Savoring Success: David Kirschner's Journey from Athleticism to Culinary Artistry and the Business of Bespoke Dining

Discover the transformative power of food on health and happiness as we sit down with David Kirschner, the culinary mind behind DK Private Dining. A recent juice fast epiphany sets the table for a mouthwatering conversation about mindful eating. We feast on the stark differences between our own oftentimes mindless munching and the deliberate dining of our European neighbors. David stirs in his seasoned insights on how food serves as the foundation of personal health, caring for others, and sustaining our planet. His passion for crafting bespoke dining experiences is just the appetizer in this rich discussion on the intersection of nutrition and well-being.

Ever wonder how an athlete flips the script to become a Michelin-star chef? We track the remarkable journey of a former sportsman whose discipline in the field translates to artistry in the kitchen. From cramming for college exams to commanding the heat of Per Se's culinary battleground, we uncover the challenges and victories of starting DineDK from scratch. With no formal training but a playbook of strategies, David recounts networking with the "gatekeepers" of the culinary world and creating opportunities for fellow chefs within the gig economy. His playbook is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit in the high-stakes world of gastronomy.

The episode culminates with a masterclass in curating a roster of exceptional chefs for unforgettable private events. David shares his recipe for success: a blend of Michelin-star expertise with a dash of charisma, all garnished with top-notch communication skills. We go behind the scenes to learn how Dine DK Private Dining whisks together a community for chefs eager to trade the traditional kitchen line for the spotlight of personal chefdom. By implementing effective systems and fostering a dynamic team, David showcases how to juggle a high turnover of events with finesse and fire.

About David:
David Kirschner's culinary journey spans over two decades, marked by prestigious roles in renowned kitchens. From the esteemed 3 Michelin-starred Per Se to the kitchens of Michael Mina and Daniel Boulud, he has built a wealth of experience under our country's best chefs. In 2015, David founded dineDK Private Dining, a boutique private dining company known for its custom culinary experiences and private chef placement services.

dinedk.com
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Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Marc J Bernstein. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this station, its management or Beasley Media Group. Entrepreneur, author and financial consultant, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing entrepreneurial business owners create a vision for the future and follow through on their goals and intentions. Ang Onorato is a business growth strategist who blends psychology and business together to create conscious leaders and business owners who impact the world. Founders Forum is a radio show podcast sharing the real stories behind entrepreneurship as founders discover more about themselves, while providing valuable lessons and some fun and entertainment for you. Now here's Marc and Ang.

Marc Bernstein: 0:42

Good morning America. How are you? We're doing pretty fine. If you heard our last podcast, I'm on a juice fast, so all things considered, a little spacey but otherwise feeling pretty good, pretty energized, and our topic for the week has been food and our last guest, Amy Zeitelman. We had an interesting conversation about food to start it off, and we've got another one because our guest today, David Kirschner, who I'll introduce in a moment, is also in the food business in a whole different way.

Marc Bernstein: 1:18

So I'm going to start out, Ang, with a little thought I have and these are a little different than our food quotes. On the other show, Samuel Johnson said he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else. Kind of interesting. I can certainly relate to that at this moment, and that actually comes from a Spanish proverb the belly rules the mind. And Fran Lebowitz, who I love, who's a satirist, if you like, you know sarcastic satire, you got to put both of those together, for her Food is an important part of a balanced diet. Kind of interesting, funny quote. So, Ang, what do you think about that? I certainly think that food, you know, we take it for granted, but what we eat certainly affects how we think, affects how we feel, affects everything. Food is an important life of it and many of us, I think, go through it unconsciously. I know I did for many years, becoming much more conscious about what I put into my body. What are your thoughts about that?

Ang Onorato: 2:17

And I have a lot of thoughts about it so many. But I think I love that quote because it's very, very accurate, right. I think for many of us in our Western culture, food is like an afterthought, particularly during the workday. You know, I myself went through three days this week where I didn't eat till four o'clock in the afternoon because it was just back to back and it wasn't a thought. And that's not good for many, many reasons, and it reminds me of our European friends where they shut everything down for two hours and, you know, have a meal in the middle of the day, because it's not just for family but it's for health and vitality and brain health and all that. So I think it's a great topic and I'm being more mindful of this myself.

Marc Bernstein: 2:56

And although US fast food is infiltrating the rest of the world, it sure is. Unfortunately, they do tend to eat much healthier than us and in a much better mode of eating. So, David, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this. What do you have to weigh in about this, so to speak?

David Kirschner: 3:13

Hey, Marc, I think, simply put right next to sleeping, food has the most profound impact on our general health and our day-to-day. There's not many activities that you do with more frequency or routine than just generally eating. So if you're trying to take care of yourself, look after yourself, be in control of yourself and then your world and surrounding environment, I think the people that do take their, their eating seriously are the people that typically are more serious about their day to day. They're more serious about their general overall being and even their impact on the world. Because if you can't start at the core of taking care of yourself and looking after yourself, you know it's the same mechanisms, the same abilities that we then put out there into the world. Take care of those around us to take care of our world around us. So I think there's a lot to be said about just the mindset of the person that really does, you know, look at the things that they can actually have the most profound impact on at the smallest level.

Marc Bernstein: 4:12

So David is involved in lots of preparing lots of different kinds of food for lots of different kinds of purposes, so maybe we can reference that back in terms of how your thoughts there affect what you do a little later on. So let me introduce David Kirschner. He is CEO of DK Private Dining and his culinary journey spans over two decades marked by prestigious roles in renowned kitchens, as a chef From the esteemed three Michelin-starred per se to the kitchens of Michael Mina and David Boulod. Did I say that correctly? Per se to the kitchens of Michael Mina and David Boulod? Did I?

David Kirschner: 4:45

say that correctly, boulod Daniel.

Marc Bernstein: 4:47

Boulod Boulod. Oh, daniel Boulod, I am so sorry it says Daniel on the. Anyway, daniel Boulod. He has built a wealth of experience on our country's best chefs. In 2015, david founded Dine DK Private Dining, a boutique private dining company known for its custom culinary experiences and private chef placement services, which is a very interesting model. So, officially, good morning David, good to have you here with us.

David Kirschner: 5:16

Good to be here with you guys.

Marc Bernstein: 5:17

So tell us a little bit about your journey, about your upbringing, how you got to that point of being a chef and deciding to go in the direction you've gone in.

David Kirschner: 5:27

Really appreciate it. So you know, it was a journey that I think, like most people that find their way into the food world, definitely started when I was, when I was young. I remember the early days growing up in New Jersey when Food Network was starting to emerge and food media was becoming a thing, and I remember just being enamored as a child with, you know, just all of these flavors, all of this technique that I was seeing on TV and it really kind of caught a little bit of you know the itch from that. You know I also grew up in a very kind of traditional Jewish household. So gathering around the table, gathering around food, watching my grandma do all the baking that she did, table gathering around food, watching my grandma do all the baking that she did I mean food equals love, expressing yourself through food was definitely a preeminent memory that I had coming up. And then, as I kind of progressed through my teenage years and started taking on my first jobs, I did find a connection to kind of the nightlife right, the maybe alternative lifestyle that most other folks were going after. I started really young setting up cocktail rooms for weddings and bar mitzvahs at some of the local temples around New Jersey Eventually, but starting serving in a restaurant and kind of got my first bites of what restaurant life was like.

David Kirschner: 6:39

And then, just given a bit of my upbringing and you know, to be frank, the ADD that I had, that I very much experienced growing up that I was trying to channel, you know, my energies into a really fruitful future for myself Cooking. You know the athletic nature of it, the competition involved with it, the stress, honestly, and the chaos that came from it as well, but something that really resonated with me as a kid. So when I was looking for colleges, johnson and Wales University, the culinary program seemed like a really engaging platform. And then, as I started delving deeper and deeper into aspects of fine dining, reading cookbooks, you know, by the likes of Daniel Ballou, thomas Keller, you know I'll never forget when the French Laundry Cookbook first came out. You know I was never forget. When the French Laundry cookbook first came out, you know I was. I was that kid at the end of the night, like you know, parsing through pages with a flashlight, you know, in my college dorm room just trying to kind of get my head wrapped around how good it can be. What the you know I was.

David Kirschner: 7:42

I came up playing a lot of sports, so I saw a lot of parallels between cooking and sports and you know I thought of three Michelin star restaurants and chefs like this as kind of the major leagues you know. So studying the mentalities, the approaches to kind of get to that level was something that really intrigued me. It seemed like a massive mountain that I could climb. And then, as I progressed through my early career, I got an internship working at Per Se during its second anniversary kind of way back in the heyday of Fine Dining in New York City. Really caught the bug deeply then.

David Kirschner: 8:08

And then, as you were stating before, Marc, I was able to land some really great positions with Michael Mina helping to open up a number of restaurants around the country. Folks like David Drake, celebrity Chef around New Jersey, you know, really got my hands in early with opening up a lot of restaurants, seeing how great the industry can be. For, you know, especially at that stage of my life where I was, and then, just through a series of my experiences, you know, slowly got to a place where I was more intrigued about of internal events, internal entertainment, with marketing clients, uh, to really spin off my services and get back to connecting with clients directly cooking, and then, you know, starting my journey as an entrepreneur and really focusing on what I can do to bring opportunities to other chefs. You know, extend the reach that we have Um and you know, really start forming DineDK into what it is today.

Marc Bernstein: 9:10

You mentioned a couple of times the parallel between athletics and sports on the one hand and food on the other hand. I don't think I've ever thought about that, but as soon as you said it it resonated. It really makes sense. You see especially films of chefs, you know, dancing almost from one end of the kitchen to the other and moving around, and it does take a lot of athletic skills. I hadn't really thought about that before. So obviously there's been challenges in building your business today. Let's start out with the beginning, but then and then talk about the challenges that you face today, which we've talked a little bit about privately.

David Kirschner: 9:43

I mean in the beginning, just like any solopreneur venturing out. You know there was first was just how to track down clients, right, how to connect with people. Um, you know my background, like most chefs coming up, was really just a traditional chef background. I went to culinary school. I graduated with my bachelor's in culinary nutrition. No formal business education or what it takes to really form a company, write a business plan, pursue, you know, those, you know very structured kind of pieces that are so vital really for so many folks that do start their own companies.

David Kirschner: 10:16

I was a bootstrap hustler, you know I was. I want to cook for clients. I'd already chatted with folks just in my network that I had met through my jobs, pulling off some side jobs for people, dinner parties on the weekends and whatnot and just doing right by people. So those initial challenges of growth really just came from. How do I create a website? How do I get my services out there? I'm a one-man operation. I have a finite amount of time and resources. How do I maximize those resources? And you know, some of the early secret sauce for me was really when I kind of the light bulb went off in my head that you know, having only a finite amount of time. I can't call every single client that I'm trying to pursue and kind of introduced to my services. So how do I find the people that have the book of clients? I started referring to them as the gatekeepers. You know the, the personal assistants to you know the C-level executives, the event planners that have the book of business that they're already working, the venue that have people calling them in every day. You know how do I take again my time and focus it in a way that's going to have much broader impact and I think once I really started building those relationships out and creating that referral network just like I think so many salespeople, business owners, pursue, that really unlocked something pretty interesting, satisfied my original goal, which was simply I want to fill up my calendar with as many events to allow me to live a balanced life and obviously earn sufficient income to be able to support my life.

David Kirschner: 11:53

You know it was this aspect of the industry that's very hard to sometimes get your hands wrapped around when you're coming up the way that I did. You know getting that balance of your life, not, you know, being absentee. You know from your family, from you know the big moments in life. So once I kind of hit that point, there was a decision of all right, well, am I just saying no, I'm sorry, we're busy, to those clients, or do I figure out how to say yes? And I think that moment of saying you know what. I think I could build this bigger than myself. I think I could put the systems in place to help support other chefs coming into the mix. You know, I've learned a lot about event planning now and managing clients, managing accounting, kind of all of the individual pieces that make up the business. Well, I think I can get some other chefs involved, really help them learn more about this side of the industry, leverage their skill set, their creativity, and give them an opportunity to also get out of the traditional grind of restaurants, hotels and the work along those lines.

David Kirschner: 12:53

As we grew, just like, I think, many businesses out there. Scale and growth brings a ton of challenges in its own right. How do I want to grow my staff basis to keep up with the work but also not over leverage myself because we don't have investment, we don't have a mass kind of war chest to play from. So leveraging kind of the expanding 1099 community and the gig economy that was kind of in its early day. Again, this is going back to 2015, when I first formed the company and started going down this pathway seemed to be the really the right fit and not a right fit in a way.

David Kirschner: 13:26

That's just kind of taking advantage of people, but more. I've got all these chefs that are also hustling supper clubs and their own pop-ups and all their own experiences. How can I just bring more opportunities to their schedules? And I think I kind of hit something when I started thinking that way and it became not thinking so much internally but thinking externally. And if I bring opportunity to people and focus on them more than focusing on just how to grow my own opportunity, I think it really unlocked a lot. Nowadays we're a big industry, changing aspect of the environment and the community around us is always bringing new competition to the table and making sure that we are reinventing ourselves to kind of stay at the forefront of what our clients are looking for.

Marc Bernstein: 14:13

That's a great description, and we're just in time for our break. I do want to ask you and I know Ang is going to want to ask you more about because you use outsourced chefs and you're providing an opportunity for them and creating opportunities for them and at the same time, you're providing an opportunity for them and creating opportunities for them and, at the same time, you're presenting yourself out there in the community as something you know, and how do you integrate these independent people into the image and the brand and the culture that you want to represent to your clients? I think is a really interesting question. And then you also have your in-house team. So how does that all connect together? So we're going to take a break right now and we'll come back with that.

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Marc Bernstein: 15:54

Hi, we are back on Founders Forum with our guest today, david Kirschner of DK Private Dining, and I think, ang, I'll allow you to not allow you, I'll ask you you'll do me a favor by picking up on the question that I just presented at the end of the before the commercial.

Ang Onorato: 16:10

Yeah. So I'll pick up on that and also comment that Marc beat me to the punch. To comment first on the when you talked about the industry and the athleticism of it, and when I kind of hone in on this question about the staff and how you've created these opportunities. Question about the staff and how you've created these opportunities, think about answering it from this perspective too, that you know I worked in the dining space from 13 till I was 30, even when I had a full-time corporate job, because I loved being, you know moving and you know all of that.

Ang Onorato: 16:38

I couldn't sit behind a desk and then at night I would go and serve and bartend. And as a recruiter for 30 years, I tell people take some time and work in service, because it teaches you how to think on your feet, how to multitask, how to be in front of clients, no matter what industry. So, given that perspective and what Marc also teed up, I'd love to find out tell us a little bit more. How do you create these opportunities? How do you bring them into the fold, the fold and being that they're, you know, maybe outsourced how do you blend them into the culture and sort of the client facing values that you want to have consistent with your business.

David Kirschner: 17:13

You know, I think the most important aspect of all of it, I think, starts with us being able to look in the mirror and understand who we are, what we stand for, what are our values, and obviously being really crystal clear about how those values are going to connect with the service that we're providing. So keeping all of that in hand, right, really, our company culture. We look for chefs that come from a particular background. You know we do, especially for our private chef, our private events. I should say that we're doing placements, for we're usually working with chefs that come from a Michelin background, which is obviously similar to the background that I came from. And you know I tell this to clients all the time. It's not so much about just slapping on this Michelin marketing moniker to the chefs that come with. It's actually more about tapping into a certain type of person, a type of person that understands they've sacrificed, probably in some capacity to learn their craft. They've devoted a kind of deep, a deep part of them into understanding how things work and how things flow. And what we just found is that the high level of communication, vocabulary, culinary knowledge, kind of plays into a lot of that. So, with understanding kind of who we are, what we look for, what connects with our clients, going after a certain ilk of chefs and then we really very much put them through their paces during the interview process. We have levels of deep interviews that we're doing with each of the chefs. We're doing tastings with the chefs that are as much about tasting their food as much it is about myself and my team peppering them with questions as they're cooking to see if they can cook but also provide the experience that we need for our clients. Can they maintain a smile? Can they maintain eye contact experience that we need for our clients? Can they maintain a smile? Can they maintain eye contact? Can they connect with us and give us some good answers and give us some stories while they're working through and we understand them that they are, you know, this well-rounded kind of communicator, presenter and really provider of the experience that we're looking for in the end. And if we can see those core attributes in there, then it becomes this, you know, really great symbiotic relationship and partnership where we can bring them into the mix.

David Kirschner: 19:20

Bringing my experience of being a chef for you know, over 20 years and being in the private chef game for so many years we're really bringing up some young folks that are really trying to break into this private side of it. So, leveraging our experience, being able to coach them along, set them up for success not looking for a chef who could also be a salesperson right, because as a solopreneur, a lot of these chefs are trying to break out on their own and they're still developing a lot of those skills. You need to be in the market, tracking down clients, marketing your services, but we give them a chance to have a platform to really be able to cook their food, develop their cuisine, really leverage their talents as something that the clients are really seeking. Between the support myself, my internal team brings to them our full-time chef that we have on staff, which is a gentleman that's been with me for many, many years, and what I really just found was when we had certain clients you know we're talking about our weddings, we're talking about our clients with massive marketing spends that they're trying to launch a product.

David Kirschner: 20:21

You know the draw of having a variety of chefs and you know you could pick from any one of these. You could pick from any one of these chefs to kind of come. Provide your experience is not as powerful as we just need a team that we trust that can provide a consistent over the top experience. So we realized that we had kind of these two sections that we needed to really have an answer for. And that's where kind of our internal chef can handle our overarching really high impact events. We can use his skill set to also coach, tutor, mentor our up and coming kind of community of chefs that we work with for a lot of our smaller events. And all of a sudden now we really are kind of achieving the mission of the company at the end of the day, which is not only to provide unique experiences for our clients but really to provide unique opportunities for our chefs to really get away from the usual traditional grind and gain some control back over their worlds.

Marc Bernstein: 21:11

Just a quick, simple question about that. Isn't it hard to find? You think of maybe backroom chefs. I know times have changed and people have to develop a lot of skills, but aren't they hard to find people that have those presentation skills and people skills, along with a great great, you know, cooking ability?

David Kirschner: 21:30

Absolutely, Marc. I think you're tapping into one of the unique things that we've been able to track down and kind of conquer as one of our main obstacles for success within our business. Yeah, I mean, I say it with a lot of love and affection for my industry and my chef counterparts. Out there, chefs are traditionally pirates. You know this, the alternative lifestyle that they do.

David Kirschner: 21:47

So by no means is every chef capable of doing the type of work that we do. So we have to really weed through a lot of applicants and a lot of vetting processes to really make sure we're touching base with the people that really can be successful in this part of the sector, the sector of the industry.

Marc Bernstein: 22:10

By the way, I just have to correct. The name of the company is Dine DK Private Dining. I thought that was a typo so I wanted to correct the name and it makes a lot of sense. If you want to find David, look at Dine. That's the first place to look. It makes a lot of sense that that's the name. Ang, I know you had more, sorry, yeah.

Ang Onorato: 22:28

So what I love about this part of the conversation, david and Marc, and your great questions about it, is I think what you're also tapping into isn't just the culture and how you identify and kind of screen candidates, but you also talk about it from the client experience that you do that so that when you're in front of the client, that if it's a corporate environment and they're there to launch a product or have a big investor meeting or something, there's a purpose for that meeting. But what I don't think enough people pay attention to and I learned this actually from a best friend of mine and a former guest we had on here that owns a heavy highway construction company as a female-owned business and from day one she has been adamant that it's a dirty business, right, and a lot of companies have. They don't pay as much attention to their trucks that the foreman's drive. They're dirty, they're whatever. She's impeccable that every single day, every one of those trucks is washed and waxed and just when they're driving through the community, the imagery that comes with or the experience that people have in dealing with a background type of business right.

Ang Onorato: 23:26

So what I'm hearing you speak about is not just what you do in the service you do for your client, the event manager, but it's what people that come to that event are going to remember. People talk about. They're not going to remember things about a wedding, but if the food's really bad, they'll remember it right. But they'll also remember, if you're coming in for a certain purpose, that there's a double-fold purpose for your service being top-notch, and that starts with the chef and the people that you have and how they're interacting, even if it is kind of in the back room a little bit, so to speak. So I just wanted to point that out that I think it's brilliant the way that you're doing it and the reasons for doing it, but also what the impact I think is to the ultimate end customer. So it's not just you know you do a good job and accomplish what they paid you to do, but you did something very deeply embedded in what they need.

David Kirschner: 24:16

Absolutely. I think, you nailed it. There's this aspect of taking care of all of our stakeholders that are at the table the client, the end experience user, the chef and all of our partners every step of the way. I've been a firm believer for a very long time. We impact everybody. They all are considered clients for us. How we treat them, how we present each step of that process, um is as important as just the food itself that's on the plate, that everybody's consuming.

Marc Bernstein: 24:45

Um, we only have a couple of minutes left. Tell me about your future vision, the next three years. What does that look like for you, david?

David Kirschner: 24:52

Uh, really, to be frank, I think we've been seeing this deep kind of consolidation that's been going on in our industry over the last couple of years. There's been a lot of big players that have come into an industry that really was dominated by a lot of smaller boutique companies for many, many years. I think my frank vision for the next three years as a business owner is really setting ourselves up to be able to have a broader impact and, you know, thinking about what that looks like to us might be joining forces with a larger entity. It's really about trying to track down what are the resources that we need to continue to compete in this new, more competitive market, with so many solopreneur style chefs that are coming out post-COVID and just trying to figure it out on their own and a lot of these VC backed firms that are kind of stepping into our space as well. So we've got we've got some obstacles to kind of overcome and some navigation to do to really make sure that we're set up for the long haul.

Marc Bernstein: 25:44

It sounds like, though, you have the secret sauce in terms of trying to find the right chefs, which would be their hardest thing. Do you have some advantage to bring either to those big companies or to effectively compete and beat them?

David Kirschner: 25:59

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing you can ever do that's more impactful than having a great reputation, the word of mouth, the grassroots referral basis that you kind of have there, and I think it's something that we have a foothold in. You know more than most. You know we've got a ton of loyal clients that have been with us for many, many years. We've got proven systems that help us, as you said, Marc, that the right types of chefs that can carry out the experiences and this backend systems that are in place that allow us to keep up with, you know, doing 250 events a year with a small team as well.

Marc Bernstein: 26:32

Believe it or not, time flies when you're having fun. This has been a great conversation and we're actually a little over time. So, David, it was a pleasure to have you here today. Thanks so much for being with us on Founders Forum and we look forward to talking to you all again next week. Everybody, have a great day.