San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Brett Dudley applies fine-dining touches to his prep meals
Brett and Cassie Dudley launched Pure Meal Prep San Diego with the goal of applying their restaurant experience to their new business. With many now working from home and limiting their ventures outside, business has picked up.
Ask chef Brett Dudley what’s most important about a good meal, and he’ll give you a simple answer: “Everything.”
■ “The ingredients, the taste, the plating,” he says.
■ In the summer of 2018, he and his wife, Cassie, launched a meal prep company after months of fits and starts test-driving their business concept from their apartment.
■ Today, the culinary trifecta of ingredients, taste and plating still figures quite prominently in how Brett approaches his work as co-owner and executive chef of Pure Meal Prep San Diego.
“When we first started,” Cassie says, “we were making a lot of meals for bodybuilders, and they wanted plain chicken. But that’s not who Brett is. To make something plain was almost embarrassing for him. He wanted to make a meal that was beautiful and tasty.”
Pure Meal Prep began as a favor to Brett’s brother, Michael, a fitness buff who wanted meals but didn’t want to cook them. Soon, through word of mouth, Brett began making meals not only for his brother but for his brother’s friends.
“He had friends in the fitness industry who were looking for clean, healthy meals, so I was doing it on the side,” says Brett, who worked for a defense contractor back then. “We started cooking meals in our own tiny little 500-square-foot apartment in North Park.”
Cassie, meanwhile, began posting his meals on Instagram “as kind of a ‘Oh, look at what Brad’s cooking today.’ People were liking the posts and commenting and asking, ‘Where can I get meals like this? Do you sell meals?’ ”
That’s how Pure Meal Prep San Diego was born. Their goal all along was to slowly grow the business so as not to overwhelm the kitchen. That’s exactly what they did, expanding their clientele through social media, TV appearances and face-to-face visits at
fitness centers around town.
The coronavirus pandemic ramped up safety measures in the kitchen, with temperature checks every morning, masks for everyone and 20-minute sanitizing sessions every other hour.
“We gained a substantial growth in business when stay-athome orders went into effect and are still growing,” says Brett, who adds that pickups at the kitchen are no longer offered and no-contact delivery has been implemented.
A few days ago, they left East County for a new location in Sorrento Valley — in a space with their own kitchen and soon-to-open Caché Cafe that will serve contemporary American menu, catering to lunch and early dinner crowds. A second group of staffers will be hired to complement the current roster of eight cooks who chop, grill, bake and plate hundreds of meals every Saturday for Sunday delivery by nine drivers. They deliver meals from Oceanside to San Ysidro between 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m.
Brett, who was born and raised in San Diego, learned a lot about food and cooking from his mother. His first job was at “a little French bistro in Scripps Ranch,” he says. “I started there, and just fell in love with cooking and never stopped.”
Many years later, he met
Cassie. They both worked at Smoking Goat and One Door North in North Park. She was a manager, and he worked in the kitchen. That combination proved to be a harbinger of good things to come.
“We love the food industry and have a passion for it,” he says. “That’s what makes us such a great team.”
They consider themselves foodies, and that’s a big part of how they approach the business.
“Our business strategy all along was to reach healthyminded people who didn’t have time to cook and shop but still appreciated good food,” Cassie says. “People who liked fine dining but on the run.”
Their menus, which change weekly, feature several plans, including lean and keto. Recent meal plans included dishes like grilled garlic pepper flank steak over sweet potato mash and charred seasonal vegetables with chili aioli. Or herb-crusted wild caught salmon over rice and grilled seasonal vegetables finished with lemon cream sauce. And Taco Tuesdays? How about braised short ribs topped with microgreens.
“Everything is made fresh,” Brett says, “from pastas to raviolis to hamburger buns.”
Even the hamburger buns? Yes.
A quick look at the company’s Instagram page (@puremealprepsd, with nearly 12,000 followers) reveals a kitchen busy making homemade hamburger buns, guajillo braised empanadas and shrimp-stuffed raviolis.
“It’s definitely not the boring chicken and rice and vegetable,” Cassie says with a chuckle.
Cassie, who handles the business side, knows well enough to let Brett’s creativity loose in the kitchen, but every now and then, she chimes in with a gentle nudge: “Shrimp-stuffed ravioli? Can we pull that off this week?” Brett’s answer is always “yes.” “Look,” he says, “we’ve gone way past our expectations. We made mistakes in the beginning, but we learned from them. We grew from them, and that’s what helped us keep going. It’s humbling, but at the end of the day, we love what we’re doing.”
“Because we worked together together before,” Cassie says, “we really enjoy working together now. We each have a respect for one another to let us drive in our own lanes. He respects my knowledge in marketing and business, and I respect his knowing his menu.”
Brett adds: “I’m fighting so hard to be different from the typical meal prep company that I really do want restaurant meals at an affordable price.”
And that means making himself worry about things like ingredients, taste and plating.
“Because we come from that industry, it’s hard for us to act like a normal meal prep company. We’ll never think the same way,” he says. “It’s what makes us different from everyone else.”