When Dara Lybuinsky began working as a private chef, she had no idea what it would grow into. In fact, at the time, she operated entirely as a business of one. But today Dara oversees a team of 30+ chefs and servers as they dish out five-star meals for Washington D.C.’s rich and famous. As the founder of a personal chef and catering business called Nourish Culinary, Dara is a world away from where she began her career.
Dara studied communications and political science in college, and scored an enviable gig soon after graduation. She told us, “I got my dream job as a publicist at Time Magazine. I was doing red carpets, getting the editors on the talking head news shows every week. One year in, and I had thought I had arrived.”
So how exactly did she end up here? To find out, co-hosts Claudia Saric and Spencer Michiel invited Dara to drop by for the most recent episode of So You Want To Run a Restaurant.
Red Carpet Rollout
On the surface, it seemed Dara was well on her way to a great career in media. But then a funny thing happened. Dara recalled, “I looked around and I realized how much I hated it and how toxic the work environment was.”
The days were long and the job seemed like an increasingly poor fit for Dara. But even in the midst of her dissatisfaction with her career, Dara had a happy place. She told us that “I would go home and cook until midnight and make food for all my neighbors.”
As she began to dread the long days and look forward to those evenings in the kitchen, she couldn’t escape the obvious. She recalled that “it really became a nagging notion that maybe I should be one of those career changers that you always hear about.”
Time for a Change
Dara went from cooking for her neighbors after work to attending culinary school at night. Then in 2008, just as she was wrapping up her classes, she was laid off by her PR firm. Suddenly, that nagging notion became an immediate reality. As Dara phrased it, “The universe forced me out on my own and I decided to give it a go.”
Her first stop was a high-intensity kitchen in the heart of Manhattan. Dara explained, “I went into restaurants at that time because I knew it was something that I needed to experience.”
For Dara, this would be a quick but educational stop on the way to her own business. As she told us, “I always knew in the back of my mind that I would try to pursue a different part of the food industry, so I started out in some kitchens throughout the city, but with a plan for making my way out of that situation at some point.”
Five Takeaways From Our Chat With Dara
That point came pretty quickly. It was less than a year actually. Read on to find out why, and catch a few more highlights from our conversation with Dara.
1. Finding a Place in The Industry
One of the reasons Dara chose the path she did was because she loved cooking, but she didn’t necessarily love the lifestyle of the typical restaurant pro.
“I didn't want to go out with my colleagues drinking or partying,” she explained. “I got off late at night and I wanted to go home, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning.”
Anybody who has ever spent time in the food service business can tell you that’s probably not an option, especially when you’re working in a deeply competitive, high-pressure setting like the New York City restaurant scene. But Dara found the perfect outlet.
“I was lucky enough to have a friend of a friend who was a private chef,” Dara recalled. “She offered me an opportunity to come and spend a couple days with her working for her client.”
2. Going Private
The experience opened Dara up to a whole new world of possibilities. It also gave her an appreciation for the unique pressures that come with this niche area of food service. It was a very different environment than what she experienced during her one-year restaurant crash course. But that’s not to say it wasn’t demanding.
“The stakes were high, in a very different kind of way. It was in somebody's very beautiful home, and often cooking for a family,” she explained. “But I was used to cooking for my own family so it was a very natural fit.”
In fact, working alongside a personal chef was the perfect outlet for Dara’s twin backgrounds in media and cooking. She explained, “Being in New York at the time was really exciting. I was meeting all kinds of people through her. It was the perfect coming together of my new food world and my media past.”
3. Paying Dues
Turning one moment of epiphany into a thriving business doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, said Dara, she had to go through what you might call a period of initiation first.
“Food media, especially in New York, is a very tight-knit club. There's not a lot of work and there are just a few big players that do a lot of the bigger stuff,” Dara explained. “At first, it was really about trying to get in with them, so I did a lot of work for free in the beginning.”
That attitude would soon pay off. Before long, Dara was cooking at swanky gigs with guests like Lorne Michaels and Eli Manning. And even more than that, she was cooking in private homes, building long-term relationships with busy, affluent families. And that’s where Dara remained until 2014. Then, when she became pregnant with her first daughter, she decided to return to her roots.
4. Flying Solo
“I'm from the D.C. area originally. My family's here. I knew I wanted to raise my family here,” Dara explained. “So it was always in the cards to move back to this area.”
All those relationships Dara worked so hard to nurture in New York began paying dividends back home. She explained, “I was very fortunate to have some wonderful clients in New York who had connections in D.C. They helped introduce me and made that transition a little bit smoother.”
As Dara told us, she had plenty of work in those first days on her own. But after a while, it did start to get a bit lonely. Dara missed the teamwork and camaraderie of working alongside other people who loved cooking and hospitality as much as she did. Not only that, but she was beginning to receive more work inquiries than she could handle on her own.
“I was tired of working by myself,” she told us. “Then over time, after turning clients away and turning business away, I thought, ‘What if I could bring on a contractor and teach them a little bit about how I like to do things and make this into a company?’”
5. Allowing the Business To Grow
That turned out to be a pretty solid idea. Dara called it the genesis of Nourish Culinary. So she brought on two contractors. Now, instead of turning down work, she was expanding her own reach. She started to see the possibilities. Then in 2020, the pandemic struck. While restaurants were shutting down all around her, Dara’s business went into overdrive.
“When COVID started, I was personally cooking for about eight families,” Dara explained. “Then everybody went home. But they still wanted meals, especially when they were ready to let people back into their homes again.”
So the opportunity to grow her business naturally presented itself. But making the leap from paying contractors to hiring full-time employees also required Dara to adjust her thinking. As she told us, “Very slowly, I started saying ‘we’, instead of ‘I.’ I started letting go a little bit. I started to trust other people and focused on teaching other people to grow.”
Get the Right Tech To Grow Your Operation
As the people around her grew, Dara’s operation grew too. For the full story on how Dara grew that business from a solo operation with a few contractors to a multi-front catering, cooking, and teaching business with a few dozen full-time employees, check out the whole episode above.
For all the tools and tech you’ll need to start or grow your business, schedule your free, personalized consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech experts and we’ll figure it out together.
