Hello

My Story
A Life Built Around Food, Family, and Service

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Cooking entered my life before I understood that it could become a life.

I grew up in Spokane, Washington, in a family where food meant care, even when there was not much to spare. At fifteen, I needed a new pair of football cleats. My mother told me to get a job, so I started washing dishes at Taco Torro, a local Mexican restaurant. Two cooks quit on my first day, and I was pulled into the kitchen to help. What began as necessity quickly became direction.
 

Food was not romantic to me at first. It was work. It was responsibility. It was a way forward. As a teenager, I also lived with debilitating migraines, an early lesson in how completely the body can shape a life. When my brother died when I was eighteen, the structure of kitchen work gave me something solid to return to.

After high school, I spent the better part of a decade at The Mustard Seed, eventually helping manage kitchens and open a new location. Later, working with Chef Jason Rex at Fugazzi opened another door. He introduced me to the discipline behind whole-animal butchery, handmade pasta, bread, and food built entirely from the raw ingredient. For the first time, I understood that cooking could be more than employment. It could be a craft and a language.
 

At twenty-five, I left Spokane for Portland to attend the Western Culinary Institute, then part of Le Cordon Bleu. I graduated with a 4.0 GPA and continued learning anywhere I could. That path took me to New York City and Café Gray, where I cooked in Chef Gray Kunz’s Michelin-starred kitchen. I returned to the Pacific Northwest with a deeper technical foundation, working in demanding restaurant environments including Timberline Lodge and 23Hoyt. Those years taught me refinement, repetition, organization, and restraint, but they also clarified the kind of food culture I wanted to build for myself.
 

In 2008, my wife, Kate, and I opened Santé Restaurant & Charcuterie in downtown Spokane. Santé means health in French, and the name reflected an idea that has followed me throughout my career: food should be pleasurable, but it should also be honest about where it comes from and what it asks of the land, the animal, the farmer, and the cook.
 

At Santé, whole-animal butchery was not a marketing phrase. We built relationships with regional farmers, broke down animals in-house, cured our own meats, baked our own bread, fermented, preserved, made stocks from bones, and worked to find a worthy use for every part. The menu changed with the farms and the seasons because I believed local sourcing had to be a working practice, not a story printed at the bottom of a menu.
 

Over the next decade, Kate and I built a family of distinct Spokane businesses: Santé Restaurant & Charcuterie, Common Crumb Artisan Bakery, Inland Pacific Kitchen, Hogwash Whiskey Den, Biscuit Wizard, and, in Santé’s former home, Smoke & Mirrors Saloon. Each explored a different side of hospitality, from tasting menus and whole-animal cooking to bread, breakfast, whiskey, and the simple pleasure of a well-made burger. Together, they became part of a changing downtown food culture and gave many young cooks a place to learn, contribute, and grow.
 

Recognition followed, although it was never the reason for the work. In 2015, I became the first chef from the greater Spokane area to be named a James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Best Chef: Northwest. My teams and I cooked at the James Beard House in New York in 2013, 2015, and 2016. Santé was twice recognized as a Good Food Awards finalist for its charcuterie, in 2014 and 2016. I was also given the opportunity to speak at TEDxUIdaho about a question that still guides me: Do we truly know where our food comes from?
 

In 2017, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, I traveled there with Chef Aaron Robertson and joined the World Central Kitchen response. With a small team and the support of people back home in Spokane, we helped prepare and serve 25,415 meals during that first deployment, working in San Juan and in the mountain community of Utuado. I returned again the following January.
 

That experience stripped cooking down to its most essential purpose. A hot meal was not entertainment. It was dignity, relief, and proof that someone had come to help. The experience led me to begin building 509Cooks around the idea that chefs could serve as culinary first responders in moments of crisis.

In 2019, life changed again. Our son Joshua was diagnosed with epilepsy, and the questions surrounding food, the brain, the body, and care became deeply personal. Kate and I sold our Spokane businesses and moved east, where I became Executive Chef of Fork, Ellen Yin’s landmark restaurant in Philadelphia. On paper, it was a major professional step. At its heart, however, it was a family decision: an effort to find the right care for our son and to rebuild our lives around what mattered most.
 

That same season, I chose sobriety. It was a decision rooted in responsibility, clarity, and the desire to be fully present for my family and for the work ahead. Between fatherhood, recovery, the pandemic, and our eventual return to the Pacific Northwest for Joshua’s care at OHSU, my definition of success changed.

I had spent years asking how far food could be pushed as an art form. I began asking a more important question:

What can food do for a life?

Forest Glen Kitchen is my answer.

Based in Oregon City, Forest Glen Kitchen is not an attempt to recreate the restaurants of my past. It is the mature expression of everything those years taught me: classic technique, whole-animal respect, fermentation, preservation, bread, fire, seasonality, disciplined organization, and hospitality that feels personal.
 

It is also shaped by everything life taught me outside the kitchen: resilience, service, fatherhood, health, loss, and the importance of being present.
 

Today, my work brings together private dining, household provisions, functional and nutrient-conscious cooking, knife craft, pantry goods, teaching, storytelling, and charitable dinners. Through the Provisions program, I help families create calm, useful, beautifully maintained kitchens filled with seasonal meals, prepared ingredients, stocks, ferments, bread, and staples made around the way they actually live.

It is not simply meal preparation. It is culinary stewardship, removing the daily burden of food while preserving its pleasure, nourishment, and humanity.
 

My cooking remains rooted in the Pacific Northwest: its farms, forests, waters, and seasons. I draw on classic technique and global traditions, but I am less interested in novelty than I am in meaning. I believe in clean flavor, thoughtful sourcing, vibrant vegetables, well-raised proteins, long fermentation, and using the whole ingredient with respect.
 

My own way of eating is now largely plant-forward, but my years as a butcher taught me that cooking meat responsibly begins with honoring the whole animal. I believe food can support well-being without becoming joyless or dogmatic.
 

Food as medicine, to me, does not mean pretending that dinner replaces medical care. It means recognizing that what we eat, how it is grown, how it is prepared, and how we gather around it all matter.

Joshua’s journey with epilepsy continues to shape my work and my commitment to advocacy, foundation dinners, and creating food-centered experiences that support families living with neurological illness. It reminds me that hospitality is not performance. It is attention. It is noticing what another person needs and caring enough to respond.
 

After more than thirty-five years in kitchens, I no longer measure the work only by restaurants opened, awards received, or plates served. I measure it by whether people feel cared for. By whether a kitchen makes family life easier. By whether a meal creates connection. By whether a young cook grows in confidence. By whether the ingredient was honored. And by whether the work leaves something useful behind.
 

Forest Glen Kitchen is the legacy I am building with my family: a place where craft and care belong to the same conversation, where food supports life rather than complicating it, and where every challenge can be met with the philosophy I try to carry forward:
 

Gift Over Grudge.