Episode 85 – Chef Katie Button of Cúrate restaurant and La Bodega
Whenever a cook asks me for my advice when they are starting out, I always tell them to find the best chef they can and then just put your head down and work hard for them. This strategy is nearly bulletproof and will almost always pay dividends down the road, even if you don't think so right away.
And that's exactly how chef Katie Button, of Asheville, North Carolina, did it when she got her first job working at Café Atlantico in Washington, DC, when José Andrés was early in building his empire of restaurants. After meeting her Spanish-born husband, Félix Meana, she went to Roses, Spain, to work at the all-time great restaurant, El Bulli, where she started off as a server but naturally migrated into the kitchen to work with Albert Adrià. By seeking out excellence and working in these world-class restaurants, she developed many of the necessary skills to run a successful kitchen when she was ready.
There are so many great nuggets of information and inspiration, but here are some of the highlights:
- Learning how to show gratitude and appreciation towards your team
- Why a good leader sometimes just need to be quiet and give their team the space to find the answer for themselves, thereby creating personal ownership over the project
- Growing up in a southern household in New Jersey
- Obtaining a biomolecular engineering degree at Cornell and how aspects of it continue to help her in business today
- Living in Paris and falling in love with the food culture
- Applying for a server position to make a couple dollars as she was beginning to study for a PhD
- How she got a position at Café Atlantico and minibar in DC
- The person who hired her and changed her life path, and how chefs can have the same impact on your employees today.
- Screwing up as a server at El Bulli and how she’ll never forget that moment
- Serving the rabbit innards on its own crispy ear and radish lychees
- How her mother was the catalyst for Katie and Félix to open Cúrate
- Why Asheville, NC just felt right for them to put down roots
- How José Andrés and his team saved their hide just a couple days before the opening of their first restaurant
- Why they keep it simple at Cúrate and La Bodega and allow the ingredients to speak for themselves
- The difficult decisions of having to close a restaurant and pivot, even if it’s the most perfect concept in your mind
- Her TV show, From The Source, and how her experiences on it have shifted her perspective as a chef
- Her mind blowing epiphany with artisan single-origin and hyper-seasonal maple syrup from Zoer Tapatree
- Her first cookbook and the one she is now developing
- The importance of good systems in your kitchen and why it is one of the cornerstones of being successful
- The ups and downs of running a restaurant when you care so deeply about every aspect of the business
- How a chef can set the example of hospitality in their restaurant, even if they are not touching tables in the dining room
- The importance of chefs helping to improve their communities around them and why we are the connection between the restaurant and the community
Connect with Katie here
Check out Cúrate here
Check out La Bodega here
A huge shout out to our sponsors, Maxwell McKenney and Singer Equipment, for their unwavering support, which allows us to be able to bring these conversations to you. Check out their websites for all the amazing equipment they can supply your restaurant with to make your team more efficient and successful.