Today we’d like to introduce you to Michelle Carpenter.
Hi Michelle, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in Tokyo to a Cajun airman and an Edoko homemaker. As a military brat, I lived in Japan for the first five years of my life and then my family moved around Texas and Louisiana depending on where my father was station. We lived in Louisiana, Wichita Falls, San Antonio, and then eventually I moved to Dallas.
I am a professional chef and restaurant owner. I’ve been in the industry for nearly 40 years, starting out as a busser, working as a bartender, to working as a commis sushi chef, to staging for two years as a sushi apprentice, to becoming a sushi chef for different concepts. In 2007, I opened Zen Sushi in the Bishop Arts, serving sushi that reflects who I am. My menu at Zen shows my formal Japanese training married to regional ingredients. In 2022, I opened my second concept, Restaurant Beatrice, which reflects my Cajun heritage.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The restaurant industry in general, even during economic upswings, is very difficult. The consumer/dining public assume that it is easy in the sense that there are less barriers to entry for some of the jobs, However, to stay open, to meet diner expectations, to pivot through different economic conditions, to stay relevant when the margins of food are razor thin requires acumen, tenacity, and quite a lot of capital. Buildings, build-out, regulations, code compliance, certifications and inspections from the local government, commercial equipment, training your labor to execute your menu, staffing, recruitment, sourcing food, menu development, creativity, and marketing and packaging of a concept is very challenging. It is hard to get everything right. It is hard to get most of these things event half-way right while pleasing everyone: your employees, your diners, the media, your peers, and your immediate community.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My second restaurant, Restaurant Beatrice, serves contemporary Louisiana cuisine inspired by my homemaker Mammaw, Beatrice Carpenter. I was a kid who grew up at my Mammaw’s apron strings. She always had gumbo on the stove, homemade cakes for every birthday, and seafood boils on the patio. Like many Cajuns, my family was used to setting up traps for crawfish, hunting game, and fishing for our supper. My Mammaw gardened, composted, and she pickled the vegetables from her garden every season. Our current dining culture is so divorced from unprocessed and whole foods. We don’t know who grows our food, raises the livestock we consume, or who fishes for our seafood we cook. We don’t know how they handle the food. We don’t even know what is in our food. I opened Restaurant Beatrice to honor her values, with the belief that food tastes best when we are connected to this process. We should know our rancher, our farmer, our supplier, our distiller, and our chef.
Restaurant Beatrice is the first restaurant in Texas to become B Corp Certified, and last year, we were the first restaurant in Texas to release a greenhouse gas inventory that measures our carbon emissions. These are pioneering steps we adopted for one reason. We want to set an example for the restaurant industry to consider the ways that we operate and our impact on our community and the environment. We want to raise the bar for the definition of sustainability in the our industry, in general, because all sustainability has to be connected to climate change and planetary health. Every year, we divert over 50MT of CO2 from entering the atmosphere through composting 100% of our food waste.
Measuring our carbon is a needed first step for any business to start reducing their emissions, as emissions are what contribute to climate change. As hard as it is, we want address our own responsibilities to the future and folks that we may never meet.
While are set ourselves apart from others, what we really want is for other restaurants to surpass what we have accomplished. What we do, hopefully, will become the bar or the standard.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Most entrepreneurs will admit, after the fact, that they would not have opened their business if they knew what it would cost them in terms of the costs. There is an emotional and mental cost as well as a economic cost that includes finances but also the opportunity cost.
Ultimately, business owners don’t always make decisions solely on risk alone. Business owners are not risk-averse. Opening a restaurant, as hard as it is, for people who truly are chefs, is not a choice. The best chefs are storytellers, who need to tell the story of their people, their culture, their experiences with their diners. What I do is a privilege and a responsibility.
Pricing:
- Signature Cocktails: $16 and up
- Entrees: $31 and up
- Desserts: $16 and up
- Tasting Menus: $100/per person and up
Contact Info:
- Website: https://restaurantbeatrice.com
- Instagram: @restaurantbeatrice
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RestaurantBeatrice/
Image Credits
All photos courtesy of Kate Voskova.
