, you know, I'm a family man, you

didn't have not some monster who puts on us, you know, come trying

to cultivate this relationship with my customers. And I almost want them to feel like they know me and vice versa. By the time I get into your house, I've always wanted my business to be less transactional and more personal. And that's something I I've guests on my podcast, I have friends, we don't always agree with it. It's like taking deposits, not that there's anything wrong with money. But I feel once it becomes like, you start talking about money too much, and it becomes transactional. It's just very much like you're the customer on the person providing a service. And um, you know, I grew up in a day and age where my dad said, you know, your, your word, and your handshake was the deal. And that's all it was. And I've never been screwed if I say, I'm gonna come cook dinner for you on Friday, and it's 300 bucks and you say okay, then that's good for me. And then you know, the money thing will work itself out. And no one's ever not paid me or something. And I have people say that's crazy, but I just feel like it changes the relationship with the customer.

Yeah, I can imagine that kind of cheapens or kind of just takes away from the experience, you know, to be going through some kind of a Venmo transaction before you come out. Yeah. And the same

with contracts, you know, a lot of people have these contracts of, I will do this, you will do that, I will do this, you will do that. You sign that. So you send it to me by this day. Like that's fine. I guess it's a Cya in some, you know, instances. But again, I've never had a problem with that. So I don't do contracts. I don't do invoices. I've been doing this for like 11 years, and I've never been burned or had a problem. So so no invoices. No, it's just I you know, it's an email. Hey, Tony, I'm coming to your house. You know, I'm cooking for you and your wife. It's gonna be 200 bucks. Here's how I tell you can pay me in cash credit. Here's my Venmo here's my cell. You can pay me day of and that's sent you an email. Yeah.

Yeah, some businesses are a lot more complex. Of course, they require that. I would imagine workers comp liability, all those things could get in the way. But if you do have a good relationship with people, they're not looking to stick it to you either.

Yeah, and I'm a solo person. I don't have employees. I don't report to anyone you know, it's very easy in that it's, it would be different. Maybe if I had people who cooked under my name, you know, if I'm sending you out to someone's house, and then you know, I pay you and like then there could be other things that happen but right now it's just me and it allows me to be nimble and just get things done and do it the way that I want to get it done.

Chris What kind of food do you just love cooking or are you just so versatile? It's like whatever the the palettes are, you can kind of adjust like, what's your go to?

Yeah, I'm really go to his tacos. I love tacos. I love Mexican. I love authentic Mexican. I love Tex Mex big proponent of making your own tortillas at home. I think everyone should learn how to make tortillas because it's two ingredients, and one of which is water. So it's Sunday,

you make them That sounds delicious. Manga and water. Yeah,

you buy masa harina like a dry product. In a lot of grocery stores. There's this stuff called Masika. And I'm not going to get into like what that is in the quality. I use a brand called mossy ENDA, I had the founder on my podcast, he put out a cookbook last year, he's sourcing high quality heirloom corn from Mexico, they're nixed analyzing it, grinding it and you can either buy from them the corn and do it yourself. But he has a really great masa harina product and they just got a deal where they're in all Whole Foods, which is huge for them. Because, you know, I started buying it like five years ago, and it was just they shipped directly via mail. And now you can get their masa in Whole Foods. And it's a game changer. And you just mix matzah and water and let it rest five minutes, roll it into a ball and then press it out on a griddle cast iron skillet, whatever, you know, you can get way more technical about it. But at its roots, it's just two ingredients. And one of those is water.

Yeah. And you know, the good for you movement is here to stay. Everyone wants, you know, healthier living. So it makes perfect sense for you, when you're kind of positioning yourself as that kind of premium cook that you're going to be sourcing these wonderful meals, do you ever and I'm curious, because obviously I'm not in your market. So I haven't had a chance to have a delicious meal. When you're presenting the food, you know, part of your presentation, are you also giving some of that backstory like that you just shared with me,

you have to read the room. And again, this is something I talk about with other personal chefs on my podcast, different people hire you for different reasons. It might be a corporate dinner, it might be people who don't really care about food, the amount of times that I've served food and you bring it out and they're talking and you can't even tell them what it is. Ideally, I want to drop the plate, they see that I'm there. They stopped talking, maybe the host says hold on one second, Chris is here. And then I get to talk other times they don't you come out and you bring the plates and there's 15 people and it's loud and you're putting food down and you can tell that nobody really cares. And in those parties quite often you clear the plates and you've got you know, this 12 ounce ribeye steak and there's maybe eight ounces left on the plate and you're just scraping it into the bin like the food is just an accessory for something else going on. Yeah, it's, it's crazy. So you got a good feel. I mean, I can usually tell even before I go to a party based on phone calls and emails, what the vibe is going to be. And then once you get there, you can tell really quickly if you're going to be the centerpiece of the dinner, or just the help. And when you're just the help quite often they don't really want to hear that story. But if they do, yes, there's more extended time a dinner I did this past Saturday, I was in the dining room during the entree course for almost the whole thing. You know, we're just talking. And while they were eating, I was out there for 20 minutes, which is on the long end for me to just keep talking about food and cooking. But they kept asking questions, and they were really interested. But that's not every party. And you know, I'm okay with that. But I want to give you as much info as I can, if you want that. So

you don't have like, like a one pager that you might print up that might, you know, talk about? No, can you because I've had I've had I've experienced some catering from certain groups, where there's something unique, you know, and they'll kind of bring that out and place it so you can kind of see, I was just curious, because that's kind of love that

but you know that everyone jokes on the internet about like, every time you go to a restaurant now it's like there's the story and the spiel. And if you dined with us before, and you know, explaining this is meant to be sure it's like, just get on with and bring me the food. Right? Like that's, that's kind of the big joke about dining and restaurants these days.

You know, you do get a little jaded to the, you know, a little over the top. It's a little too too they're trying too hard, but I think yeah, so to your point, you know, reading the room and knowing who you're, you're talking to, I guess when you go out and you lay it down when you set the plate, you know, if people were making eye contact with you, that's their your first sign that they they see you and that and that they recognize you. Okay, so Mexican is one of your favorites, you know, kind of authentic Mexican ate well, what else are what are some of your other like

Southern stuff, shrimp and grits? pimento cheese, you know, catfish? That kind of stuff is interesting ish. Yeah, and I'm not from here. I'm from New England originally. So these are things that I've kind of found a love for here. You know, I think it was important for me to you know, I moved to Maryland to start kind of looking at what are mid atlantic foods you know, what are kind of southern foods what are people around here like? And then if I could bring my own influences, so sometimes it's traditional take shrimp and grits you know, I think a lot People know what that is. But I also love foods from Spain. So sometimes it's going to be a Spanish inspired shrimp and grits. So there's maybe Manchego cheese and the grits and do a tomato tomato component, but have it based on like a Spanish brava sauce, and they're smoked paprika and sherry vinegar in there. And instead of doing a bacon or an Andouille, doing like Spanish Serrano ham, so sometimes I'll keep it strictly traditional, or sometimes I'll bring in some other things that really excite me and make it you know, a little different.

How difficult is it for you to go grocery shopping, reading labels these days, because there is so much crap out there and our food system and here you are curating some of the best food for people. What kind of pressure does that put on you just in your own personal life? Is it? Do you stress out over this? Or can you just be kind of easygoing, and yeah,

I'm easygoing about that. I mean, if you're talking about anything, that's like a prepackaged thing, I, for the most part, have my go to brands and things I like. And, you know, I think once you find some of those things, and then there's things like, I love ketchup, I love Heinz ketchup, I will never buy a natural ketchup, a low sugar, a made with beets, any of that nonsense. Like, I don't care. It's a super processed product. Nobody in the world makes better ketchup than Heinz regular ketchup End of story. I don't want in house ketchup, but just things like that. And it's like, if that means I don't do all natural cooking, or whatever, I'm okay with that.

It's so funny that you signaled out that you singled out ketchup because we've we've talked quite a little bit about that, because the role of sugar as an extender, you know, lets them use or anyone who's using you know, process, they can use less tomatoes and add that sugar. But I have to admit, I mean, you're not wrong. I want to on the fly, I'm talking just straight flavor profile, straight foot, you know, but of course, you look at the labels. And I've had some wonderful samples sent to me, and I do use them and they are so much more tomato II and zesty. And I know you've tried them. But

that's what I think a lot of a lot of what I think goes back into cooking, and successful restaurants and things is nostalgia, and reference points and stuff. And, you know, it gets hard if minus minus knowledge is definitely gonna be different than yours, like what we grew up eating, right. But I think that's like a classic flavor. I think people know it. And when you try something, even if you don't know that this has, you know, if you make a barbecue sauce as Heinz ketchup in, I think it's going to have a flavor that's reminiscent of something you had growing up, because that's what we all use. We weren't using a natural ketchup. And I just think there's some receptor, some kind of trigger that makes you feel hopefully comfortable when you have something like that. But obviously, you know, going forward when I'm looking at new brands and things to bring in my home, yeah, I love small you know, small batch small companies, you know, companies that are doing things the right way, with you want to use the term artisanal or you no less ingredients. Sure My wife's a registered dietician. She used to be a chef, but she's a dietitian now and has a master's in public health. So you know, we talk about food, food, nutrition, food labels all the time, that's her full time job. But we also have a lot of those products in our home that are, you know, processed condiments and things of that nature. And, you know, my kids want to eat Kraft macaroni and cheese. I've tried making homemade I've tried like, the Annie's like, they're all right, but but again, you know, and this is a much bigger conversation, you know how these companies have engineered these products to be crazy between the salt, the the fat, all of that stuff that is hard. I don't want to eat a lot of processed foods, and I don't want to be serving them. But there are some things that I just love.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that. Because that is truly what's happened. They've engineered the food and as a result, they have engineered our tastebuds and our palate and you if you're trying to go really against that you're fighting against something that is so big and so powerful. The consumer has to want to do it you can't force them into these behavior changes and that's what I think a lot of companies are trying to do. They're trying to force these consumer behavior changes. Yes, I want to get your take on something. Do you ever cook with plant based foods? How do you what you do? What's your

What does plant based foods mean? Does it mean are you talking vegetables and vegetarian are you talking artificially like meat? I don't eat like Beyond Meat and stuff like that. I think it's gross and terrible. I am okay, let me back up. I don't like the beef ones. I will eat like the artificial chicken I actually like and I'm big fan of all the grocery stores. I don't know if you have all the we have all the in the South. Yes, I really liked their vegetarian chicken and like I actually like that's one of my things I keep in the freezer at all times is like they're breaded chicken nuggets that's you know soy protein or whatever. And I love throwing those in the oven and making like fried Chicken Sandwich with that, so I like that. I don't like the beef ones though. I think they're weird. They have an off taste off flavor. I mean, at the end of the day, I think you're better off just eating true plant based and vegetable. I mean, I guess some of that they're calling it plant based. I don't think it's necessarily healthier. Like if you look at I don't like some of them are, you know, water, soybean oil, all these things. Going back to all the they have a line of veggie burgers. And if you look at them, you know what every ingredient is there, they have a quinoa crunch burger, and it has quinoa, and it has red pepper, and it has peas, and it has corn and potato starch. I make one at home that has walnuts and keen WA and chickpeas and things of that nature. So I'm big fan of vegetarian cooking, I used to be a vegetarian, I think vegan food is really interesting. Right now there's some cool stuff. I just, if I'm going to do and I want to be healthier, and I think like, again, an overly processed product that maybe doesn't even have like actual vegetables in it isn't a better product for you. I've

seen some interesting developments where they take beef and they blend it with chicken, this is not a new idea. But that is you know, lessening the dependence on just red meat and the consumption around red meat and what it might take to be producing enough red meat. They blend it with chicken and it comes out very, very similar way I just had someone on the podcast, it was crossed crossover meats was the name of it. And they're frozen. And kind of to your point, it's great to just have something like that in the freezer, you can pop it out, you know if you're if you're out of whatever you wanted to cook, just pull them out and they're frozen. And they're in there perfect. And there's some really good chicken brands out there that or substitute chicken there's some very, very good ones. And I think chicken is further along in my opinion than beef. I

do too. You know from a number of years of eating and vegetarian restaurants like the the TVP type stuff. I used to go to a Vietnamese restaurant they call it like mock doc, but it was like vital wheat, wheat gluten, you know that had this right the right texture of it. And once you cooked it up in sauce, it was delicious. But like a hamburger, I would rather just eat a vegetable burger. Or even like one of the chicken the chicks was before I have like a fake beef well, and it just it's weird to me and I still eat beef. So I would rather eat a hamburger a good real hamburger less often. And then just have like, you know, an actual veggie Patty the other times?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's what I see happening here too, a lot. So, before we before we go, I want to know a little bit more about what your some of your future plans are. Because I know right now you kind of operate solo, have you given thought to or maybe what some of the pros and cons would be for you if you were to try to expand on your personal brand. And maybe try to add more people to expand your reach? What?

What's the future I'm not, I'm not going to do that. If I'm going to expand it's gonna be through Chefs Without Restaurants. You know, I'm building a network there. I'm building a community before it was a podcast, it was a community it is we have a Facebook group with like 1500 members in it. It's something where I've looked at building an app for consumers to find personal chefs, or working as almost like a marketing agency, since I taught myself how to do this. If you want to now start a you know, a personal chef business, can I build a course, or an e book or something like that, and grow business that way. That's the scalable aspect. I got out of what I did partially because I didn't want to be a manager anymore. You know, I was at a level where I had 125 employees who reported to me, my Daily Success hinged on their success or failure, and you're getting calls at home because a 16 year old did something stupid. And like I didn't show up to work. Yeah, I don't I don't like that. I don't need that. I don't, you know, look at talking going back to like reviews, read any reviews of any business out there. And 90% of the negative ones come from some interaction that not the owner, not the chef, but a frontline employee or so I went to this restaurant, and the waitress was rude. I went to this restaurant, and, you know, the food was terrible. And you know, it was a night the chef wasn't there. I don't want to send you to go cook at those people's house and you not, you know, holding things to my standard, maybe I'm too much of a control freak. I totally am okay with that. But I have like a certain standard and certain level. And, and I'm doing what I do, because I really enjoy it the cooking process. If I start stepping back and become more of an office manager, that's not what I want to do, I can go make more money in. If I'm gonna sit behind a computer, I can make more money doing something in a more lucrative field than managing a bunch of cooks and chefs. I want to go out and cook because I enjoy going out and cooking. So if I'm going to grow and scale it's going to be through the Chefs Without Restaurants community. So

Chris, for people that are maybe in your geographic area, why what's the best way for them to connect with you? And perhaps have you come down and you know, bring a pig head?

Yeah.

You know, even better. Yeah,

well my business is called perfect little bites. So perfect little bites.com but I'm at perfect little bites on social media, Facebook, Instagram there, you can find me there. You can DM me, you can follow along. I tell people if you're not in my geographic area, I'm always sharing recipes, blogging, about recipes, cooking about food, talking about food, giving cooking tips. So yeah, you know, follow along, maybe you can learn some some tips and tricks, maybe you can pick up some recipes. I do about a 70 mile travel radius from Frederick, Maryland. So again, that's like DC, Northern Virginia, Baltimore. But I go into like Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, I go to York, Lancaster, PA, for the right price I travel. I know a lot of chefs who do travel things. I mean, I'm always amazed when someone says, Yeah, this client paid for me to come down to Florida and cook for them for a week, you know, so if any of your listeners are out there, and you know, want to fly me out, or have me commute out to wherever they are, I'm open to that as well.

Well, you know, weather dependent, that could be a pretty, pretty good gig, you know, fly on down to Miami, or, you know, kind of get out of Yeah,

or take the, you know, I think that's one of the great things. And we didn't even talk about collaboration, but one of the things I love doing is cooking with other people. So it's like, I've got a buddy up in Boston, like, what if, like, I went up and hung out with him for a week, and we did like one pop up dinner like that would pay for the trip, and I get to hang out and my family could come along. And you know, just take one day out of our trip and go do a dinner, you know, make 1000 Couple $1,000. And that would pay for the time up there.

That sounds fantastic. Chris, I'm so glad we had a chance to finally share this out on the platform. Because you and I, you know, we've known each other for a while we've been talking about this stuff offline. So it's so good that you're able to come down, expose, winning it workers to you know what it's like, kind of building that personal brand as a chef. And you know, that strategy is certainly a good one with the collaboration and kind of building that community, right to kind of get those reviews and let people see that. You know, there's a family man kind of behind the scenes kind of take away the mystery of it all, Chris, so appreciate you coming down here today.

Well, thanks so much. I'm so glad we could do this. You're still here, the podcast is over. If you are indeed still here. Thanks for taking the time to listen to the show. I'd love to direct you to one place and that's chefs without restaurants.org. From there, you'll be able to join our email newsletter. Get connected in our free Facebook group, and join our personal chef catering and food truck database so I can help get you more job leads. And you'll also find a link to our sponsor page where you'll find products and services I love. You pay nothing additional to use these links, but I may get a small commission which helps keep the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast and organization running. You might even get a discount for using some of these links. As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram at Chefs Without Restaurants or send me an email at chefs without restaurants@gmail.com Thanks so much.