Chef / Owner of Centrolina Group

I’ve learned throughout my career to be reliable, earnest, humble and accept feedback. It is also important to stay positive, believe in yourself and be confident that with dedication, openness and hard work you will achieve your goals.

With our cuisine being heavily focused on the quality of ingredients and seasonality, it is important to understand flavors. A relentless focus on how a dish tastes is very important, if it has all the right flavor components: salt, fat, acid, sweet, heat.

Read. Read. Read. It’s how I continue to educate myself.

Exercise is very important to me. I set aside dedicated time to do that.

As a woman in the hospitality industry, my experience raising my own capital and building my restaurants from the ground up has inspired others to believe that anything is possible.

Transferable skills including great motor skills, organization, time management skills and great knife skills are what I look for in candidates when hiring.

I find inspiration from ingredients around me and what we purchase every week based on seasonality. How each ingredient tastes inspires me to find its natural counterpart or contrast ingredient. I also love to travel and to experience other cuisines, especially Asian and all of their terrific cooking techniques.