MEET THE KITCHEN ON FIRE CHEFS

Chef Olivier (“Olive”) Said is the founder and co-owner of Kitchen on Fire and one of the East Bay’s most popular culinary personalities. Chef Olive teaches many of the  Kitchen on Fire classes, leads team-building and private events, and is also a Nutrition Professional.

Chef Mat was trained at the Culinary Institute of America, has 15 years of fine dining experience in prominent restaurants in both San Francisco and the East Bay and has been an instructor at Kitchen on Fire since 2012.

Chef Kevin is a San Francisco native who grew up far from the Bay area. The son of a US health department administrator, Kevin got an early introduction to the foods and flavors of the world while living in France, Switzerland, Nigeria and Côte D’Ivoire. Food, the gateway to culture, was a particular fascination for him while living in foreign countries, eating in restaurants, home kitchens, and market stalls, and he learned to love new and unusual flavors.

Chef Eden’s cuisine is inspired by a lifetime of travel to China, India, Europe, and Southeast Asia where she lived for a year after graduating from UC Berkeley.

Chef Eden was most recently the executive chef of Anaviv Catering and Events as well as Anaviv’s Table but decided to switch her career towards the classroom after discovering her passion for teaching while volunteering as an instructor for the Plant to Plate Internship Program. Chef Eden’s motivation is to awaken the chef inside all of us and to bring our inner creativity to the kitchen.

Chef Terry’s world revolves around food. She believes in food as a way to create and build community with friends, family and beyond. Terry has worked in food for the past 35 years, from catering to private chef work to teaching cooking lessons to running large production kitchens feeding the food insecure.

As an avid traveler, Terry has enjoyed food from all over the world, from India to Turkey to Mexico. She has integrated these adventures into her recipe and menu design.

Terry’s classes, with humor and joy, include her extensive knowledge of food traditions, ingredient production and sourcing, and, of course, cooking techniques.

Growing up in the Bay Area, Chef Jack’s love for food developed early on and grew in to his insatiable curiosity of all things culinary. He draws on over 10 years of experience in many different modalities of the food industry. From retail meat and seafood mongering and commercial kitchen management, to fine dining catering and private chef work. Jack maintains an ongoing obsession and ceaseless curiosity towards growing his knowledge and skills while experimenting in the kitchen. At Aliment Events, Jack finds the culmination of his experiences come together as an exhibit of his love and appreciation of great food and the bounty of California ingredients.

Born in Normandy, in the famous region of Mont St. Michel, Chef Anthony spent his youth on the shores and in the beautiful countryside where his extended
the family worked the land and the sea, surf and turf!

At a very young age, Anthony embarked into the culinary world, starting with 5 years of schooling in catering, hotel marketing and management.

Anthony then went on to work in hotels and restaurants in France, Spain, Corsica, Florida, New York City, Central and South America, finally landing in his second home, the San Francisco Bay Area.

Chef Sara has worked in the culinary industry for 25 years. Born in Pakistan, her mother owned a wedding catering business and shared her recipes and knowledge with Sara. Also, her great-grandparents moved from Burma to India, so Sara’s family cooked many Burmese recipes, as well.

In addition to being a professional baker, Sara has been hosting cooking classes for two decades and has taught over 800 students! Her teaching style is very accessible, warm and friendly. Sara loves to share stories from her culinary explorations around the world. For example, Sara is a certified pizza and gelato maker from a school in Florence! Students will take away knowledge about different spices and how to use them to balance out flavors along with an understanding of the techniques used for her recipes.

Chef Maggie, formerly the Executive Chef of Cesar Berkeley and Oakland, found her love of Spanish food early in her career as part of the opening team of the Spanish restaurant “The Willow” in Mill Valley. Throughout Maggie’s extensive culinary career, she had many opportunities to travel to Spain in exploration of Spanish cuisine through various restaurant internships and research trips. Maggie currently resides in Valencia, Spain where she continues to learn the local cuisine as well as discovering other traditional dishes from all regions of Spain.

Aside from her formal education and professional work as a chef, Maggie has also honed her skills as a cook through friendships and meals shared. Several of her class menus (The Hawaiian Family Table) feature traditional family recipes and techniques that she has collected over decades of cooking with friends for intimate meals and family celebrations. Maggie is the co-author of Cesar Recipes from a Tapas Bar.

Chef Mark grew up in Marin County with a mom who consistently cooked delicious food. He didn’t learn to cook until age 23, but that childhood experience provided the backdrop for a deep sense of food as wellness. His growing obsession with cooking led him to pivot from music education to culinary instruction. His life’s mission is to teach people how to cook and eat well. He believes that through empowered—and uncompromisingly delicious—food choices, we can care for ourselves, animals, and the planet. He is passionate about sharing what he has learned with anybody who is wanting to explore plant-based cooking.