Catering

Fancy Plants caters memorable dinner parties — and weddings, graduations, art shows, retreats, wellness events, and countless benefits, fundraisers and galas.

Every menu is built for the season and the room rather than pulled off a list. Tell me the occasion, how many people, and how you want the evening to feel, and the food follows from that. Fully plant-based, without announcing itself as such.

One of my most memorable cooking experiences was at the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Founded in 1962, Esalen encompasses twenty-seven acres of oceanside cliffs, mountains, natural gardens and cliffside hot springs. It is the birthplace of the Human Potential Movement and a vortex of east meets west, mind and body, science and spirituality — a home for counterculture, and for philosophers, psychologists, thinkers and bodyworkers. Esalen created the Esalen Massage, and keeps its own biodynamic farm, which could produce almost all of its own food if it did not need to order meat deliveries.

I was honored to be the first outside chef to lead the kitchen there, and the first person in its history to turn it vegan.

I loved touring Esalen’s biodynamic farm, tasting the produce in the field and taking inspiration for the weekend’s breakfasts, lunches and dinners. They grow their vegetables on an oceanside cliff, and twice I turned my head and saw a humpback whale surface in the Pacific. The Esalen team is gracious and professional, and with my team we cooked wonderfully elevated vegan food for two hundred people, morning, noon and night.

I really enjoy cooking for mindfulness and health. To practice with a group, and to provide for the group, is a wonderfully intimate experience. I have a passport, and I am deeply interested in exploring the crossroads between cooking and consciousness.

Practice

My desire to cook compassionately aligns with my own mindfulness path.

I came to yoga to get out of my own head, and I loved Les Leventhal’s classes in San Francisco — he felt like a compassionate drill sergeant, always challenging, but with kindness and care. A beautifully imperfect practice has kept me grounded through a career in professional kitchens, and asana and pranayama have kept me injury free.

My practice of zen started at the San Francisco Zen Center on 300 Page Street, at 5:40 in the morning. I rode my bike with half-opened eyelids through the Wiggle in the dark, that beautiful stretch of panhandle at the edge of Golden Gate Park. The smell of the eucalyptus before dawn felt like a flower ready to bloom, and the clearing fog promised an ever-quickening day in one of my favorite cities. Parking my bike and crossing from the street into the zendo, I would join my hands in gassho, fall into the procession of robed monks walking with slow mindfulness to their zafu, and be carried by the sound of the han and the mokugyo.

So much has been influenced by the arrival of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and zen practice in the Bay Area — from reassessing our values as a society, to creating community, to changing the way we eat. It is the same attention I bring to a kitchen: cleanliness, order, and doing one thing at a time properly.

I am interested in cooking for wellness and retreats because I, too, like to participate.

Fancy Plants has won numerous awards, and was the first vegan coffee shop in the Midwest.

Client references are available on request, and a selection of reviews will appear here.