Biography
Tyler is currently the Executive Chef at the University of Richmond. He’s involved in menu development, quality assurance, team building, staffing, training, design and daily operations. He also works with the campus community to assure customer satisfaction.
Tyler’s career started off as one in the school of hard knocks. He started off as dishwasher at the age of 14 trying to make some money. He quickly fell in love with this crazy industry and never left. For over the past 25 years, he’s worked his way through all different positions, he’s worked in fine dining, catering, corporate and now collegiate. In 2012, Tyler became a Certified Executive Chef.
Tyler’s passion resides in fresh, sustainable, healthy food/dishes that can be expanded to a large-scale food service operation. He loves to incorporate flavors from all over the world and bringing interesting experiences to the food he cooks.
RAPID FIRE Q&A
International, fresh ingredients, locally inspired. We have many talented chefs on campus so its quite diverse.
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I get ideas from Industry trends, eating out, exploring cuisines that we have never worked with to continuously challenge ourselves. |
They influence our menu items a great deal. We are mindful to be balanced and provide a choice but this has a level of influence on our food service.
All of our fresh seafood options are in accordance with good sustainability practices and in conjunction with Monterey Bay Seafood Watch, Fishprint, Environmental Defense Fund, Etc. Our purchasing department does a great job continuously to develop and source items. All of our produce when possible is automatically locally sourced.
Just try to pay attention to what people are eating and craving. Look through usage of items. When it comes to testing, flavor, does it fit our labor model, costs and overall appeal. It’s a pretty organic process here which is very exciting.
The industry itself and food in general. My mentor when I was younger was a Chef named Brad Mangus, he really instilled so much in my foundation that got me where I am. Famous Chef would most certainly be David Chang.
It is challenging and never the same.
Anything. Personally, I feel that I am very interested in exploring any cuisines.
| It would be my current role of taking a large department and having the charge of change. We are exploring new directions in order to keep up with the growth of demand and food in general. It’s been a wonderful experience but at the same time quite difficult. |