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Growing up in a large family taught chef Joe Flamm the importance of speaking your mind. If you wanted to be heard in your house, you had to be loud and have something interesting to say. This upbringing prepared the future Top Chef winner for life as a celebrity chef in the age of social media.
Nowadays, it's not just celebrities who are expected to tell the world something. Everyone has a story to tell. Chef Flamm gives a personal insight into his work and life – not just food, but family and fun too.
“I'm a chef, I'm a husband, I'm a South Sider, I'm a Bears fan, I'm a Sox fan,” he said of the many parts of his life. In other words, don't go onto his social media accounts expecting a perfectly curated feed. “I'm not perfect, that's what makes it so fun.”
Preference for television
Chef Joe Flamm is now the culinary director of the Day Off Group, which operates Chicago restaurants Rose Mary and BLVD Steakhouse. Before opening his first restaurant, Rose Mary (named after his grandmother Mary, a culinary inspiration), Joe Flamm worked with several well-known Chicago chefs, including Stephanie Izard at Girl and the Goat and Tony Mantuano at Spiaggia.
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While working as a sous chef for Stephanie Izard, Flamm got his first taste of television. He was chosen to cook alongside her on the Food Network's competition show “Iron Chef.” “It was so overwhelming, the adrenaline rush was through the roof,” Flamm said of cooking in front of a large television audience. And when the dust settled from the Iron Chef competition, he knew the media was for him. “I thought, 'That was cool. I've got to do that again sometime,'” Joe Flamm told Restaurant Influencers host Shawn Walchef.
Little did he know that years later he would get another chance to appear on cooking television – this time on an even bigger stage.
While working at Spiaggia, Chef Flamm was invited to compete on the 15th season of Bravo's Top Chef in Colorado. He won the season. “It was just an amazing experience,” he said of his Top Chef win.
When Joe Flamm left Spiaggia to own a restaurant, he knew he wanted to go his own way. That meant that with Rose Mary, he wanted to steer the menu away from the traditional Italian cuisine he had been making up until then. “I didn't want to leave Spiaggia and open Spiaggia. I wanted to do my own thing.”
Rose Mary combines Croatian cuisine with its Italian heritage. Flamm calls it “Adriatic drinking food.”
Soon after opening the restaurant, Chef Joe knew he had to prove his skills to some customers who were skeptical about whether he could prepare Balkan dishes the way they knew them from home. “Balkan hospitality is like skepticism mixed with kindness,” joked Joe Flamm.
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Some people raised their eyebrows when they saw his last name and the menu together. “This is not the cuisine I grew up with. This is the cuisine I've learned over the last 14 years of my relationship with my wife Hilary. I did a lot of research and read as much as I could,” he said of marrying into a Croatian family.
“I think I own more Croatian cookbooks than anyone else in the United States,” he said at the Toast booth during the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. “I love this food and I wanted to be able to cook it and tell this story. I always say, I hope I do a great job. I'm still learning this. I'm still evolving in this.”
Joe Flamm said all the hard work was worth it when he learned how his food touched people and advanced Balkan cuisine in America. “After we opened, a woman came in and started crying,” he said of one particular customer experience.
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