Callis Cuisine to The Table Catering
Thirteen years in the making
The Table Catering
A Berkeley Wedding
Peter and I married in the crisp fall of 2011 in Berkeley, California.
We still love to cater a handful of weddings every year, as we ourselves are a married couple and love to
celebrate love, families and communities
coming together in celebration!
Oakland Co Housing
Peter and I moved in together and joined a beautiful co housing community in temescal.
Residents and families enjoyed their own private homes and shared an additional common space, to come together for weekly meals and community. Peter would regularly cook for this community and everyone was always so appreciative of monthly community dinner’s prepared by a trained Chef.
Peter relocated in 2000 from his hometown of San Diego, seeking and completing his undergrad at Cal (UC) Berkeley. During his Chemistry studies, he also pursued an art minor and used food as a medium. Peter also explored his spirituality and felt a calling to go into the Culinary field for his life’s work. Stepping into the unknown, he took out student loans and pursued two culinary degrees from the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco.
Peter never went into the traditional Chemistry career path, but instead traded his Chemistry coat for a Chef Coat, and prepared both casual and fine dining meals in various East Bay restaurants for the next seven years,
including an externship at Chez Panisse, prep cook at west Berkeley’s Pyramid Brewery and a line cook in Emeryville’s Bucci’s and Oakland’s Garabaldis’ restaurant.
I am a Bay Area local and lived in Berkeley and Oakland most of my life, minus a few years at Chico State and another year abroad studying art history in Italy. When Peter and I met at the age of 28, I was still floundering about what I wanted to pursue as a career. I had taken some time off from college and returned to the Bay Area, changing majors from Interior Design to pursuing a Bachelors in Social Work.
I was drawn to both design and spaces of service. I really love helping people. I worked in fast paced food spaces for years, like Oakland long established Fenton’s Creamery. I had previously worked with youth in both educational and sports sectors and held program and people coordination roles. Coordinating came easy to me.
*Volunteering with Alameda County Community Food Bank with my Fenton’s Creamery co workers
I worked four years in various North Berkeley coffee shops as a barista, Shift Supervisor and then Assistant Manager, both Starbucks and then Peet’s Coffee.
After my academic break, I completing my Bachelors degree From Cal State East Bay which led to nonprofit career roles serving food insecure individuals within the Alameda County Community Food Bank.
Growing up in Berkeley where I saw and experienced social economic diversity, I always felt compassion for unhoused individuals and believed food is a basic right.
Early Days Catering
As a newly married couple, in our free time, Peter and I found ourselves drawn to combining our knowledge of culinary and service and catering weekend events for our friends and our faith based community.
We didn’t yet have kids and didn’t have a big entertainment budget, (thanks, student loans) and in retrospect has lots of free time, so we said
“Sure, we will cater your social weekend event!”
Our skills set was so complementary, me as a front of house aka FOH and Peter as BOH Cook, we had fun working together and it just made sense to have catering be our side hobby and hustle.
Cue Launching our business, Callis Cuisine!
From 2011 to 2020, Callis Cuisine catered friends and community members weddings and social milestone events on various weekends. Sometime in there, I also became a part time wedding venue coordinator at my church.
We each continued on our 9-5 w2 career paths, being employed by a variety of nonprofits and socially responsible businesses in our prospective areas of interest and skills.
Peter continued to build on his culinary and kitchen management skills. For three years, he held various roles on the Google campus cooking and leading large restaurants or cafes, ultimately becoming an Executive Sous Chef for a seven day a week cafe feeding three meals a day for 800 daily googlers.
I too was hired at Google and supervised cafe or the restaurant of another large cafe and supervised the guest experience and operations of the 800 guest restaurant for breakfast and lunch service, and occasional special events. We worked with so many hard working, passionate and caring food service team mates and were selected to help open a new Google restaurant in Seattle, Washington.
I had never tried catering, but I had this internal knowing that I would love it!
In 2012, I applied to a Catering Coordinator job at UC Berkeley and thanks to my awesome boss and now friend and mentor, I was hired! I went on to lead the department, an internal promotion and was responsible for hundreds of annual events, up to 50 student staff and supervising, working and ensuring excellent catering events on and around the Berkeley campus.
Shortly thereafter around 2013,
Peter stopped the daily commute from Oakland to Mountain View and took a similar but different role serving hundreds of unhoused community members a daily lunch with reclaimed ingredients with a wonderful non profit at St Vincent de Paul and became their Culinary Instructor.
*Check out his 2014 feature in NBC Bay Area Proud
Chef Peter trained formerly incarcerated individuals culinary skills as they pursued a culinary path, who in return served unhoused Oakland community members.
Together they prepared large batch cooking for a different type of clientele than a Googler, and yet showcased his culinary talents and feeding hundreds a day.
While holding our 9-5 w2 jobs in our prospective hospitality industries
We would hear of a friend getting married and absolutely wanted to cater for their special event!
With any new venture, you learn as you go!
We have some silly stories of the early days of catering, filling up our Toyota prius with tortillas from Oaklands delicatessen and driving to San Clemete, North San Diego to cater a friends wedding, smashing ingredients in home fridges and hope for the best.
We would cater at various venues or in the mountains, we were up for an adventure and loved feeding and serving people even with unknown terrain and environmental factors.
Around 2016, we had our second child.
After our daughter was born, we continued to work in service and culinary spaces.
I gained additional experience planning and servicing couples as a Wedding Sales Manager at Hotel Shattuck Berkeley.
Peter went to become the Hospitality and Chef of our large home church, serving 200 congregants and community attendees weekly new menu meals of new menus every Sunday.
My hotel work was missing the element of being able to bring food to food insecure groups, so I joined Revolution Foods, a healthy school meal company.
I was responsible for 60 Northern California school partnerships and $9M in revenue to bring reimbursable meals to free and reduced lunch students in k-12 schools.
Then comes 2020..the pandemic.
This season looked similar and different for so many of us, full of separation, pain, sickness, a break from business as usual.
Peter and I were both being let go from work we loved, serving nourishing meals to the East Bay.
I had been ignoring a long time curiously and internal knowing about becoming an entrepreneur and business owner.
After being let go from Revolution Foods, I registered The Table Catering as an LLC business.
We had hoped this was something Peter could do on the side of his Chef position with the church, but after a few more months, he two was let go. More devastating news.
For our family, it meant not one but two job layoffs. Douh!
The Table Catering became our sole source of our family income, and during the pandemic when people are not hosting parties, we offered handcrafted meal deliveries.
One of our shared values is lessening our carbon footprint, so we invested thousands of our personal dollars to purchase reusable glassware.
I have always felt strongly about workers rights and fair business practices, so sought out the best made in the USA reusable BPA free heatable glassware I could find.
We continued on the path of offering meal delivery and catering events to the East Bay, but still floundering to cover costs, pay ourselves, keep our books organized and all those behind the scenes details to make a business run.
We hired part time team members, were committed to paying well above minimum wage despite not regularly paying ourselves.
After two years of both love for the work we were doing and frustrated with the learning curve of running and marketing a new start up business, we hired our first business coach.
2024 has been a theme of taking steps back, to take steps forward.
Exploring questions of Why do we do what we do, what is our bigger impact and legacy we want to leave, how can we serve our community and care for ourselves and our family,
what does pricing look like while believing strongly organic and regenerative is the way forward for our community, earth and health and what is the actual price for that service and our expertise.
What has come about during this coaching season is better fine tuning our ideal and best offer to our community, one we have done all along but couldn't quite package it up or communicate it.
It is hand crafted nourishing and friendly fine dining buffets for large groups.
It is having two tiers of full service or drop off, always with attention to reusable supplies and value aligned partners like our very supportive and loyal delivery team with Oakland’s based Piikup.
It is continuing to serve high quality handcrafted meals to a variety of communities with the desire to extend our reach of bringing those same meals to anyone around the table.
With that, we are honored and excited to bring our large group catering expertise to your next gathering of people around the table!
