Laurie Gershgorn is opening a brick-and-mortar expansion of her current personal chef offerings in downtown Ossining. The organic farm-to-table eatery, Good Choice Kitchen, is slated to open at 147 Main St. in mid-August.
The restaurant will sit below four stories of apartments in a newly constructed building and will offer patrons eat-in prepared foods, juices and grab-and-go options, along with weekly customized meal plans.
Ingredients will be sourced from the more than 20 local farms and food purveyors that Cortlandt resident Gershgorn has built relationships with through her personal chef business.
While the Ossining location may be new for Gershgorn, she has a long history of cooking experience.
“I was a latchkey kid growing up in Brooklyn,” she said. “I was at the stove, at the oven, and my mother would tell me what to do over the phone, and I would make dinners.”
Still, her decision to cook professionally did not come until later in life.
Gershgorn worked as director of technical operations for MTV for more than a decade before deciding to take the off-ramp to care for her children, though she likens her work in television production to her current career.
“Prep, scheduling, pre-planning, production and showtime,” she said. “It”™s the same.”
During her time as a stay-at-home mother, Gershgorn became involved with local agriculture, nutrition and the quality of school food, which led her attend culinary school and embark on a new career path.
“I thought, I”™m an at-home mom, so let me just create my own business,” she recalled.
What started as food demonstrations at schools and local farmers markets turned into in-home cooking classes, monthly catering events and a list of eight clients whose homes she visits on a weekly basis to prepare their meals.
“As the years went by, I got busier and busier, and I started realizing I couldn”™t fulfill the need,” she said.
Gershgorn decided to open a restaurant and kitchen in Ossining not only for its centralized location on the western end of Westchester County, where most of her clients reside, but also because of its current economic climate.
“There”™s a huge push in Ossining, not only for small business, but also for green businesses,” she said.
Gershgorn will continue serving her current client base, though all meals will now be prepared in the kitchen of her new location instead of in clients”™ homes.
“Instead of coming to two to three houses per day, I now have a home base and a staff,” she said.
Gershgorn expects to hire around 16 employees once Good Choice Kitchen is up and running.
The restaurant”™s menu will change weekly and will be dictated both by in-season vegetables and her clients”™ weekly meal plan needs.
Though some might see a personal chef as a “privileged service,” Gershgorn notes that she has clients of “various socioeconomic” levels.
“It”™s not as crazy as people think,” she said, adding that customized weekly plans start at $275, which provides prepared dishes to feed a four-person family for four to six days.
Gershgorn has financed the bulk of the $200,000 build out costs through her own savings and equity in her personal chef business.
She is also crowdfunding a portion of that total through the online fundraising platform Barnraiser, with a goal to raise $20,000 by May 27.
“It”™s a pad,” she said of the target, adding that the crowdfunding campaign was also “a call of who else is in this with me.”
While more than 60 percent of that total has been reached already, Gershgorn does have “contingencies” of “local, small bank lines of credit” in place if that goal is not met.
Tarrytown resident Heather Dyer, a client of Gershgorn”™s, says her services have introduced Dyer”™s family to a wealth of new food options, including millet spring rolls, a gluten-free grain alternative that her family now requests on a weekly basis.
Gershgorn has also taught clients to “eat with the seasons,” along with providing an opportunity to support local farms.
While Gershgorn hopes to carry the success of her personal chef services into her new location, she stressed that her current client base come first.
“These are my families,” she said. “I want to get it right for them.”
