Chef perfects 25 meals daily — with Zoox employees’ help

Now, heading up the kitchen at the sprawling waterfront Zoox campus, Catalano said he feels most enjoyment from being able to democratize the creative process. Not only does he solicit feedback, recipes and suggestions from employees, or guests, but from staff and other vendors as well.

It’s not surprising that Catalano is intrigued by the more informal, egalitarian culinary experience. A self-described latchkey kid, he began experimenting with simple ingredients — a can of tuna or dry spices — at an early age. And for the better part of his 20s, Catalano lived near Lake Tahoe selling snowboards, making breakfast and lunch for current or prospective customers.

“I would have people come up to my house and stay with me. It was like a snowboard bed and breakfast for people I was trying to sell snowboards to,” he said. “Then I would go to the mountain and make lunch out of the back of my van, so it was a full experience for them.”

Knowing he eventually needed to find a way to earn more money, he enrolled in culinary school, which seemed like the natural next step.

Soon after graduation, Catalano started working at Charlie Trotter’s, where he said he was both “a deer in headlights” and "a kid in a candy store.” Like any practical artistry, culinary excellence required not just a healthy dose of tinkering and curiosity, but also rigor, discipline and a lot of humbling moments.

“It was a whole other level of growing up. I was stressed when I walked in the door, stressed when we left. I’d wake up in the middle of the night going, ‘Did I order enough?’” he said. “I’d get sick in the trash can outside from being so nervous.”

But perhaps the most crucial lesson he learned in those years was an aversion to wastefulness — which seemed more like a philosophical tenet than a rule in such establishments. Reprimands were freely given if there were even four grains of sea salt on a floor tile, not just because it showed a sloppy aesthetic, but it signified a lack of care for the ingredients. Catalano said he learned how to use every part of a food item, from getting creative with animal cuts to saving the juice from poached carrot dishes.

“When I was at Manresa, I ground up a dehydrated apple skin and blended them up to a powder, put them in an espresso machine and ran hot water through it trying to see if I could get a tea out of it or extract something out of it,” he said. “And we’d always try to fry everything. It was always like you’re constantly trying to squeeze something out of nothing, but also constantly trying to find something cool, something different.”

Such a mindset is key for success in the restaurant industry, which sees notoriously thin profit margins. But it’s also important at Zoox, which, with a large budget and high-volume shipments, still requires precise orders.

“In actuality, it’s not as hard on the body, but mentally it's more challenging now that you’re scaling,” he said.

Catalano doesn’t just orchestrate the recipes, ingredients and menus for the Foster City location but his leadership also reverberates to the firm’s numerous locations throughout the Bay Area, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas and even the U.K.

In Foster City, Zoox employees can choose from roughly 25 different meals each day, across seven types of cuisine. There are always vegan, vegetarian, dairy and gluten free options, as well as a list of ingredients in each dish for employees’ reference.

Getting real-time, relationship feedback is also an added perk of being at a corporate kitchen — something you can’t typically get at a sit-down establishment. The kitchen is able to perfect recipes through real-time feedback, Slack threads and texts. Sometimes, employees will even bring in their own dishes, which will soon end up in the mouths of hundreds of Zoox employees once Catalano and his team add the finishing touches.

Unlike traditional establishments, recipes are freely circulated, with recommendations and suggestions encouraged. Catalano added that he has never worked at a restaurant where he’s been able to conduct interactive contests with guests. But just recently, Zoox employees participated in a pizza dough game, where they had to guess whether the Zoox kitchen staff or AI had generated the recipe.

“I’m not going to say who [won],” he said, though conceded the aim was to reinforce the camaraderie and communal approach to food and cooking. “The creativity that I get to have, the people, then the feedback you get — it stretches you in different directions.”

alyse@smdailyjournal.com

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