Bon Appétit Management Company

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 […]

What’s the shortest route to a reporter’s heart? Through her stomach of course! We believe the best way to deliver the fundamental Bon Appétit story, that we cook everything from scratch using fresh, often local, as-sustainable- as-possible ingredients, is to feed it to people — literally. To that end, we invited a select group of local media and VIPs and Diet for a Hot Planet author Anna Lappé to join us for an informal discussion over dinner cooked by one of our stellar teams. Anna is one of the leaders of the food movement — she was born into it, as the daughter of Frances Moore Lappé, whose 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet became a best-seller and the first handbook for eco-conscious eaters everywhere. Anna interviewed Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation Director Helene York for her own book. […]

The food-truck craze has taken the U.S. by storm, and Bon Appetit at University of Pacific in Stockton, CA, wanted in on the action — and to solve the problem of feeding students in out-of-the-way part of campus. Students love Bon Appetit’s new bright-orange food truck called e.a.t., which rolls up 20 minutes away from the other campus eateries.

Executive Chef Guido Lambelet at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, has been experimenting with Native American recipes and some special ingredients.

Though Passover is the most observed holiday on Jewish calendars, finding kosher-for-Passover programs on college campuses is not so easy — unless you’re a Penn student. Falk Dining Commons at Steinhardt Hall at the University of Pennsylvania is the premier kosher dining facility in Philadelphia, and the only university facility in the country that does “full-service” Passover for the entire eight days.

By Vera Chang, West Coast Fellow, Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation                         Chef Paul Leiggi and Catering Director Chris Linn The last time I went wild mushroom foraging I was a child. My mom and I wandered the forests of the Catskill Mountains in New York. My basket was in one hand, my mother’s hand in the other. Our eyes set even more intently on the ground than we New Yorkers do on city streets. If I remember that day correctly, we found more poisonous than edible mushrooms. Regardless, foraging foods of all kinds quickly became a favorite activity. (To learn about my love of seaweed and seaweed harvesting, click here.) This November, while on the last stop of my fall West Coast Tour and visiting Willamette University in Salem, OR, I went back to the woods. The fog rolled into […]

~Written by Carolina Fojo, East Coast Fellow for Bon Appétit Mgmt. Co.  As a Fellow for Bon Appétit, I have the pleasure of traveling to local farms from which Bon Appétit purchases, and meeting the very people who provide us with the food we eat. In September, I traveled to St. Libory, IL to visit Brad Schmitz, owner of Wenneman Meat Co., an old fashioned butcher shop and meat market that provides meat from Illinois farmers to Bon Appétit cafés at Washington University in St. Louis. Wenneman Meat Co. is unique to its area. Let’s face it—Illinois is corn country, not meat country. And sure enough, as I drove down IL-15 E—(nearly blinded by the sun, it was so bright!)—I passed field after field… after field… of corn, and soy. So what is this shop, sourcing local meat, doing in […]

Silky Sea Palms (seaweed) and California Kombu (kelp) This summer, Director of Specialty Culinary Programs Jim Dodge and longtime Bon Appétit friend and author Raghavan Iyer toured the country to help host Bon Appétit Management Company’s Vegan Chef Trainings. I joined the Northern California Training, held at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose. It was a fun and flavorful affair! It was especially exciting to see the variety of ingredients with which Bon Appétit chefs cook. Many, such as seaweed, house-made seitan, and nut butters, are less mainstream but nonetheless nutritious and delicious. In this post, I include two of my favorite recipes from the Training. Please enjoy and let us know what you think!

In my last vlog, I talked about a few food issues that stand out to me as some of the bigger challenges we face. In this vlog, I talk about two of those issues—the depletion of wild seafood and climate change—and give suggestions of what we as consumers can do to make a difference.

Most of my work for Bon Appétit this past month and a half has been research-oriented. Since I’m going to be working with farmers and speaking to students about issues of food sustainability, I need to understand the issues themselves well. Here are a few facts I’ve learned thus far… More to come in my next vlog!