The CPA to Baker to CFO Pipeline

My ‘why’ behind Tarragon is more than a decade in the making. It all comes back to good food.

Back in 2016, I felt the pull to dedicate my energy to interesting and impactful work in food, so I started experimenting, bit by bit, from a few different angles:

• Running a weekly Sunday supper club out of my kitchen for friends + friends of friends
• Overseeing finances on the board of my neighborhood farmers market in Petworth, DC
• Taking sustainable farming courses (quickly learned–not a farmer!)
• Preparing the taxes for my friends’ coffee roasting business, Lost Sock Roasters
• Staging as an AM prep cook at a Spanish dive bar and gastropub, Bar Pilar

At the time, I was working at the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, putting my data, CPA, and finance skills to use. After testing the waters at Bar Pilar, I fell for the pace of the kitchen. In 2018, I made the leap, quitting consulting to become a baker at Call Your Mother Deli in DC. Hello 3am shifts!

Many babka, bagels, and black and white cookies later… by 2020, it was clear Call Your Mother was on a path to grow. The team needed someone who could speak kitchen ops and finance.

They tapped me for the role of “Director of Numbers / Pretty Good Baker” (yes, my real title). I started small, splitting time between baking and spreadsheets, before moving full-time into the CFO role and helping scale the business from one location to 13 by 2023.

The CFO role took me further away from the food, but straight into the problems holding restaurants back.

I tackled sexy problems like food waste and menu engineering, but also unsexy problems like negotiating credit card interchange with our POS, insurance bundling, inventory database upkeep, and month-end close. Clearing these hidden operational and financial blockers let the team truly care for the food and guests.

I left Call Your Mother in 2023 for an MBA at MIT. This time, I skipped starting small. I jumped in feet first with Tarragon to focus on a problem I had lived firsthand, with the right people, at the right time.

After a decade in and around restaurants, I keep coming back to the same three paradoxes.

Restaurants are:

1. Massive value creators, but meager profit takers.
2. Data rich, but insight poor.
3. Generous with guests, but time starved themselves.

We’re fired up about how we’ve been solving each of these at Tarragon.

All in service of good food and the people who make it happen.