Chefcentury's mission: one affordable meal at a time
San Jose commissary kitchen also home delivers wellness lunches, dinners
What do you get when an entrepreneur looking to make a difference during a pandemic meets a chef who has unretired to cook home-delivered meals for his longtime clients? A San Jose venture called Chefcentury, which has put a multicultural array of chefs into a commissary kitchen on Winchester Boulevard near the Campbell border.
The initiative, founded and funded by Richard Tam with Brad Kunkel managing the kitchen operations, comes with this urging for both the budding and experienced culinarians in the kitchen: “Focus on cooking. We handle the rest.”
And by “the rest,” Tam means chefs are provided with a fully equipped and licensed kitchen plus marketing, delivery and customer service support — with no upfront cost — so they can “showcase their culinary skills and build a future in the emerging delivery food industry.”
“A lot of chefs were devastated by COVID, and I thought I should do something to help the small guys,” said the Monte Sereno resident. “So it started off as a social mission.”
The profit-sharing model gives 70% of the profits to the chefs. “There's no financial risk at all. Otherwise, we can't stay true to our mission.”
Tam's background may not be in restaurants — he was the founder/ceo of the iuniverse self-publishing business — but he's deep into this field now. “His heart is for the chefs. He wants to help local chefs find a way to pursue their passion,” Kunkel said.
Since late 2020, more than a dozen chefs have done just that, fine-tuning their skills by preparing lunches and dinners for pandemic deliveries, experimenting with pop-ups and donating meals to charitable organizations.
Among them is San Jose resident and Hawaii native Nia Robello, who specializes in island cuisine and has been with Chefcentury
since the beginning. Besides showcasing her food on the company's platform, she has also started and grown her own brand, Gourmet by NK, for event catering, family meals, private chef services and more.
“It's been an amazing opportunity,” she said. “I'm grateful that Richard and Brad came into my path.”
These days, Chefcentury is pivoting and experimenting with new ideas, and she's part of it.
One of the staples has been holiday meals for pickup or home delivery. The Mother's Day brunch menu features vegetable strata, a Cobb salad, smoke salmon crepe, a muffaletta sandwich, Chicken Cordon Bleu and macadamia nut mahi mahi.
Now Chefcentury is preparing for its next project launch: a line of home-delivered wellness meals in April that build on Kunkel's experience cooking for clients under his brand, the Nutrition Kitchen.
Tam emphasizes that these are balanced farm-to-table meals, not a diet plan. “There are no false promises that this is a quick fix. Eat well and you will get healthier over time,” he said.
Kunkel, who has had long-term success with clients, said, “If the idea is a lifelong commitment to eating well, you have to make it interesting and not boring. You can't drink smoothies all day. The idea is to have a variety of proteins and cuisines each week. We'll change it out based on the seasons.”
For lunch, he may put a souvlaki-grilled prawn skewer atop quinoa tabbouleh or make a batch of his sweet potato and mushroom chowder with lentils. Dinner could be his popular London broil with a Dijon-peppercorn sauce, accompanied by potato wedges and green beans. And he'll work with the other chefs to incorporate Vietnamese, Italian, Thai, Hawaiian, Mexican and other cuisines into the repertoire.
That's part of the appeal. Unlike a conventional restaurant, which typically is tied to one cuisine, Chefcentury can accommodate chefs with varied talents.
And Tam's keeping the price points reasonable at $10-$12 for lunches and $10-$18 for dinners for a la carte items, with no delivery fee and discounts given for meal plan “bundles.” He finds the 25 to 30 percent fees charged by delivery services “unconscionable.”
DETAILS >> Learn more about the upcoming wellness meals and holiday specials at www.chefcentury.com.