Ethan's Catering Blog by Robert Edwards

I’m Robert Edwards, a Bay Area private chef with a passion for local ingredients, organic gardening, and traditional recipes and techniques combined with international flavors to create a style of cuisine best described as international cuisine created in a California style.

I launched this blog because I love food. Food is my motivation, number one. Number two, living here in the Bay Area, one of the culinary capitals of the world, with its availability of fresh produce and ingredients keeps my creative juices flowing.

I constantly expand my culinary knowledge base and understanding of food history. I travel and explore the California food culture. I love cooking and eating with friends and family and sharing my food passions with my catering clients. I talk with other chefs and people who love to cook. I’m not driven by any one cooking style nor do I chase food trends.

I think of myself as a modern traditionalist. I don’t approach modern cooking like nothing important happened before the Food Network. I draw some of my inspiration from the long lineage of proven food combinations and styles and simple recipes brought up into the present with fresh, local ingredients.

I draw from old cooking styles. I collect and read old cookbooks and find inspiration in forgotten cooking traditions and reinventing things no longer prepared in modern kitchens, substituting canned or processed foods for fresh ingredients.

In cooking, the techniques are pretty much set. Everybody who has gone through a culinary program, or has learned from a chef that has gone through a culinary program, knows the classic European cooking techniques. Once you get the techniques down, everything else just falls in place.I believe that creativity in the kitchen largely comes from fresh, local ingredients. At the end of the day, it’s what is freshest, and what is available locally, that deliver the best flavors in your final product.