Local Star Written by Liz Burnett
How Forks in the Road Led Chef and Restauranteur John Wolferth to a More Fulfilling Life
Broomall resident John Wollferth Photo courtesy of John Wolferth
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weeks, exploring and getting excited about all the great San Francisco restaurants. When he returned home, John convinced his wife Kim to move there. It was a fairly easy decision because they were young and had no kids yet.
hange is inevitable. Sometimes it’s caused by something we have no control over, like the calendar changing to a new year or the passing of a loved one. Sometimes such externally caused changes motivate us to make New Year’s Resolutions or tell people we love them more frequently. This is the story of John Wolferth, a long-time Broomall resident whose life has changed in many ways, but most dramatically over the past seven years. John grew up in Bala Cynwyd. His mother and one of his grandmothers, both great cooks, got him interested in food and cooking. One summer during high school, John worked as a dishwasher in a French restaurant. The chef took a liking to John, and soon started training him to do food prep and appetizers. John had a strong creative bent, which found a great outlet in creating food. Over the next 20 years, as he perfected his craft by working front and back of the house in many Philly area restaurants and hotels, John became a fine dining Executive Chef and also a partner or owner of several restaurants. In 1989, John’s brother who had moved to California asked if John would drive out there in the car he had left back in the Philly area. John agreed, and after arriving, stayed on for two
After six years working as an Executive Chef in several top San Francisco restaurants and hotels, John and Kim decided to move to New York, so he could take the 2-year program to get his Culinary Arts degree at The Culinary Institute of America. When John graduated in 1995, he and Kim moved to Broomall because they both still had family in the Philly area. Their two sons attended the great Marple Newtown schools and are both now in college. Kim has worked as a Nurse at Lankenau Hospital for 25 years. John says they’ve been blessed to have “great neighbors who look out for each other.” After settling in Broomall and until seven years ago, John worked as an Executive Chef and Restauranteur on the Main Line. He had expected that would be his life’s trajectory until he retires. He never expected that his future included being a licensed sailing captain who has sailed over 8,000 miles to work with NGOs providing donated disaster relief supplies to Caribbean islands, and seeing and doing things he would never have imagined.
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