This past Sunday evening in downtown Houston, over 100 people poured into the doors of the soon to open Kitchen Inc headquarters on Franklin Street.

I’d draw up a contract to have both parties agree to the new set of rules, but since they’d fail to understand the language or honor the contract anyway…

I decided to host the Open Kitchen series to provide that to the community but of course, we can’t always have tours once people are actually working in the kitchens. Thus, we’re working to create a 3D Virtual Tour of the entire Kitchen Inc space!

We’ll be hosting an “Open Kitchen” next month for everyone to tour the space, ask questions and get to know one another. Management will be available to answer all your questions and we’ll have copies of our Licensing Agreement for you to sign and register on site. The Open Kitchen will be a potluck, so [...]

We manage to find a space for the equipment truck across the street. It looks like all of our equipment will have to travel a block down Travis – ridiculous. A few more of the crew arrive and we’re able to hoist the ovens up the stairs using a ramp and a dolly. Naturally, it starts to rain.

Free to build at last! This Monday morning I met with my contractor, landlord’s project manager and the landlord’s building engineer to discuss final transition of the space from their team over to me.

June 10: Landlord “understands” where I am coming from and apologizes. Reality: Landlord does not understand the difference between the outside world and the inside of the paper bag they have been unable to find their way out of.

Monday arrives and I receive another email from the landlord. This one telling me that their contractors were “unable” to move the granite and it would need to be removed before they begin work. Astonished, I wanted only to ask for clarification of “unable” and how exactly a crew of construction workers were incapable of pushing something aside.

On Friday, April 9, I was assaulted by a stranger who was parked in my driveway in the Washington Ave. corridor.

After only a few hours of sitting down with Todd at Mirador we managed to clean up the space and get things in the right place. Then it was time to head down to Sugarland and discuss equipment with Willie McBride of Hangman Kitchen Outfitters, where I got to peruse equipment catalogs and play on Auto-Cad like an engineer in a candy store.

At this point I resigned myself to the fact that I could easier sell a kidney for the same amount of funding.

Season’s Greetings from KitchenInc! While we are happily baking away at this most wonderful time of the year, we regret to inform you that our kitchens will not be open for the Holiday season as we had expected. Negotiations with our Landlord and construction planning have delayed our project further. We wish you a wonderful [...]

Six months of lease negotiation and the landlord’s lawyer found a problem only now, after we had signed the lease. Convenient, perhaps? Now we are stuck with the impossible task of obtaining a convoluted permit or rewriting language in the lease that we had worked all Summer to achieve. Saner women may have given up [...]

While we may not yet be open for business, I’ve spent the past two years learning the ins and outs of the food industry, eaten my way across Texas and enjoyed a few other interesting adventures along the way.

Growing up in rural New Mexico I learned some unusual things at an early age. I learned that you shouldn’t make friends with a calf, no matter how cute, because eventually he will grow up to be hamburgers. I learned how pipes explode when they freeze and just how many apricots you can eat before [...]

Then I discovered Acción Texas, the local branch of a global micro lender specializing in start-ups and other high risk organizations. There was one key problem to pursuing a loan through Acción: their maximum amount was less than half of what we had originally intended to borrow. It’s okay, I convinced myself. I can go another year without a salary. Disposable income is overrated. I have enough fat on my hips and shoes in my closet to last several more years without discretionary spending (seriously, I spend all my money on food).

So it went that a company that once trusted me with multi-million dollar deals could not trust me to small business loan that amounted to little more than pocket change in their portfolio. That is fine. I’m just happy I took that stapler.

Really? You are asking me to address the potential risk of my death? “Well, I certainly do not plan on dying any time in the near future,” I started. The Board members laughed. This “single-manager” clause is standard in prospectus language and is merely added in to the list of risks for liability protection. I tried to explain that this is standard language and inherent to any small business, which, despite adequate insurance protection and other precautions, will always suffer should anything prohibit its leader from running the business. I explained how this is especially pertinent in the restaurant business where a chef is essentially, irreplaceable. “However,” I noted, “this is accepted in the industry and hardly makes a business dependent on a single personality such as Robert Del Grande’s ventures, a prohibitively risky concept.”

From the first moment I decided to go through with the incubator project, I knew that I was going to do something that would be accessible to anyone and everyone with no red tape and an easily navigable process. I swore to myself that grant funding was simply out of the question.

At this point I had already fallen too in love with my concept and put too much into the business plan to let a tiny, petty thing like a global economic collapse stand in my way. Obviously.

After putting about 500 miles on my motorcycle running back and forth across the city (and putting reviews of each site into a handy spreadsheet database, might I add) I finally found a broker that specialized in urban development.
The first sites we visited were all in downtown, an area I had never entertained as a possibility – I mean, traffic and parking problems and bars, oh MY!

Hello! Thank you for your interest in Kitchen Incubator, “A Center for Culinary Entrepreneurship” in Houston, TX. Here you will find all of the latest updates on Kitchen Incubator as we progress towards opening our shared-use kitchens and café, along with helpful links, pertinent resources and articles and access to our new community of culinary [...]