In August 1986, I founded Splendid Feast Catering, and haven't looked back. After a truly memorable time growing up in Palo Alto, CA, I graduated from Western Washington University in the great Pacific Northwest. I earned degrees in chemistry, and biology, and completed programs in pre-medicine and nutrition. I returned to my hometown and found work with Raychem, a local Fortune 500 as a chemist/process engineer. While I loved this opportunity, within a few years I realized my true mission in life and morphed from chemist to passionate chef. Chemistry and food, like mathematics and music, are two intrinsically connected fields, and most chemists I’ve known are hard-core foodies.
I made this career change rather suddenly after discovering that a local firm, an arm of a France-based corporation, needed to bring in a catering company to provide daily meals for its staff. Thus, they reasoned, their staff would be inspired to remain on campus engaging with one another and brainstorming over good meals. I jumped at the opportunity and went directly, with Italian feast in basket, and menus in hand to the hiring manager whom I somehow convinced to try me out. They had already assigned ten large and well-established catering companies to prepare trial meals for each of their weeks. The trials would culminate in a company-wide vote. Based on a turn of good fortune, my novice status remained unnoticed or perhaps was disregarded, and I slipped into week three for my trial. My retired but devoted Italian Dad helped me prepare each day’s six courses, working out of my tiny rustic cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains. By Thursday, the company called the vote, and to my astonishment, unanimously voted me in, and canceled the other contenders.
My first unwieldy moment was on the day I had prepared my first French meal for the France-based company. Arriving with no fear whatsoever, I was told that management from Paris was visiting from the company’s home base. Phillipe, the lab director, whom I had met earlier, had challenged the validity of my first name as it was commonly a man’s name in France. Phillipe approached me after lunch and announced “Patrice. This Chicken Normande.” Two seconds became an eternity. ”This Chicken Normande is better than I’ve had in France”. To be sure, during those two seconds, I thought my new career was coming to an abrupt and humiliating end.
Mind you, my job as a chemist/process engineer was to take small product samples from Research & Development and to scale them up in the process lab for production. It turns out- this is the perfect background for my culinary career, where I likewise take small batches from my R&D kitchen and develop large-scale batches for the consumer. In fact, it was a perfect mirror image of two seemingly unrelated fields.
Ultimately, I designed and constructed a commercial kitchen in Mountain View, CA, learning from having designed and constructed my chemistry lab earlier, and just a few blocks away. From there I formulated a product line, Via Ventresca Foods, and sold One-Step Kitchen Masterpieces to high-end retail and wholesale grocers. My products were sold in Costco, Price Club, Gelsen’s in Texas, Ralphs in Los Angeles, and locally in Draeger’s, Andronico’s, Molly Stones, and Cosentino’s in the Bay Area.
My catering client base rapidly grew through word of mouth and through a few personal visits to local corporations. In fact, my second major corporate account came to be when I got a phone call from a woman who introduced herself as Joanna Hoffman. She said she heard about what I was doing at Schlumberger and asked if I could provide the same during the dinner hour for the crew at NeXT, Steve Jobs’ company after he left Apple. I gladly accepted without hesitation, since not only would the food be the same, but because I was close friends with Jobs’ good friend and associate at Apple, Daniel Kottke, who had traveled with Jobs to India, attended Reed College with him, had lived and worked in Jobs’ Cupertino, CA home, and who had spoken to me frequently very highly of Jobs.
Indeed, I’ve had the privilege of watching the San Francisco Bay Area evolve into the Silicon Valley that it is today while providing feasts to its players and their quintessential Silicon Valley companies. From Schlumberger to NeXT, to Xerox PARC, Sun Labs, Intuit; to the venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla, to those at Kleiner Perkins and Mayfield Fund; to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, to their World Bank seminars, to the Stanford football team; to Peter Jennings and ABC News’ Bay Area coverage of the 1992 Presidential election, Splendid Feast continues to provide inspirational food throughout the San Francisco Bay Area to the present day.
Patrice, passionate chef and native to the San Francisco Bay area, lives high in the Santa Cruz mountains above Los Gatos, California. The views of Monterey Bay are the inspiration for her delightful, sensual creations. When not cooking professionally for others, Patrice’s dinner parties are treasured, long-remembered events for friends and family.
Splendid Feast will happily work with budgets of $1500 or more.
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