Is a Chef Without a Restaurant Still a Chef?

Most of the prestige in cooking goes to restaurant chefs. The impact shows up in a lot of other places. Recorded live at KiCo in The Hague, this conversation brings together Furqan Meerza (senior innovation chef at Kraft Heinz), Ernesto Vecilla (culinary innovation at a biotech ingredients startup) and Abir Lakehal (head chef at Bayonne and the baker behind Baked by Abir). Big food, biotech and pop-up baking: three scales, one question about what a chef is once the restaurant is behind you. In this conversation we discuss: 🥫 Why chefs belong in companies with no obvious need for one, from ketchup to fermentation 🧪 How a startup role grows from product development into pitching and technical conversations 🥐 Selling out 450 pastries from a home kitchen, and what scaling a pop-up asks of you 🎓 Culinary school, hotel management or internships: what actually taught each of us 🎨 The creativity that gets trapped in restaurant kitchens, and where else it can go 🍳 Can a chef's perfect-conditions testing mislead a food company? 🧑‍🍳 Whether you still call yourself a chef when you leave the restaurant 🎤 From the audience: how small founders can use chefs' feedback, how AI changes the work, and how to try a restaurant kitchen from the inside 🎧 Fugitive Chefs explores how culinary expertise creates value across the modern food system. 🌐 Website: https://www.fugitivechefs.com 👥 Join the community: https://fugitivechefs.kit.com/297093b0dc 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/57kmFAUgp6DhgnguexFuDs 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fugitivechefs 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fugitive-chefs/id1676930088 📩 Beyond the Pass: https://beyondthepass.substack.com 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/fugitivechefspodcast