Chad Kelley, a former teddy bear-turned-grillmaster, navigates the high-stakes, high-pressure culinary world as he strives to build his own beer-centric restaurant, learning the hard way how to balance intensity and professionalism.

"I found something here. There's something. And I was like, I should probably follow this up with a more bachelor's based degree, because I also found that I was very good at not just the cooking side of things, but the financial side of things as well. As most people are a lot of chefs out there are great chefs, great cooks. But when it comes to managing numbers and all that stuff, they know fucking nothing." - Chad Kelley

Chad Kelley is a chef from Southern California who has worked in seafood restaurants in Dallas, San Francisco, and Indianapolis. He has worked his way up from line cook to executive sous chef and has experience in both the cooking and financial sides of the business.

Chad Kelley was born and raised in Southern California but didn't take school seriously, instead preferring to work and have fun. When his cousin suggested culinary school, Chad realized it was something he could excel in and found himself in San Francisco at the California Culinary Academy. After bouncing around to different jobs in the kitchen, Chad found himself back in Southern California where he worked for a real housewives of the OC restaurant. He then moved to Indianapolis and later Dallas, where he became the youngest executive chef in the company. While in Dallas, Chad took charge and didn't take any nonsense from his cooks, and eventually he opened a beer centric restaurant with 100 taps, proving his success in the culinary world.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. How did Chad go from a high school student working at In-N-Out Burger to becoming a successful chef?

2. What is it like to work in a high-volume kitchen and how to handle the high pressure?

3. How did Chad transition from working in the kitchen to becoming the executive chef of a beer-centric restaurant?

Check Out my Other Projects:

Chef Made Home @Instagram

Roasted Bean Freak @Facebook

Other episodes you'll enjoy:

Ariel Guivi, Part 1: What is a Chef?

Patrick Stark: The Untouchable Egos

Josh Morris: Balancing a chefs drive with family life

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Transcipt

And welcome back to season two. And so today we're going to be talking really more about my background, my history, and how I how I grew. Originally, I was going to break this up into the interview where we are going to be looking at both Morris and I kind of at the same time as we grew, where our backgrounds, where we came from, and how we ended up at the same restaurant. But the more I kind of listened and started looking at these things, it was like, man, it doesn't make sense. So we're going to go ahead and drop these episodes separately just to make sure we can do each its own justice without just editing the shit out of it and turning it into something it's not. You guys listen to this because it's more raw, and creating something super edited is not something that I want to do or something I think you want to listen to.

Speaker B 00:01:15

All right, welcome back. We're here with Josh Morris and today's session, if you will, episodes. Morris is going to grill me.

Speaker C 00:01:32

It's not really a grilling. We'll compare and contrast our paths as chefs, I think.

Speaker B 00:01:40

Okay, that works. Compare and contrast. Yeah. The different perspectives. I mean, we kind of talked a little bit about that last week, where it was definitely much more old school in a lot of ways. It served me well for a long time. It got me into plenty of trouble as well, especially as my career progressed. And there were more and more bitches coming into the kitchen. When I say that, I'm not talking about the females. They were much stronger. I will tell you. We're 100% I would rather have an all female kitchen than some of the all male kitchens I've had is less drama. I mean, they were there to fucking work, and they were kicked ass. Some of the guys are just fucking little dramatic assholes. They were my bitches. They were the dramatic bitches. So I need to clear that up before I got in fucking trouble on that one. So the Morris, take it away.

Speaker C 00:02:45

Well, we've known each other for six years or so, maybe seven, somewhere in there.

Speaker B 00:02:54

Okay, sounds about right.

Speaker C 00:02:57

I know that you grew up in Southern California, and I know that you worked in Dallas at mostly seafood restaurants. Everything else about your career is a fucking mystery to me, and I know you personally, so let's dive into that a little bit. Where did you come from and how did you get here?

Speaker B 00:03:18

Where did I come from? I came from the shadows. Yeah. Having my voice a little jacked up, that worked pretty well there. So I came from Southern California. Born and raised southern California. Orange county. And no, I didn't surf. No, I didn't skateboard. I did spend plenty of time on the beach. I would frequently ditch high school and go hang out at the beach. And that's something that was possible there, because in high schools, a lot of high schools back then were open campuses. You can drive on, drive off whenever you want. So it was good and bad. And I was working for in and out at the time, and I was enjoying working a whole lot more than I was enjoying going to school. School was always busy work for me.

Speaker C 00:04:25

Did your family is it like a foodie kind of a family?

Speaker B 00:04:31

No. My grandmother was in charge of the catering at her church. My mom and my aunt at one point did some catering. Very small scale kind of thing. But at no point were anybody in my family were they really involved in cooking.

Speaker C 00:04:59

Okay.

Speaker B 00:05:01

But anyway, after high school, I was still working in and out. I just didn't give a shit. I was having fun time. Everybody else was doing their own thing. And my cousin, who he's been on the show, Jeff, mentioned going to culinary school. And then at that point, something just snapped. Like, that light bulb. It didn't come on all the way, but the dimmer hit switch. Someone hit the dimmer switch, and all of a sudden, it was like, hey, there's something there. And it was just like, okay. And I started exploring it, and the more I dug into it, the more it was like, this is kind of cool. And this was late ninety s I want to say 97, right? Is probably when I started digging into it. And I looked at several schools, whether it's the CIA there was a school in Arizona. I don't remember what it was called. And then I ended up going to California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. It was downtown. And this was before it was bought by La cordon Blue. That was cool. Living in downtown San Francisco for a little over a year was pretty badass, man. Sorry, I was just hearing noises. I'm like, what is that? Living downtown San Francisco, going to school in this old building. It was just French and austrian chefs and a couple of germans thrown in there just for fun. And it was just it was the time of my life. I mean, I absolutely ha