Tweet
Chef-Restaurateur
at Little Fish Brewing Company
at Little Fish Brewing Company
Little Fish Brewing Company, in Athens, Ohio, is looking to hire a chef-restaurateur to help us with our upcoming kitchen. This is a long post, but please take the time to read it all to make sure this sounds like something that would work for you. We currently operate with one full-time food truck, that runs as a separate business. That person will be leaving in November, and we are feeling that it is time to commit to our own restaurant that will be a part of the Little Fish business.
Our brewery is very committed to brewing with locally sourced ingredients, and operating as sustainably as possible. We use Ohio-grown grains in all of our beer, we purchase wind power credits for our electricity, and we are installing a solar array this spring. We also own over an acre of green space that we are transitioning into a working garden for growing beer ingredients. We would like the restaurant to jive up with this vision. The exact type of cuisine that we serve could be totally open at this point, but it’s important that the chef would share this vision with us on the sustainability front. Ideally, we’d like to see Little Fish become a true farm to table brewery and restaurant over the next few years. There’s plenty of room for kitchen-oriented gardening or even a greenhouse on our land.
We don’t really want to be a brewpub. We would like to operate a small kitchen, with a pick up window for food, to avoid the table service dynamic. So it would be more like a really cool food truck, but operated inside the building. Orders could be taken at the kitchen or at the bar. We would like the food to be a destination in its own right. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel on the cuisine, but it should be something interesting and cool, and really well done. There is no kitchen currently, so we could potentially install whatever kitchen equipment we want. Possibly a wood fired oven. We want to have good vegetarian / vegan options as well as meat options We need stuff that kids like too. Overall, we can keep the menu fairy small for simplicity’s sake.
If we had our ideal situation, we would license this project out to an entrepreneur who could operate freely and have pretty much total autonomy. However, due to legalities, it probably makes more sense to operate this under our business and have the chef be a paid employee. The reason for this is due to the Ohio liquor licensing. We are currently only allowed to sell our own beer under our license (A1-C). Having some wine available could bring in some of the folks that don’t drink beer. In order to get that license (A1-A), we need to be a fully operating restaurant. A separate business serving food in the same building is not enough to meet that requirement.
However, nothing is set in stone right not. If we find the ideal candidate, and they would really rather run this business separately from the brewery, that could be up for negotiation.
Salary and all of those things will need to be negotiated. We don’t have a number in mind yet, but we like to pay our people fairly, so that everyone on the team is happy. We do not currently have health benefits for ourselves or our employees, but that is something we would like to offer in the future.
We would like to find the right candidate soon so that we have time to conceptualize the restaurant with them, to include them in the kitchen building phase, and to hopefully transition into opening the kitchen right when our current vendor leaves.
If you are interested in this job, please send a cover letter and a resume to both sean (at) littlefishbrewing (dot com) and jimmy (at) littlefishbrewing (dot com). Tell us a little bit about what you could see working here. Also please have job references ready, we will check them during the application process.
Thank you for your time!
Sean & Jimmy
Co-Founders