the fab four
Lady Chefs
Group Shot
Rebecca Jean Alonzi Rebecca Jean Catering Rebecca Jean Alonzi knows her way around a kitchen. Involved in food service since she was 14 years old, Alonzi ran the gamut of jobs: fine dining server, back of the house in a Michelinstarred restaurant, line cook, demo-girl, and private chef. When some of her loyal clientele pursued her to cater events, she embraced the challenge and started Rebecca Jean Catering, now one of San-Francisco’s fastest-growing catering organizations. Alonzi started solo, and cooked first out of her own kitchen, enlisting the help of her neighbors’ refrigerators and ovens. She started by booking weeklong lunch jobs for a local company, and business began to blossom. When Alonzi faced $30,000 in sales in one month, she realized it was time to own her own kitchen space. She hired her first employee in Spring 2010, then her second. “Now, we are almost 25 employees strong!” Alonzi says, and Rebecca Jean Catering has grown over 300% as a company in both daily lunch and event sales. Alonzi is perhaps the best example of her own advice, “be willing to work hard.” When she began her business, Alonzi would wake up at 6am, cook for a few hours, deliver lunch, come home, wash dishes for 2 hours, work as a private chef until 8pm, go food shopping, prep product and menus for the following day, and then complete her homework (she was still in college at the time). “It's your vision, your dream,” she explains. “I'm not saying sleep deprivation is the key to success…in fact, probably the opposite is true… but it helps to have an ‘all or nothing
attitude. If you don't have a vision that is solidly grounded in your own hard-work, you'll be susceptible to the whim of what others say and you'll question yourself.” Alonzi credits the continuing success of her business to the help of dedicated employees. “I have an awesome team of strong, hardworking women and men who support me everyday in producing beautiful product and upholding some very high standards of productivity and service.” Alonzi says. But that doesn’t mean she lets herself get comfortable. “There is always something to be improved upon,” she explains, “when we've been in business for 20+ years like some of the catering greats, then I can pat myself on the back and say, ‘Okay, we're here,’ until then, it's hard work and dedication to meet and beat our latest challenge.” www.RebeccaJeanCatering.com.
Adobo Chicken
Porchetta
LIONESS AUGUST 2012
31