My Story

I started cooking when I adopted a plant-based diet about 20 years ago. Prior to that event, I didn’t have a huge interest in food and, like many people, I was unaware of ingredients and how food works in our bodies. I made the decision to adopt a plant-based diet overnight and, the next morning, I stood in my kitchen and said, “Umm…okay. Now what?” That’s when my love of cooking and nutrition began and when I started down the path to becoming a chef.

The journey was incredibly organic and it wasn’t something that I was really pursuing. I got my first restaurant job in 2002 and I worked in and out of restaurants since then. I started a non-profit in 2015 to provide custom financial relief packages for people suffering from chronic illness. As a marketing professional, I knew that I needed to create unique content across all social media channels. For the brand’s YouTube channel, I decided to do a series called Cooking for Chronic Illness. The channel featured plant-based recipes to reduce inflammation, aid in digestion, and provide nutrient-dense meals that are useful for the management of chronic illness. Having lupus myself, I know what a difference diet makes in overall health.

People began asking me for recipes and to cook for them and I found myself as a part-time personal home chef. Before long, a local grocery store came knocking and my food was featured in their prepared foods section. I have been living between Wellington, FL and Charlotte, NC for my entire adult life. When I made the move to live in Florida permanently, I was working in restaurants in both FOH and BOH positions. I was blessed with the birth of my daughter, Eleanor, in 2021. I needed something I could do around the baby’s schedule, so I moved to the private chef sector.

A close friend asked me to chef for herself and her mother and the private chef jobs started rolling in from there. From there, I worked as the Executive Chef for Kokoro, a Wellington, FL seasonal meal delivery service. During this time I began getting calls for private in-home events and have cooked for celebrities and other very discerning clients. While I prefer to work in a restaurant setting, being a private chef has challenges that I enjoy. There’s no re-firing when you’re cooking in someone’s home. You can’t run to the store. You have what you have and you have to execute it perfectly the first time, every time. For smaller, more informal events, I also plate, serve, and clean up. Timing these dishes to account for serving, plating, pouring drinks, and clearing requires down-to-the-second timing. I enjoy these challenges and cooking for private clients.

I spent time as a Chef at Cafe Boulud on Palm Beach Island and to say that experience was life-changing would be an understatement. Recently, I saw a reel from restaurant Daniel where a staff member stated that one of the most amazing qualities about the Boulud brand is that everyone who experiences the Boulud method is forever changed by it for the better. This was certainly true for me. My time there made me a better chef and a better person.

From there, I went on to pursue my own interests and I worked as Chef de Cuisine for a stint before finding my current role as Minor League Performance Chef for the New York Mets.

I’m incredibly grateful for the experiences, people, and lessons that have shaped my path and ultimately led me to this opportunity. As a former professional athlete, returning to the world of professional sports is especially meaningful. It is an honor to join the New York Mets as Performance Chef and to contribute to an environment where preparation, performance, and excellence are deeply intertwined.

I’m excited to play my part in player development through nutrition—creating food that is thoughtful and purposeful, while still being exciting, approachable, and full of flavor. Because food is, of course, our fuel. But it is also so much more than that. Food carries culture, memory, connection, comfort, and the things we hold dear.

I’m looking forward to bringing those ideas together at the intersection of performance and culinary innovation, and to helping create an approach to nutrition that supports athletes not only in how they perform, but in how they experience food.

Feel free to reach out to me to book meal planning services or to inquire about public speaking engagements.