ABOUT
Andrea Rappaport, Chef-Owner
My love of food and cooking was ignited at an early age and then propelled by two major forces. One of those was my maternal grandmother, who would lovingly spend time teaching me how to prepare her coveted recipes, and the other was my food obsessed parents who would regularly bring me and my brother to hip and hot Los Angeles restaurants with them.
With a deeply instilled passion for food and cooking, it was no surprise that when I started my first job at the age of sixteen it was at a high end specialty food shop. A couple of years later, while attending college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I pursued a degree in sociology, but I ultimately realized that I was much more interested in food and cooking. To that end I got a job as a line cook at one of the top restaurants in Madison and by my senior year, as I took a full class load and worked two different restaurant jobs, there was no doubt in my mind that my calling was to be a chef. After graduating with my bachelors degree, I moved to New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America and upon earning my degree from there, I was hired to cook at the original Spago restaurant in Hollywood and then at Spago, Las Vegas.
A few years into my Vegas stint I’d had my fill of that town and decided to move to San Francisco where I became the executive chef at a new Cal-Italian restaurant called Zinzino. In my six years as the chef there, I received sparkling reviews from customers and food critics alike. I was named one of the top ten Rising Star Chefs in the San Francisco Examiner's annual list and later, I was invited to be a guest chef at the James Beard House as part of their Chef Discovery Series.
Six years running a restaurant proved to be enough for me, however, and I was burnt out from the demands of chaotic restaurant life. With that, I decided to shift gears and became the private chef for a family in Silicon Valley. I spent more than a decade with them and my culinary responsibilities ranged from multi-course fine dining menus to baby food and birthday cakes, to delicious comfort food and high end hors d’oeuvres for cocktail parties. I was there for the birth of two of three of their children and grew to truly love them and am still in contact with them today. After more than a decade at that job, however, I began to yearn for the freedom that came with being self employed and with that, decided to enter yet another realm of the food industry launching Bijou Catering in San Francisco. My goal in becoming a caterer was to fill what I saw as an untapped niche, a chef for hire who specialized in bespoke, intimate events with seasonal, delicious and memorable food.
In 2018, I moved to Los Angeles so that I could be closer to my family and I now split my time between catering, private cheffing, home meal deliveries and teaching small, in-home cooking classes. Being both the chef and owner of Bijou allows me to be hands on for every step of the process, from designing the menus to procuring and cooking the food to sweeping the floors at the end of the night. At Bijou my focus is to think outside the box and offer unique experiences by creating imaginative, seasonally inspired food. I use my expertise to construct dishes that emphasize the delicate balance of complementary and contrasting flavors, textures and appearances. I also use my creative prowess to ensure that anybody with dietary restrictions or allergies is fed as delicious and memorable a meal as everyone else I’m feeding.
Activities and Accomplishments:
CCD Innovation Chef's Council - product development
Lotus Eater SF pop-up dinner series - co-creator/chef: lotuseatersf.wordpress.com
Castlemont Elementary School Garden, Campbell, CA - volunteer cooking instructor
San Francisco Book Review- cookbook reviewer
James Beard House, New York, NY Discovery Series - guest chef
San Francisco Examiner - named one of the "Ten Best Chefs You Don't Know Yet"
Bay Cafe- guest chef, two episodes