Culinary Collective Network: The Cook, the Need, a Sauce and an Industry Platform

Kristopher Ott used to manage the kitchen at two of downtown Boise’s busiest restaurants, Fork and Alavita. Last year, Ott relinquished his executive chef title and the crush of serving meals for what he says were thousands of guests on busy weekends. He spent about a year as the chef at The Local in northwest Boise, a modest pub-like restaurant that strives to be a neighborhood hangout.

He’s now running a website called the Culinary Collective Network. As Ott describes it, the CCN is a virtual platform where chefs, restaurants, bars, brewers, vintners, farmers and other food purveyors can collaborate, communicate, announce upcoming events and find qualified workers.

“It was really hard finding people who were skilled,” says Ott, explaining what inspired his foray into digital media. “You’d post ads on craigslist or Indeed. The problem is you’d get people who apply who don’t necessarily read the ad so you’d have guys applying for cooks’ jobs who aren’t in the industry.”

Envision a LinkedIn that focuses solely on the culinary industry with local farmers, restaurateurs and other food and drink businesses as paying members. The general public can also visit the site, free of charge, to look for jobs, find events they want to attend and learn the latest local culinary news. Ott considers the CCN a way to bring industry players together while giving back to the community.

He says a jobs forum was just the beginning—if the network goes over well in Boise, he wants the platform to spread to other cities. In that regard, he’s going head-to-head with more established players and industry leaders like Facebook, craigslist and Instagram.

To distinguish his offering from such giants, Ott says his narrow focus on the culinary industry gives him an advantage over general-interest social media sites. And he has a secret sauce for funding the CCN, literally: a line of sauces dedicated to his project called Late Harvest.

In partnership with Boise’s MFT Sauce and Rub Company, CCN’s Late Harvest brand sauces are made by using end-of-season farm produce that would otherwise go unused. “The surplus amount of food in this valley is absurd. It’s incredible the harvest these little farmers pull out of their gardens,” says MFT owner and founder Scott Tharp. “We didn’t want it to go to waste.”

Meridian’s Wagner Farms provided the produce for the first Late Harvest run. Debi Wagner, who co-owns the farm with her husband, Rod, says, “[Kris] always comes by and spends Sunday afternoon to visit with us just to see what all we’ve got and to hang out with his kids. At the end of the season he saw how much produce I had left as we were shutting down and I told him what we did with it.” She adds, “I gave him totes and totes of tomatoes and peppers and then half a bin of onions.” Although she didn’t keep an exact count, she estimates she gave Ott hundreds of pounds of produce.

Tharp says, “The poblanos were just gorgeous. I mean, they weren’t sprayed with wax. They looked so pretty.” He adds laughing, “So, that’s what a poblano looks like? Well, that’s cool. You know what I mean? They’re all different. They weren’t manufactured, so to speak.”

With Wagner Farms’ bounty, Ott and Tharp used MFT’s production and bottling facility to make, so far, an onion chutney, pickled onions, salsa roja, salsa verde, Holy Mole Pepper Jelly, sweet and spicy pomodoro, Basque pepper jam and a sweet and serrano pepper salsa. Because they’re made with what’s available at the time, once a particular ingredient is gone, that may be it for that flavor.

If all goes as planned, Ott hopes CCN’s website will grow as members and the public become more familiar with its offerings. Eventually, he wants to generate enough revenue from the site and Late Harvest to buy and equip a commissary, or commercial, kitchen to allow start-up food businesses and food trucks a place to cook up their ideas. 

If things don’t go so well, Ott says, “I give everything I’ve got to everything I’ve done, every restaurant I’ve worked at. I want to be able to give back at the same time. If success is something that grows out of that, great. If not, I’m still a chef and I’ve got plenty to fall back on. There’s never a lack of work in that industry.”

Late Harvest products are available at MFT’s booth at the Capital City Farmers Market, Wagner Farms and both the Meridian and North End Boise Co-op locations.

Fork | @fork_boise
Alavita | @alavita_boise
The Local | @the_local_boise
Culinary Collective Network | @culinarycollectivenetwork
Late Harvest
MFT Sauce and Rub Company
Wagner Farms
Capital City Farmers Market
Boise Co-op | @boisecoop