What an absolute relief it must be to know exactly what you want to do in life. To be born and immediately step foot on your career path, with unwavering certainty. That might be a bit of a dramatic way of looking at it, but for Chef Jarad Gallagher, it’s pretty much always been clear.
“You don’t get to be great at five things in life,” he says. “You have to choose one.”
For Gallagher, who helmed Chez TJ in Mountain View, where he earned and maintained a Michelin star for eight years in his tenure there, the one choice was simple. He grew up in the kitchen, imbued with a comfort in cooking. His dad, who died when Gallager was just 10 years old, was a chef as well, which set in stone a legacy to follow. What brought him from a kid in the kitchen to an executive chef, restaurant owner and vice president of culinary operations at Shashi Group in Silicon Valley? He says it sounds cliché or nostalgic, but “Cooking became really intuitive to me. My brain was wired to look at the foundation of how things are built rather than reading a recipe. So my early career was based on that as a jumping point,” he reflects.
While much of his interest in food and cooking began considerably earlier at home, his first job as a barista in Seattle at age 14 placed him in the industry. He set out to immerse himself in what the classic European chefs were doing. “The best of the best,” he says. “I wanted to work for the best French chefs. At that time they were everything ... they got to operate on a different plane. For them, it was not a question of how to drive a car, it was how to race it.”
Deep admiration for the names Thomas Keller, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay (just a few on Gallagher’s list) kept his goal alive. His time in Europe, training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and London followed by working in restaurants, was pivotal for his life experience. He staged (interned) at many Michelin three-starred restaurants across the continent, learning from the very top.
Back home, Gallagher worked around his native Seattle, then joined Restaurants Unlimited, eventually becoming senior executive chef for the multimillion-dollar company, where he managed 52 restaurants nationwide. This job is what brought him to our neck of the woods, landing in the Bay Area where he went on to earn a Michelin star at The Plumed Horse and One Market and two stars during his time at Michael Mina. Chez TJ came next, cementing Gallagher’s fine-dining career to much acclaim.
These were the kind of years that were the quintessential chef life. Crazy-long hours, city living, the quick pulse of the pursuit of excellence in the restaurant industry. After a while of getting Michelin stars, a thought kept creeping in: “‘What now?’ It actually created more pressure, more and more work. It wasn’t building personal success or happiness, or more time with my daughter. You don’t get that time back, you have to be there. So what creeped into my head was, ‘What am I doing with this [success]? I had to define what was important to me,” reflects Gallagher.
Enter the pandemic. The forced shift led Gallagher to follow that drive to define what was most important. And what came next was a little bit surprising for his fine-dining, white-tablecloth precedent.
In November 2020 he opened Smoke Point BBQ in the tiny town of San Juan Bautista (he opened a second location in Hollister in 2023), exploring the art (and challenges) of cooking over live fire. This was also Gallagher’s big leap toward slowing down. Not that opening your own restaurant is a small thing, or “slow” by any means. But the rural setting, his new home on a ranch in Hollister, more time with his family and setting his own schedule was the major shift.
However, at the same time came the opportunity to step into a parallel career with Shashi Group, the hospitality company that runs the Shashi Hotel, BROMA Restaurant, The Emerald Hour cocktail bar and Carte Blanche coffee shop in Mountain View. As vice president of culinary operations, Gallagher finds the culmination of every part of his path up to this point: utilizing his master of business administration degree (he earned one of those along the way too) plus all the positions he held at various restaurants, even his time as a barista, to oversee all culinary decisions and operations.
With this big career load, it might sound like he’s back to racking up those never-ending work hours. But the irony, or perhaps intention, is anything but.
“I spent 20 years working 100-hour weeks, but I don't do that anymore,” he says. “I work four days a week. I’m not demanded to overwork, and I don’t volunteer to. I have clear boundaries. I stay very connected to everything, I’m involved, but now I can do a lot on Zoom and I take advantage of that. And I don’t worry about stuff. I’m very confident in my ability to change and develop and I just stay focused on making the next right decisions ... That’s a very lucky position for me to be in.”
This “luck” is a testament to the Shashi Group team and Gallagher’s CEO, Dipesh Gupta. The group is not the typical Silicon Valley corporation, and has put a lot of trust into Gallagher’s vision and expertise.
“Our CEO is very passionate about the guest experience ... and I do things from an artistic perspective,” he explains. “In Silicon Valley, there is enough of a corporate environment, so there’s a huge opportunity for our customers to be removed from that where they don’t have to get stuck in that same feeling. In this circumstance, different is good. It’s very unique, to have that intent and to have people be able to see that. To see actual humans building something.”
Gallagher is also quick to give credit to his dedicated staff, including Corporate Executive Chef Aubree Arndt, who heads up BROMA and is the yin to his yang in the kitchen. “I have unbelievable people that work with me, that have been with me for a very long time. I don’t penny-pinch, I have a clear understanding of the turnover and the value of those relationships, so I pay people more.”
That valuing of relationships extends into ingredient sourcing as well. Having been in the industry for so long, Gallagher can speak to the downfalls of the typical, large-scale food distribution systems. “There’s a lot of unnecessary distribution that drives quality down. It’s inevitable. But to become a priority with the growers and purveyors, you have to find a way to connect. It’s all about the connections and relationships. The story also comes from the beginning; it comes as a partnership and creates a closeness. And then it leads to a purpose for the customers,” he says.
We customers will have a bit more purpose in planning a visit to Mountain View in 2025. Gallagher is launching a new dining concept at the hotel, which will be called Beltare, a loose translation for “beautiful earth” in French. The fine-dining, multimillion-dollar project will be a spacious, opulent, luxurious restaurant highlighting a tasting menu and a focus on wine. It will be a curated experience, designed to be different from the norm. Not a single electronic or digital device will be apparent in the space, avoiding any interruptions to the immersive dining they hope to create.
“It will be a full engagement of community, of dining, of people,” explains Gallagher. “I have a desire to operate on that fine-dining level, at the tip of the spear. I still have something to offer in that realm, so it’s not a fool's errand.”
You might be asking yourself, “Does this guy ever sleep?” It is pretty astonishing how driven yet balanced he seems to be in his life’s work. But perhaps that is the key: It is his life, and it is his art. He finds inspiration in everything.
“Some come in my dreams. It sounds whimsical but it’s true. We have a salad on the menu that literally came as a full picture in my dream. There’s something intuitive but it leads to a foundation.” And if anything can be gleaned from Chef Gallagher’s story, it is to trust that intuition.
