Today we’d like to introduce you to Zoë Spezzano.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Zoë. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve always loved food. Thats just a fact of my life. Cooking, eating, sharing my creations with my family and friends has been the most consistent thing in my life and I always knew that I wanted to turn this passion into a career. I officially started working in restaurants at the age of 18.
My first kitchen job was with Chef Neal Fraser. He took me under his wing and put me right in the middle of his kitchen working for his event space, Vibiana in Downtown LA. I spent my first day picking mint for three hours until my fingertips turned green, and I loved every second of it. I worked for him as a prep cook for two years on and off. A year or so later, he opened up his other restaurant, Redbird. There, he put me on the line working Garde Manger station. This was my first time working as a line cook and the thought of going through the levels of a professional kitchen really sparked my interest. Working for Chef Neal Fraser was an absolute honor, he is a lifelong mentor that I will always thank for giving me the introduction into this beautiful, crazy industry. All the while, I was going to college at Colorado State University studying Hospitality and Business. But even so, I was a line cook! I worked at a local restaurant called The Kitchen during my studies, which was a notable farm-to-table restaurant in Fort Collins. I learned a lot about working with local farms and being really purposeful about how you source your ingredients. After I graduated from CSU, I moved back to LA full time and started working for Chef Walter Manzke of Republique, a mid-Wilshire staple! I was there for two years working the dinner service with some of the most amazing people. I think Republique really rounded out my skills and truly made me the cook that I am today. I learned so much there and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work under such a talented and respected Chef such as Walter.
Another reason I’m thankful to have worked at Republique was how they gave back to their employees. They allowed us to take time off to travel and experience food abroad while still knowing we had a job to come back to. I feel that quite a bit of my cooking has been curated from my travels around the world. I’ve taken trips all over Southeast Asia, Japan and Europe, all of which were so inspiring. Each time I returned, I had a clearer view on what kind of food I both enjoyed eating and wanted to incorporate into my cooking. I always say, “the more you eat, the more you learn.” And trust me, I never hesitate to always learn as much as I can. After my two years of working at Republique, I felt like it was time to start my own culinary journey. That is when I decided to start Zoë’s Kitchen Table, also known as ZKT. I knew I wanted to share my food with the world so I quit the restaurant and began to pursue ZKT full time. And here we are!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I would say that this has most definitely been a bumpy road but nothing so far that I can’t handle. I’ve always loved what I do, but the direction in which I choose to take my career has been a struggle. I’ve always enjoyed working in restaurants and who knows, I’d love to have my own restaurant someday. I think my in-the-field experience is where I built a solid foundation as a chef and where I really came into my own with skill, adequacy and confidence. Since I never went to culinary school, I chose to just jump right into this world with zero professional kitchen experience. Although my college degree in hospitality has certainly come in handy. I think this posed the challenge of finding the right opportunities to prove myself in the kitchen. Yet, I was able to align myself with the right people and the right situations. I’ve always been the type of person that thrives in situations of desperation and consider myself an A+ hustler (for lack of a better term). I pride myself in being able to take a challenging situation and turn it into a successful one, for instance now during the corona crisis. For many months I was working as a private chef leading up to the coronavirus outbreak. All of a sudden, I had no job and needed to figure out an alternative. While quarantining, I started baking challah bread for a few friends and overnight turned into a full-on baking business.
In the last three months, I’ve baked and delivered over two thousand salted chocolate chunk shortbread cookies, over one hundred and fifty challah loaves and over two hundred scones, just to name a few. I’ve always loved baking as a hobby but never considered adding it to ZKT officially. I was able to generate an income with the money I made selling my baked goods, which is something I will forever be grateful for. I couldn’t have done any of this without the immense support from my community. My customers constantly promoting me on Instagram, spreading the word, and gifting my baked goods to friends and family. All of this has contributed to the growth and success of Zoë’s Kitchen Table. It’s amazing what the power of sharing a post can do for a small business. Creating Zoë’s Kitchen Table has been such a whirlwind and I’ve learned so many lessons along the way. It hasn’t been that long since the official launch of ZKT back in September 2019, but the progress that I have made in such a short time has been so rewarding and has allowed me to have tremendous growth. Actually, the most challenging part for me was learning how to market myself on Instagram and social media. The cooking comes easy but advertising is a new skill for me. Nowadays, it is so important to make sure your social media presence is strong and consistent, especially when it comes to starting a small business. You can have the best tasting food on the planet but if no one knows it exists, then you really don’t have a business at all.
Zoë’s Kitchen Table – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
To be honest, Zoë’s Kitchen Table started because at the time, I was completely burnt out from working at the restaurant. I was working all these crazy hours (as you do as a line cook), super long days and I was just plain tired. I was lucky to have overtime, which thankfully was available to me. I didn’t have time or energy to pursue my personal passions and even waking up on my day off, I was just so unmotivated to do anything that it really put me a bad place. This is not to say that I didn’t love my job, but it was time to push myself to begin a new endeavor. So I decided to move into the private sector. I’m a Los Angeles based personal chef who provides a variety of different services. These include at home meal prep, dinner parties, special occasion meals, ZKT pop-up events, and catering services. I work with clients to customize the perfect menus but also have pre-set menus to choose from. Zoë’s Kitchen Table is all about fresh, seasonal, colorful food that isn’t intimidating and always makes you want to dive right in for a second bite. Quality is always a top priority.
I love being able to source the best produce from local farms and working to highlight them in my dishes. I pull a lot of inspiration from my travels around the world so I find that my dishes use a variety of global flavors and ingredients. ZKT is very produce forward, unbelievably fresh, jam packed with spices, fresh herbs and beautiful ingredients. I wouldn’t say I specialize in any one particular dish or type of food, but that could be what draws people to my cooking. It encompasses comfort food, refined dishes, yummy snacks, delicious baked goods and everything in between. Quite literally…what you see on my kitchen table. I think in addition, what people seem to notice about ZKT is the love…because you can tell I put a lot of love into everything I make. The food I cook for others is the food I most enjoy eating. I am most proud of the amount of growth I have made in such a short period of time. Like I said earlier, I only officially launched my business last September and I feel as if I’ve done so much already. But I’m in the early stages of ZKT and know I have so much more room to grow and will be accomplishing a lot more in the future.
What were you like growing up?
Oh, little Zoë was a special kid. In kindergarten, I was diagnosed with ADD and had a lot of difficulty focusing on specific tasks for even five minutes at a time. But of course, when it came to learning a recipe, I could follow it without a hitch! I wrote my first recipe for chicken nuggets when I was seven years old (I still have it as a keepsake). I’m not too different now from how I was then. I still love chicken nuggets and I’m still writing recipes, except now they are a bit more sophisticated. I loved to draw and paint, and I think the root of it was the process of working with my hands and being as creative as possible. I enjoyed being outside, hanging with friends and going out to eat. There was no question about how much I loved food.
Even at the age of ten, I loved watching the original Iron Chef on Food Network, baking desserts at home, and being in the kitchen. There was even a point where I was selling apple galettes to my friend’s parents, in-between babysitting on the weekends. I would show up to school with my homemade pop tarts for my friends to try and everyone would be so excited. And I remember, it made me feel so good on the inside, feeding people something that I created and seeing how happy they were. I clearly remember moments like this, which really reinforced my decision to turn this hobby and passion into a career. The funny thing is, my whole life, I cannot remember wanting to be anything else other than a Chef.
Contact Info:
- Website: zoeskitchentable.com
- Phone: (323) 423-5654
- Email: zspezzano@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoeskitchentable/
Image Credit:
Sadie Spezzano
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