Today we’d like to introduce you to Helene Henderson.
Hi Helene, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
When we lived in Los Angeles, I started a catering company in the mid-1990s, ironically called Lavender Farms Catering; in 2008, we moved to Malibu. I then worked as a private chef and, for fun, started offering cooking classes out of our home. I created a blog where I posted the recipes from my cooking classes. The name of my blog was Malibu Farm. After a while, I started doing backyard “Farm dinners”, as well, selling tickets on the internet. Not sure what I was thinking inviting strangers to our home. Today, that seems rather crazy!
The dinners (basically an underground restaurant), of course, were non-permitted and not allowed in the city of Malibu (rightfully so.). They were definitely too frequent for such a quiet neighborhood. Since I could no longer host dinners at home. I started to search for alternate locations, which is how I ended up with a short pop-up at the end of the Malibu Pier.
Today, we have 5 restaurants we operate and three licenses.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
When I first opened the pop-up cafe on the pier, I had actually never set foot inside a restaurant kitchen. I had no clue that you needed “tickets” so that the kitchen would know what to make and for who! I had the everything set up like a catering gig with zero clue on how restaurants operate. Definitely a rather steep learning curve.
Throughout my catering years, private chef work and backyard dinners I was always a one-woman operation, following no rules or mentor paths. One of the hardest things for me has definitely been to learn to work as part of a team and people managing. Although it has now been ten years since the pop-up cafe opened, I do not consider people managing and conflict resolutions a particular skill set of mine. It is definitely a daily challenge.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about Malibu Farm?
The one thing I learned while doing private chef work was having a different measure for “success.” And how to cook for a family. If grandma is visiting from out of state, or the teenage children who live in the house, or uncle “Bill” from Texas who is in town do not like your food, you are absolutely failing.
The parents of the families where I worked were always health conscious, but you also have to feed a range of very important visitors. Not necessarily VIP as in famous actors etc, (although those came by as well) but true VIPs, because who is more important than the grandparents, yeah, nobody right!
I started to tailor my menus with a healthy slant but not so healthy that it felt like homework or was not accessible to an average person. When i opened the pop-up cafe I used what i had learned as a private chef. Although my motto was “no soda, no French fries,” we still had hamburgers, but the hamburgers came with broccoli mashed potatoes (no fries) and with a side salad. No matter what you ordered, I wanted it to be healthier and with more greens than what the guests would normally eat at a Pier location.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
The role of luck or destiny? I don’t know, but I can say it never occurred to me to go into the food business. I was a decent home cook and enjoyed cooking, but I never thought of it as a career possibility. Instead, I was working random jobs in clothing stores and as a graphic designer. One day, my friend Donna was hosting a small business dinner for her husband’s recently started production company. She was also a really good home cook and was doing the dinner herself when she accidentally cut her hand while prepping and needed to go to urgent care for stitches.
She called me and asked if I could go to her house and cook the dinner for her, and so I did. Then from that night on I started getting booked to cater events. I really did not have a clue of what I was doing and had to learn on the fly and improvise a lot.
I honestly don’t know if I would have been in the food business today, if she had not cut her hand that and asked me to cook the dinner for her.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.malibu-farm.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/malibufarm/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/malibufarm
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Malibufarm
Image Credits
Erin Kunkell
