About Us
The two of us
Mendocino Chef is a partnership: Chef Chantelle Sookram leads the kitchen, and Chef Keith Kalmanowicz produces the events and runs the business — and each of us also cooks and hosts events of our own. Between us, your gathering is covered from the first email to the last plate cleared.
Chef Chantelle Sookram
Culinary Lead
Chantelle’s culinary journey began in Trinidad, enriched by East Indian and Afro-Caribbean flavors. Trained at Johnson & Wales in Miami, she honed her skills at San Francisco’s Nopa, embracing organic, seasonal cuisine. Her dedication to local food systems deepened through her work with Miami’s Urban Oasis Project, promoting food sovereignty and community empowerment. Now in Mendocino County, she partners with local farmers to craft menus that celebrate the area’s bounty.
A culinary journey rooted in experience
From fine dining to community-driven food initiatives, Chantelle’s background spans top restaurants, sustainable food projects, and unique outdoor dining experiences. Her passion for farm-to-table cooking is shaped by years of working with fresh, locally sourced ingredients in every kind of setting.
Caspar Bread & Wine pop-ups
Throughout the year we team up with Caspar Bread & Wine for pop-up dinners — seasonal, farm-driven menus served at the community table.
Restaurants & hospitality
From San Francisco’s Nopa to Miami’s BLT Steak and The Betsy Hotel, Chantelle honed her craft in fine dining, open-fire cooking, and refined, ingredient-driven dishes.
Urban Oasis Project
Committed to food sovereignty, Chantelle played a key role in Miami’s Urban Oasis Project, connecting communities with fresh produce, urban farming, and food education.
Love and Vegetables
As a founding chef of Love and Vegetables, a pay-what-you-can pop-up café in Miami, Chantelle championed plant-based, locally sourced meals accessible to all.
Featured in
Word of Mouth Mendo · Spring 2024
Chantelle was profiled by Torrey Douglass in Word of Mouth Mendo: “There’s lots of fresh food accessible on the coast — there are amazing local farms here. It sparks joy for me.”
Biscayne Times
Keith’s pay-what-you-can pop-up Love and Vegetables made the cover of Miami’s Biscayne Times — “What would you pay for gourmet vegan?” — with praise from James Beard Award winner Michael Schwartz.
Chef Keith Kalmanowicz
Chef & Event Producer
Keith’s cooking life started on the line in Miami Beach — sauté, grill, and sauce work at BLT Steak under chef Samuel Gorenstein — and grew into fifteen-plus years across fine dining, private clubs, wellness retreats, and production kitchens turning out five thousand meals a week. Along the way he became a trusted produce buyer for James Beard Award winner Michael Schwartz’s restaurants, building the farmer relationships that still shape how he cooks: garden-to-table, seasonal, and unfussy about letting great ingredients lead.
Miami’s kitchens
Keith cut his teeth at Miami Beach’s BLT Steak, then sourced produce for James Beard winner Michael Schwartz’s Genuine Hospitality Group — buying directly from farmers for multiple restaurants, openings, and pop-ups.
Private clubs & banquets
Between a national golf club and a historic hunting lodge in the Poconos, Keith led private dining, tournaments, and banquet events for 200+ guests — the production discipline behind our seamless big-table events.
Love and Vegetables
In 2012 Keith founded Love and Vegetables, a pay-what-you-can pop-up café that grew into farm-to-table dinners, retreats, a nationwide plant-based chef network, and a seed & garden brand. Chantelle cooked there as a founding chef — this partnership grew from that table.
Wellness & scale
As executive chef at Fit AF Nutrition, Keith ran production of up to 5,000 meals a week and launched its catering division — real dietary needs, executed flawlessly at scale.
Keith was very creative and passionate. He was always interested in using the freshest ingredients, many of which he foraged himself locally.
Michael Schwartz, James Beard Award–winning chef, in Biscayne Times
Keith’s pay-what-you-can work with Love and Vegetables was featured in the Biscayne Times, and he spoke at the One World Everybody Eats Foundation summit on feeding people regardless of means — the same food-justice thread that runs through Chantelle’s story, and now through Mendocino Chef. Trained in culinary arts at Luzerne County Community College with business studies at Northern Arizona University, Keith carries both halves of our promise: food worth remembering, and an event that runs like clockwork.
Why we work together
Our story starts in Miami, at a food event at Paradise Farms, while Chantelle was finishing culinary school. Keith was so impressed cooking alongside her that he went back to his chef at BLT Steak, Sam Gorenstein, with a simple message: we need to hire her. She came on at BLT Steak, and a best friendship began that’s still the engine of this partnership. When Chantelle moved to Earth N Us Farm in Little Haiti, we started Love and Vegetables together — a pay-what-you-can pop-up café built on the belief that everybody eats, regardless of means.
More than a decade later, the division of labor is second nature: Chantelle obsesses over the plate; Keith obsesses over everything around it — the timing, the setting, the welcome at the door, and the feeling that someone thought of everything. Book either of us on our own, or both of us together when the occasion calls for the whole experience.