Chef turned consultant promotes healthy, sustainable
When Justin Johnson founded Sustainable Kitchens in 2015, he wanted to change the way people viewed institutionalized food.
Building upon 18 years of experience in professional kitchens, he’s become a focal force in the back-to-scratch cooking movement.
While he pushes for less processed and packaged food, he’s also showing businesses around the country how it benefits their budget.
Partly, he’s driven by filling a role he didn’t see anyone else taking in the food industry, but he also wants to make positive changes.
Starting with senior living and hospitals, Johnson has introduced local sourcing and from-scratch cooking into institutional settings.
His ability to affect both health and the bottom line seems to be getting him the right kind of attention; he’s now working with hospitals and school districts nationwide.
You’ll see his work at Madison West High School, where students have been sampling recipes throughout the school year. His team also has worked with the Sheboygan school district and Beaver Dam Hospital.
Johnson and his wife, Jessica, live in Wauwatosa with their three sons, Max, Henry and Louis.
Early aspirations
When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be Steven Spielberg. I wanted to be an actor and make movies. I actually was an actor for about five years. I did a lot of stage and theater, some local TV commercials.
The last show I did was “Of Mice and Men” at UW-Milwaukee. That was where I met my future bride. She was a stagehand, not in acting or theater at all. She came backstage and I was standing there in my underwear, because that’s what you do backstage. It was maybe three weeks later that I asked her to marry me.
Becoming a chef
I went to Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. I’d worked in restaurants all over Milwaukee, but that was when I really learned to become a chef and cultivate a passion for it.
Finding his fit
Harwood Place in Wauwatosa was the first place I had the opportunity to build a program from nothing. The administration wanted to have better food, didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t either, so I just started to conceptualize a program where everything is local and from scratch. Nobody was really doing that in a senior home, especially in Wisconsin.
Fancy food failure
Trying to figure out how to meld what I wanted to do as a chef and what the residents (at Harwood Place) wanted to eat … my first menus, it was all like stuff that I liked and was informed by my French training. It was stuff they looked at and said get this fancy food out of my face. That was the biggest learning curve for me, trying to put customers’ needs ahead of my ego.
What drives him
I was a terrible student, I did not graduate from high school. There was a strong narrative or sense I was going nowhere fast and I would do nothing in life. I think that is another huge driver for me.
When I was at Harwood Place and wanting to change (jobs), there was a new restaurant, an aspiring James Beard kind of thing. I had some interviews, and in the last phone conversation one of the owners said, “Justin, you’re a really nice guy and you’re a good cook, but you won’t ever have real success in this business because you don’t have the pedigree.” That always hangs in the back of my brain.
Fate and food
December 2011 I was fired from Hotel Metro. That was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It gave me the opportunity to go to Watertown Hospital, and that job changed my life. It is why I am able to do what I do now.
I spent about four months unemployed, saw a Craigslist ad looking for an executive chef for the Watertown Hospital. Executive chef in a hospital? This doesn’t make sense. They had this crazy vision to invest in the health of the community by serving food.
Perfecting a plan
I spent three years at Watertown and developed what I think is still the best food service program in the country. I wanted to take that experience and knowledge and transfer it to as many operations as I could. I launched the business in literally 48 hours: I wrote the business plan, bought the LLC, created the logo and said OK, I’m Sustainable Kitchens now. Starting from scratch There is nothing in the food we didn’t put there, meaning everything is made in house. It doesn’t mean all health food made from tofu, flax and barley. It is all real food. There isn’t going to be any yellow No. 5 or butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT).
Proving his point
I was (working with a client) watching a prep cook open boxes of salmon, putting them on the sheet pans and all that waste, the plastic, the cardboard. (I said) Don’t you think it would be easier if we just got whole fish and broke it down ourselves? His eyes got wide. “That would be too hard. I wouldn’t have time.”
I had the chef order 50 pounds of whole salmon the next day. I set up a cutting board next to him. I said let’s race and see who gets done first. The fish is already thawed, I don’t have plastic and cardboard.
I’m not a great fish butcher, I’m average at best. I had all that fish broken down, skinned, deboned, portioned and ready to cook by the time he was on his third box out of 10. Why is packaged more convenient? It isn’t.
On-the-road meal
Caesar salad. That’s No. 1. You can easily pack on the pounds if you eat in a restaurant every day, so I typically get soup and salad. I never get a steak. Fork. Spoon. Life. explores the everyday relationship that local notables (within the food community and without) have with food. To suggest future personalities to profile, email nstohs@journalsentinel.com .