I began cooking in restaurants around age 16, and in 1999, I started culinary school and cooking full-time.

I was learning so much, and I began writing down everything in a little spiral notebook: all of my ideas, what I was learning, and what I was eating and tasting. One little spiral notebook turned into 2, then 5, and soon, more than I could count.

Unfortunately for me, between my terrible handwriting and the fading paper, my early notebooks are pretty much illegible now…

I learned an unbelievable amount working in the kitchens of chef Gray Kunz, Floyd Cardoz, David Bouley and Rick Moonen.

In 2003, while working for Chef Floyd by night, I also spent my mornings working for free rinsing pig intestines in a Salumeria, so I could learn how to make charcuterie.Every meticulous detail of the process—time, temperature, humidity, proper tying and hanging, good bacteria, fat content, etc–all ended up in the notebook I was using at the time.

Then one day, while trailing at another restaurant, I lost that notebook! I was devastated and vowed to never lose a notebook or a recipe again.

And thus, the idea that would grow to become Meez, was born.

In 2009 I opened a fast-casual concept called Bark Hot Dogs with a business partner. Our mission: taking the same commitment to technique we apply in fine dining to execute classic American fast food.

We quickly realized that translating technical cooking skills to a team of cooks that had never worked in a kitchen before required a methodical approach to documenting and training.

In just a single recipe like Baked Beans, a cook needed to learn to sweat an onion, cook bacon lardon, soak dried beans, clean & smoke trotters, braise, tie a proper sachet, and more–a heck of a lot, especially for someone who's never picked up a knife before.

Through this experience, the vision for meez began to expand far beyond simply capturing recipes and ideas. And thus began a new journey: aligning a love of cooking with a newfound obsession–leveraging technology to promote better cooking and have an everlasting impact on our industry.

I spent the next few years researching and soliciting friends and colleagues for input on what I was building.

And with the help of a small team, I began analyzing thousands of ingredients that would eventually become the Meez ingredient database.

After sharing the vision for meez with the founders of Aurify brands, an NYC based hospitality incubator, they believed in the product enough to help fund the project.

With a long road ahead developing Meez, I also began developing menus and creating an R&D process for Aurify, eventually also becoming the COO of Aurify.

The Meez team began full-time development of the tool in 2018. Aurify to date has been instrumental in allowing Meez to incubate within a hospitality company, allowing for constant feedback and iteration.

After 2 years of development, Meez is ready to be shared with the world. We're giving a number of hand-picked chefs, mixologists, and teams early access to Meez.