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

Carlos, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?

People in hospitality are so commonly mistreated, overworked and underpaid. The verbal, physical and mental abuse one goes through in the kitchen dealing with problematic management and co workers are not the recipe to happiness. After attending le cordón Bleu culinary school in 2005, I learned this mistreatment is “normal” and I had to learn the hard way. Prior to the outbreak of Covid in 2020, I was the executive chef of a vegan restaurant in uptown Whittier, shortly after the outbreak, management with their lack of experience in the industry, decided to reward my hard work of training staff and formulating a well flowing kitchen by letting me go and letting the staff fend for them selves. This was the motivation I needed to branch out and work for myself.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hello my name is Chef Carlos Campos, from Whittier Ca. I am 36 years old and I am an alumni from CSCA Le Cordón Bleu Pasadena ‘05. I have always had an affinity to food due to my latin heritage and by watching my parents cook many different cultural dishes together. My father is from Puebla Mexico and my mother is from Nayarit Mexico, the perfect combo of Reef & Beef. I was definitely predisposed to the culinary world at a very young age. I have been cooking professionally since ‘05 and I have been a small business owner since 2022. My grassroots business “Alchemic Catering” is my means of supporting my family and my passion to serve food to others. We do our best to take the stress out of party planning by supplying the best sourced materials, quality dishes & assisting clients with whatever they need. I couldn’t imagine working for anyone else anymore, and I strive to offer a positive and rewarding work environment for our staff. At Alchemic catering “we feed the needs of all.”

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Building an audience for social media has been a very daunting and challenging task, but we have been. up for the challenge. Most of our followers have come from firsthand experiences, either through catering events or through pop-ups. We allow the work we do to speak for itself to try our best to get as many organic social media followers as possible. For anyone who needs advice all I can tell you is put yourself out there and let people be the judge also listen to your clients!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

If anyone has worked in the kitchen, you know how hard it can be but one experience was definitely life-changing event in my demeanor how I talk to people how they treat people in the kitchen. I did a Stage at Wolfgang Puck’s famous restaurant Spago, there as I work the line, meticulously placing items on individual plates for, one cook next to me and messed up a plate. The reaction from Wolfgang puck was abhorrent, abusive and unnecessary. He goes on to grab the plate from in front of the Wolfgang screams and corrects him about his plating and goes onto breaking the plate in front of him and screams to “redo the dish immediately!!” The cooks response was “yes Chef.” that’s when I knew that I would never become that type of abusive chef to anyone such as the Austrian a**hole Wolfgang. A very humbling experience.

Contact Info:

• Website: Hey, check out my website, “Alchemic Catering” with this link: https://camposchef86.wixsite.com/alchemiccatering
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/alchemic_catering_llc?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==
• Yelp: Alchemic Catering

Image Credits
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