We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Maxwell Bredenkoetter a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Maxwell, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I absolutely wish I’d started my career sooner. When I entered the culinary field, I was an accounting student at University of Minnesota. I was miserable with my choice finding it hard to do my work as I just wasn’t enjoying it. I’d always seen whatever I did professionally as a way to find my hobby of cooking and hadn’t ever taken the idea of doing it professionally. However, right before the pandemic hit, I was forced to step away from school for a few weeks when I became seriously ill with an infection in my leg. Once the pandemic hit and all classes went online, it would have been impossible for me to catch up so I withdrew from school for the semester. In my depression from this, my drinking increased heavily while my self worth dropped drastically. In my free time, all I did was cook and, after some soul searching, I finally made the decision to cook professionally and found something I truly enjoyed.

Maxwell, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I run a pop up restaurant series called Temperance Kitchen. We’re a group of chefs and other industry professionals who host pop ups about once a month with all proceeds going directly to Ben’s Friends, national organization dedicated to providing addiction and substance abuse resources to those in the food and beverage industry. The idea for Temperance came about due to both my personal connection to addiction being 3.5 years sober as well as how rampant addiction is within the restaurant industry. I started looking at ways to get involved in the community with addiction and wasn’t able to find any that catered to those in the food and beverage industry specifically, which I found troubling given our very unique jobs in the sense that we’re near guaranteed to be surrounded by alcohol in our jobs and our work hours are often the reverse of your typical 9-5 crowd making it more difficult to attend the majority of meetings. So in one vein, we contacted Ben’s Friend’s Founder, Mickey Bakst, to start our own local chapter in St. Louis that meets every Monday at 11 AM at Olive & Oak in Webster Groves. On the other side, we began these pop ups in a tasting menu format for $135/person that includes 7-8 courses plus 4 N.A. drink pairings, raising a little under $7,500 to date.
I’m definitely most proud of the team we’ve assembled. Ben Grant, Jiana West, Teo Gibbs, Adam Dove, Brian Moxey, Hannah Mihulka, Taylor Streiff, and Miranda Wagner. Every single one of them have donated their time, energy, and skills to this cause just because they care and want to make a change in our community for the better.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

When it comes to being a chef, the biggest reward I’ve found is in sharing new foods with other. There’s a very special feeling when you’re able to give someone something they may not have had before and they enjoy it. You may expand their likes and dislikes, give them a new favorite food, or just simply show them something they knew nothing about it. It’s inherently rewarding regardless of the outcome.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I had known sooner about Ben’s Friends. I personally never did any form of group work with my addiction prior to starting our local chapter out of a naïveté at 23 of feeling like I was too young to have an addiction issue. Obviously, I was wrong and addiction affects people of all ages equally, but I often wonder where I’d have been if I had started group work sooner or where our community may be if we had this group sooner.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.one.handed.chef?igsh=MXFwZ3E5Nm92b2k2dw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/temperancekitchen?igsh=Zzc0bnFjdG5lZWZl&utm_source=qr