Origin Story

Est. 2017 : Venice, California

I didn't plan on becoming a chef.

My wife was pregnant, and something simple took hold: whatever else happened, I wanted to be able to feed my family well. Not impress anyone. Just make sure the food was good, no matter what came next.

That resolve got tested fast. Three weeks before my son was born, the company I worked for decided it didn't need what I did anymore. I found other work, and kept at it for years — but the resolve about the food never went anywhere.

So I taught myself.

No culinary school, no line, no kitchen I'd ever worked in — just a copy of The Flavor Bible and a grill I cooked on until I could get close. The more I cooked, the more curious I got. That curiosity is still the whole engine.

I got better, then better again — enough to start photographing what I made. Once our son was asleep, people started coming over. That's where Ginger Table actually began — not a plan, just a kitchen and whoever showed up.

Where it started — unedited, still early days

2017. Michelin ambitions, but totally delusional.
Later that year. Simpler, more sure of itself. (Maybe?)
A few dinners in. Guests, mid-figure-it-out. Look at their faces.
Still early days. You'd never know.

And then it had a name.

Two friends sent me a video one night — a clip of one of my dishes, scored with the theme from a popular cooking documentary, a title reading Ginger Table across the middle. I thought it was hysterical. I kept it.

The dinners kept growing.

What started as feeding a handful of people once a month turned into a standing table that kept growing. It started with people I already knew — friends, people I worked with — and grew as they brought people I didn't.

I kept my day job the whole time. My title never changed, but somewhere in those years, people started calling me chef — half joking, mostly not — and a few friends started asking someone else to host, because they didn't want to cook for me anymore. In public, I was still an executive. At the table, something else had already taken over. Eventually, only one of them stuck. I'm the chef now. This is my company.

A handful of things I made kept getting asked about, dinner after dinner — a condiment, a sauce, and the boozy little confections people wanted most of all. Those became Nite Caps, the first product we ever actually launched. Everything else here grew out of the same handful of requests.

We cook in the Hudson Valley these days. Same instinct, different address.

We kept the menus.

Eight years of these, going back to the first dinners. Some of these dishes are the reason the jars exist.

And here's what came off those menus.

What's actually on the table

Not just condiments in a jar, or confections in a box — the shortcut to the feeling I was chasing all along, the one where the table gets quiet for a second because the food is actually good, then gets loud again because good food makes people want to talk to each other.

I'm not a chef in the way that word usually means. I'm someone who got here through curiosity, not training, and every jar is the fastest route I know to that same flavor and that same feeling — no culinary school required, just years of paying attention.

I can't cook at your table. This is the closest I can get.

Stay delicious,
Jay

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