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Something’s cooking
Nuestra Culinary Ventures offers its kitchen — and its resources — to those with epicurean dreams
BY RUTH TOBIAS

neat, trim HOUSES with neat, trim lawns line Brookside Street as it crosses this Jamaica Plain neighborhood, standing testaments to the relative shift in fortune the proud but once-rundown community has seen in recent years. As such, they make a fitting backdrop for Nuestra Culinary Ventures (NCV) and the businesses it helps entrepreneurs build from the ground up.

Located in a squat, nondescript building on the former premises of the Haffenreffer Brewery, NCV operates as a resource center/proving ground for individuals who show talent in the kitchen but whose means have hitherto hampered their dreams of going into business for themselves as caterers, specialty-foods producers, or pushcart operators. NCV provides the facilities, physical and otherwise, to help make those dreams come true. It not only offers a commercial-grade kitchen for rent by the hour, but also conducts business workshops, provides contacts, and, ultimately, instills hope and confidence in place of disadvantage.

Two years in the making, NCV is a natural extension of the Nuestra Comunidad Development Corporation (NCDC), a nonprofit organization founded in Roxbury by local clergy who sought to revitalize the area via real-estate and economic-development programs even as they emphasized community empowerment and self-reliance. It’s an idea not unlike the biblical injunction to teach the hungry to fish and thus form a thriving fishing village. In its 20 years in operation, the NCDC has procured affordable housing for the residents of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, and involved itself in all aspects of community life, from voter registration and technical training to crime prevention.

One successful program, Village PushCarts — responsible for the presence of merchandise carts in the Dudley Square T station — more or less launched the NCV. Project director Ed Feldman explains that the group started with pushcarts — including the food carts you see on City Hall Plaza today — "because it’s a business with low entry costs. But then we began to see similar issues with other would-be food providers. They all need a place to start up; they can’t cook out of their homes." (It’s illegal to sell food prepared in any kitchen other than a licensed commercial one, although Feldman later says that many of the people he now works with did just that before learning of the city ordinance.) NCV was conceived, then, as "an incubator kitchen ... supplying basic services for start-up businesses, because start-up is the single-largest cost for food-related businesses. Doing so breaks down the barriers for low-income entrepreneurs."

To hear the recipients of said services tell it, though, "basic" is a gross, overly humble understatement. Though Feldman claims that "we’re like the landlords, but we don’t want to be micromanagers," the recipients depict a relationship so multifaceted that it’s hard to describe their part in it — as clients, tenants, protégés, even colleagues — which may be why they voted to adopt the title of "culinary entrepreneur," or CE. If it sounds rather grand and vague, that's because active reciprocity, not passive charity, is what defines this experiment. NCV’s fate is so bound up with that of the CEs, its success is so interdependent with theirs, that only time will tell the whole story of the initiative — one of only a handful of such projects in the nation — and determine precisely if and how it works.

Caterer Kris Alden predicts a happy ending. Speaking in NCV’s commodious on-site kitchen, she’s up to her elbows in raw poultry, making chicken-and-mango curry for a party and waxing optimistic all the while.

"[NCV] is just a great place in terms of getting what you need," Alden says. "For me it’s much more than the physical space; they helped me with financial projections — looking ahead to next year and beyond, proposing market strategies. They enhanced my business plan, which led up to me getting my first business loan, which is something I’ve never been able to do before. It would be difficult to fail —you’d really have to work at it, considering the amount of support they give you. We’ve had tax workshops; they’ve even brought in purveyors to help us set up our own accounts. Everybody involved in this is so enthusiastic and wants you to succeed. It’s just such a supportive environment."

Unlike many of her fellow CEs, Alden is no newcomer to the business; she started her company, Someone’s In The Kitchen, eight years ago. But her story presents the same themes raised by virtually everyone at NCV — namely, of opportunity born of adversity, of blessings in disguise. For a long time, Alden says, "I rented a church kitchen; I had assistants and everything. But after 9/11, business was nonexistent, and I couldn’t afford to pay staff and rent costs anymore. Then I heard about this place, and it was perfect."

Alden estimates that although she had paid $1000 per month to lease the church kitchen, "if a business my size were to try to set up a kitchen on its own [in a commercial space], it would cost $100,000, easily. To get all that state-of-the-art equipment in, to get the licensing — it’s phenomenal." NCV, by comparison, requires a security deposit of $125 for Boston residents and $175 for nonresidents; the hourly kitchen-rental fees range from $25 to $45, and the CEs are expected to sign up for a minimum of five hours per month. "They set their own schedule; we try to have schedules in place every month for the following month, although we also try to be flexible, since a lot of jobs are last-minute," explains Feldman.

Cherie Craft, the younger half of the mother-and-daughter catering team Mother Craft’s Kitchen, also ascribes her newfound career to NCV’s fortuitous assistance in the midst of a recession. Though cooking had always been a part of the Crafts’ lives — Cherie describes how "my mom and grandmom were always cooking for the community, be it church gatherings, school functions, friends asking, ‘Can your mom cook for my son’s bar mitzvah? He just loves her fried chicken’ " — it wasn’t until she got laid off from her job as a pediatric-program director at the Boston Medical Center last January that she and her mother, Dolores, began to consider professional catering. That was around the same time NCV happened to schedule a workshop called "How to Start a Catering Business." Cherie enrolled, and the lessons proved invaluable: "When we started, all we knew how to do was cook — and penny-pinch, as family members. But we didn’t know how to run a business. We were just a couple of old ladies clunking around the kitchen."

In fact, the Crafts are anything but; they appear cheery and energetic in their chef’s whites, red bandanas, and red Reeboks, preparing macaroni and cheese and dark-chocolate cake for delivery. Cherie recalls how, right off the bat, "we found out that there were a lot of legalities involved, a lot of licensing, insurance issues. There was a lot of red tape that had to be removed before we could start a legitimate business. We had no idea how to navigate the system. What [NCV] did was say, ‘Here are the things you need to do, this is how much it’s going to cost you,’ and then they sort of held our hands and walked us through it."

She emphasizes that the learning process is ongoing: "We’re still taking workshops. The next one is going to be taxes and accounting — learning what a claim is, what a write-off is." One suspects, however, that the Crafts could run a business on pure enthusiasm, especially when Cherie goes into her spiel regarding the appeal of their style of catering for busy families: "We make traditional food, not just soul food but American food — what do you call it, Mom? Comfort food. We do well-balanced, family-style meals for the same price as take-out."

And when the Crafts speak of tradition, it turns out they aren’t kidding. "Many of our family’s recipes have been passed down for generations, all the way back from the slave-plantation days when they had to be really creative with cooking and use what they could get," Cherie says. "Sometimes when I’m cooking I can feel the ghosts, reminding me this is a tradition and not to cut corners. I owe it to my foremothers to stay true to the recipes." Those recipes range from fried chicken and collard greens to sweet-potato pie. As for the dark-chocolate cake, Kris Alden, though technically the Crafts’ competitor, says it’s the best she’s ever tasted.

Clearly, ncv’S climate is conducive to mutual support. Alden calculates that between two gas-top ranges, a number of ovens (including two convection ovens), a walk-in fridge and freezer, a deep-fat fryer, eight prep tables, several large sinks, a grill, baking racks, and a small array of donated cookware, all in one spacious, well-ventilated room flanked by storage units, "you can have at least four different businesses, plus staff, working at the same time in here with no problems." In other words, no one’s stepping on anyone else’s toes, literally or otherwise.

Meanwhile, project director Ed Feldman’s own approach is mostly hands- (and toes-) off without being laissez-faire. "The goal is that they will have pretty much free rein," he says. "But frankly, some are just starting out — there are pieces of equipment they’ve never seen before; there may be problems they’ve never encountered before. So I generally have an assistant here who can help them if they need it." In fact, NCV went so far as to "arrange for the original group of CEs to meet with manufacturers’ reps" to show them the ropes, "from turning on gas ranges to using the fryolator."

Of course, it’s in the preliminary stages that Feldman, for all his subsequent restraint, does get actively involved. The would-be CEs he oversees must meet a number of requirements — from obtaining proof of residency and acquiring registration and insurance papers to devising a viable business plan, becoming ServSafe-certified (i.e., passing the nation’s primary standardized test regarding sanitation in commercial kitchens), and going through an orientation — before gaining unsupervised access to the kitchen.

Still, despite the rigorous training, and even with all of NCV’s resources at their disposal, it seems some CEs are better off than others. Take Deborah Taylor of Deborah’s Spreadable Fruit — soon to become Deborah’s Kitchen, as Taylor has plans to expand her line beyond jam to include biscuits and muffin mixes — who describes the road to success as long and exhausting. Self-employed for 27 years as a creative director in advertising, she too "got desperate when 9/11 happened — everyone just stopped working. I was watching a lot of TV and thought I might as well start making my Christmas gifts [during shows], which were jams and jellies — a lot of jams and jellies."

When the profit potential struck her, Taylor took a business class at NCV and "a lot of what they said resonated with what I already did in my day job," particularly the emphasis on "a lot of research. Who’s the competition? What are the trends? So I took my everyday skills and I applied them." For instance, she conducts surveys of consumers’ shopping habits and flavor preferences, and has developed a low-sugar product based on her finding that "high-sugar jams were on the downswing." She’s begun to set up shop at area farmers’ markets. On top of that, Taylor is simultaneously dealing with trademark lawyers, submitting data to testing labs for nutritional information, and applying for a UPC (universal product code) — while paying tidy sums to do so. (The UPC application alone costs $750; the lawyers, of course, are eating up thousands.)

Obviously, such heavy investment is the exception rather than the rule; financial difficulties, after all, are what bring people to NCV in the first place. Taylor herself recognizes that "everyone’s doing it in the way that they can afford."

The Crafts, for example, are taking a grassroots approach to advertising. Says Cherie, "I just received my postal machine, and we’re going to start sending out mailings to local businesses and nonprofits. We’re also going door-to-door with our family-style menus. And there are marketing specialists [at NCV] to help us devise marketing plans."

Feldman adds that they can put the CEs in touch with graphic designers for collaboration on a logo as well.

But who are these "specialists"? They begin with Feldman himself, who until recently was in Macedonia working for the United Nations Business Development Program. Before moving back to the States, he floated an e-mail announcing his return, and "within 24 hours, three different people, each in a different part of the country, sent me this same [NCV project-director] job posting. It’s kind of like it was meant to be."

In fact, Feldman’s whole life seems to have led up to his current position, what with his experience in institutional food service following a master’s degree in management and a professional-chef’s certificate; in the ’80s, he even co-owned a restaurant, Café Freesia, in Newton. His NCV staff is small, limited to two project coordinators, Krystal Ardafio and Jonathan Buck. As for the instructors, Feldman says, "we have attorneys who do the workshops on business law, a representative from the State Revenue Office who does the business-tax workshop. Chefs and caterers do the food-related workshops, and Eduardo Varas, the business-development manager at the NCDC, works with the CEs on business-plan development, finance, and start-up. We’re constantly looking for additional, community-minded individuals with expertise in key areas who could teach [future] workshops or classes."

In the meantime, however, the folks at NCV are concentrating on the 28 current CEs; Feldman intends to "hold the line at 35 until we have all of the operational details worked out." In June, NCV hosted its official grand opening, a sort of CE exhibition "both to raise awareness for the project and to offer an opportunity for the entrepreneurs to reach out for business contacts." Indeed, no less a contact than Mayor Tom Menino attended. (NCV, as a job-creating initiative, is funded in part by the city.)

But as nurturing as the place seems to be — as Cherie Craft puts it, "cheerleading, troubleshooting, [the staff is] always right there behind us. It’s almost like being part of a family" — Nuestra Culinary Ventures is a nest that will have to be emptied periodically to make room for other fledglings. Feldman says that while "at present we don’t have a limited time frame in place, ideally tenants will grow to a point where they will be able to eventually have their own facility." He expects to evaluate such matters on a case-by-case basis. Nor is NCV’s support unconditional; poor sanitation, disregard for other CEs, and, of course, engaging in illegal activities can all lead to expulsion.

Still, despite all the uncertainties and difficulties, Deborah Taylor, for one, thinks her time is being well spent. "I still do the advertising [job]; I can’t live on this yet," she says. "I’m really working two jobs. My family and friends ask me, ‘Do you really like doing this?’ You have to, to do it."

Nuestra Culinary Ventures, located at 31 Germania Street, in Jamaica Plain, can be reached at (617) 522-7900. Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthiet@bu.edu

Issue Date: September 12 - 19, 2002
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