:: March 2006 ::A Taste of LifeElements Kitchen offers something for your every mood.text Teena Apeles photo
Former fit model Carole Grogan and musician Onil Chibás know all too well about life on the go and the importance of staying healthy. Both were important factors to these California School of Culinary Arts graduates when they started their catering business last year and opened Elements Kitchen in late December. At their big kitchen, small dining location—there's a single table with seating for three inside and three tables for two outside—they offer an array of appetizing dishes for active people who appreciate "eating out" in the comfort of their own home. How did the idea behind Elements Kitchen develop? Grogan: The elements food, art and nature are part of the concept we started with. We're both artists, and we both love nature and how things grow and gardening in itself. There are just so many things that combine to make a nice dining experience. Your menu is a veritable "united nations" of dishes, with everything from linguini and plantains to fried rice and roast beef. Why is it so diverse? Chibás: I think it reflects who we are. I'm Cuban. Carole has a Russian background. The other chefs we work with, Marcus Scott and Yi-Fan Chu, are American and Asian. It is a whole melting pot if you just look around at Elements at the whole crew. And we just like all kinds of food - we have different moods. You likely have one of the smallest restaurants in the city. Why did you choose this space? Chibás: We wanted a kitchen to work out of for our catering, but we wanted to diversify Elements so that we weren't just doing catering. So we thought, let's do some prepackaged food that people can pick up and take, and let's put one table in, because some people will want to eat here anyway. Grogan: In general, we get a lot of working singles, working couples, small families with a kid, single moms with a child. They want to provide really healthy meals for their family if they have children, but they don't want to go to a restaurant or prepare something themselves. Same with singles who don't want to go to a restaurant by themselves. What sets your food apart from other places? Grogan: Probably the diversity. We try to hit a lot of different moods that people have concerning how they want to eat when they're thinking of taking food home. If you go to the gym and work out really hard, ... you don't want to eat a Quarter Pounder® with cheese, you want to eat something really healthy. We offer a quinoa salad, which is incredibly healthy but also delicious. Or if you've had a hard day at work and you just want to crash on the sofa and want something that'll make you feel really good inside, like chicken pot pie, it's that comfort food. Or if you just want to try something new, we combine a lot of different ethnicities in our food. Our lemon saffron chicken with the coconut chili sauce is sort of an Asian sauce with a Mediterranean or Moroccan starch, so it's kind of a lot of cultures brought together, an experimental level of trying food. Chibás: It's a hybrid. I think the other thing too is that a lot of our dishes are familiar but done at a high level, such as chicken pot pie or macaroni and cheese. You want people to take a bite out of these and say, "Wow, that is incredible." © 2005 Southland Publishing |