Oakland’s Brundo Chef Residency Is Looking for Its Next Up-and-Coming Chef | Eater SF
"Daniel Aderaw Yeshiwas, the restaurateur and managing partner, says “I realized it’s really, really hard to even get the support to open up a restaurant in the Bay Area, even if you had the capital, even if you had the business plan,” and adds, “Just talking to some of my peers, who also mentioned having a lot of struggles being able to find a space, needing this really big proof of concept, and really needing a following to make it in the Bay Area — it’s hard when you’re just starting from nothing.” Knowing that difficult path, he helped formalize the Brundo Chef Residency to clear a way for chefs to get more restaurant experience: it is a six-month residency prioritizing chefs of the African diaspora in which the featured chef will host a monthly dinner party series on the patio, with access to the restaurant’s kitchen and wholesale accounts for ordering food, and a chance to collaborate with the bar team on drinks. The residency includes built-in advising and feedback sessions with a selection committee that includes Yeshiwas and chef Geoff Davis of Oakland’s Burdell, as well as former residency participants Selasie Dotse (who used the kitchen for their Ghanaiane le aɖe Test Kitchenpop-ups and is now executive sous chef at Elmina in Washington, D.C.) and Leonard Roberts III (chef de cuisine at Reve Bistro in Lafayette). Dinners are also an opportunity for the chef-in-residency to get marketing materials—the program provides a photographer and videographer for the events—and finalists will do a tasting with the selection committee and receive feedback on their menus even if they’re not selected. Thanks to a grant from the Heinz Black Kitchens Initiative, the program has been able to offer more perks and formal structure; Yeshiwas says the ideal candidate is “somebody who has a lot of culinary experience, somebody who’s maybe working inside of a kitchen now, somebody who feels really tied to a diasporic identity and really wants to showcase that.” The eventual hope is that by the end of the six months the chef-in-residence will be able to leverage the experience into a new position or to get their business idea into new and different spaces, and, as Yeshiwas puts it, “We’re really, really excited to have taken this from a small idea at a farmers market to something that has funding, that’s become very structured, and involves members of the community, with intersections of culture, music, food, and Ethiopian cuisine and other diasporic cuisines.” Applications for the Brundo Chef Residency are open through Sunday, March 9; interested chefs are asked to fill out an application at Brundo.com." - Dianne de Guzman
