JAMIE JARRARD
Owner, Chef & Planner
After receiving her Grand Diploma in Culinary Arts from the French Culinary Institute in NYC in 2005, Jamie cooked in a variety of restaurants in New York City and staged at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, her love of Big Sur and the bay area brought her to work as head pastry chef for 5 years at Sierra Mar at the Post Ranch Inn, where she developed an extensive knowledge of pastry arts and wedding cake design. She attended San Francisco Baking Institute’s Custom Wedding Cake course. She discovered her love for catering when she began working with a local band promoter in 2007. Cooking custom meals for the musicians backstage and on tour in venues all across the state of California, Chef Jamie learned the fun way how to improvise to create a stellar meal to the stars by showering them with the glorious seasonal, local, bounty of Monterey area. She then started catering and planning the weddings for some of those same musicians she had made an impression on when they performed in Big Sur. She fell in love with the planning process and cooking for such festive events such as weddings. She has catered, planned and managed weddings, private parties, music festivals throughout Big Sur and up and down the coast of California. TOMS shoes, Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg, Arcade Fire, Cat Power, Will Oldham, Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, Bright Eyes, Silver Jews, Pegi Young, Gillian Welch, Jon Paul Jones and The Beach Boys are just a few of her notable clients.
GIVING BACK ~ Chef Jamie is also a certified ROP school teacher in Monterey County for Culinary Arts. She single handedly spearheaded a new ROP Culinary Arts class at Seaside High School, focusing on local, seasonal produce from the area’s rich farmlands. She also acted as Chef Consultant for the Monterey School District, implementing new freshly prepared recipes for the 3000 children in the school district. She also enjoys teaching occasional classes for elementary students throughout Monterey County the importance of eating healthy fruits and vegetables and how to cook a “4 course meal”, through a program called Project Helping Hands.Jamie is a mother of 3 and wife to an artist and loves cooking, design and planning weddings and parties and open fired paella on the beach for friends.
“How did Jarrard obtain such a prestigious position at a world-renowned eatery at a young age?
It wasn’t so much because she trained at the esteemed French Culinary Institute in NYC, nor because she studied under the master tutelage of Jacques Torres, one of the world’s most famous pastry chefs, though that helped.
Jarrard’s success is more directly the result of everything she taught herself, spending years learning French technique and recipes from classic cookbooks. She figured out at an early age how to create dessert menus inspired by embracing the seasonal and fresh produce from local growers, home gardens and farmers markets.
“You can create things that bring back nostalgic memories of childhood for people,” Jarrard says. “And it can be done in a colorful and incredibly artistic way.”
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