This past weekend by some chance (and persistence) I was featured as a chef at Food Loves Tech for the amazing Farm.One!

You really need to check them and if you live in the NYC area, definitely pay them a visit in Tribeca! But what I would like to focus on in this post is my experience in cooking for nearly ~1000 people in the span of 6 hours. Yup! Over the span of 3 days I had to decide the menu, coordinate with the Farm.One team on menu finalization, timing, ingredients, and storyline of the demo – all while still working my full-time job at Twitter (and traveling this past week nonetheless!). Farm.One hooked me up with a kitchen space at the Institution of Culinary Education in NYC, which was aaaamazing! But let me not fool you with all this amazing-ness – not all of this process is glamourous. In fact, it is extremely labor intensive, detail-orientated, but incredibly rewarding.

After Food Network, this was the second commercial kitchen I cooked in (at ICE) and I had it ALL to myself!

Now that problem with that is, I had to COOK all by myself for majority of the time. Julia was Farm.One was incredibly generous in helping me for a bit, but ultimately, I planned the menu, cooked, and cleaned in 6 hours in the ICE kitchen. It’s not an easy feat to plan for 1000 portions, so for those who cater regularly on this – props, man props!! It requires a lot of organization, coordination, and fast pacing – rolling out 500+ Aloo Tikkis gets the carpal tunnel goinggggg! Also, trying to figure out a commercial blender – to make my lemon basil pesto for my Italian panzanella – that I could barely life from the shelf was also another (amusing) hurdle to cross. Someone should’ve been there video-taping me. I ultimately finished, cleaned and left IC shortly after 12:30am…

At the actual event, there are so many amazing brands and chefs with booths, so Farm.One has a fairly large space, but the space I was situated in was definitely tight! So it was all about maximizing what I had to work with. I had to quickly plate my food in the compostable bamboo dishes that FLT provided – every 2 minutes – once the FLT patrons completed the Farm.One demo, they would move to my station where I would take the herbs they just “grew” and pair it with one of my original vegan dishes. So I was serving about 4-5 people at a time every 2-5 minutes! That’s incredibly fast!

The experience was incredibly tiring and rewarding. I was running on a couple hours of sleep every night, and everything happened really fast! And keep in mind, I had to be ON once the event started at 10am on Friday and Saturday. But the reward comes in the reaction of people eating my food and loving it! I gave away nearly my entire stash of business cards – and everyone was so open and interested in trying my original vegan dishes! However, it was also astonishing to see how disrespectful some can be – some would just grab the food and walk away without realizing that I was the chef or without understanding that I wasn’t just there to hand out the food. Or WORSE – some would try it and then throw the remainder out in the garbage right by me – if you’re going to do that at least go to a garbage can a bit further away!! But these are the learnings that come with experience, and I must say this was an incredible experience!

Thank you so much Farm.One and my wonderful Twitter team for supporting me in doing this over the course of a few days – I can’t wait to do more together!! <3