Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 10 - March 11, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................8
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Huber’s Hiccups..................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals............................. 4,6,7
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Partly
Cloudy
57˚/44˚
Saturday
Sunny
61˚/47˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
61˚/50˚
Lawndale Tribune
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Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
SoFi Stadium Helps Celebrate
Read Across America Day
SoFi Stadium employees took part in Read Across America Day to help South Bay students. They were happy to virtually participate by reading to kids in our local elementary schools. Photo courtesy SoFi Stadium.
Jackson Kalb Nourishes the
Soul with his Delicious Food
By Kiersten Vannest
Mélisse, Alinea, Joël Robuchon, Houston’s
Restaurant with Hillstone Group, Union Square
Cafe, Factory Kitchen. For foodies, these names
will all sound familiar as some of the best
restaurants in America. For one El Segundo
resident, they were his training grounds.
Jackson Kalb started his culinary journey
at the young age of eleven. “I got sick with
something like mono, where I was bedridden
for a while,” says Kalb. To pass the time,
he watched the Food Network. He watched
it, learned from it, and when he got better,
he made a complicated six-course meal for
his friends and family, his first foray into
fine dining.
As his interest in cooking grew over the
next couple of years, he started and ran his
own catering business. With no family or
connections to the culinary world, he explored
his own abilities for anyone who was willing
to taste them at events and parties.
“Really anyone who wanted to give me
twenty bucks to make some food, it was
mostly just family friends,” he laughs. At one
of these parties, a guest asked him if he’d
like to meet the owner of a restaurant. Wanting
the opportunity to look in at a restaurant
and see how that world works, he agreed.
At age thirteen, he showed up at Mélisse,
a Michelin two-star institution, thinking he
would speak with the owner for a bit and
maybe watch some practices. When the owner
greeted him, his first remark was, “Why are
you wearing shorts? You’re working today.”
After a quick panic call to his mom to bring
him more professional clothes, they threw
Jackson into the current, assigning his first
task to be deboning rabbit confit. “Rabbits
have very teeny tiny bones. It’s a very tedious
process,” he explains.
Kalb continued to work at Mélisse after
school for the rest of middle and high school.
“It wasn’t a paid gig,” he says, “It was an
apprenticeship. I was there of my own accord
because I wanted to be there.”
Toward the end of his high school years,
he went to work for three Michelin-star restaurant
Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. Here
about nourishment, and part of nourishing
yourself is nourishing the soul,” he says. In
other words, consuming food is about more
than just getting enough calories to go about
the rest of your day. For him, this comfort and
nourishment looked like a fresh plate of pasta.
Upon his return, he got a job as the Chef
de cuisine at Factory Kitchen, all the while
planning out a future in which he operated
his own Italian restaurant. After a very intense
experience working for Factory Kitchen
and an opportunity to open a restaurant for
someone else fell through, Kalb resolved that
he was ready to be his own boss.
“So we tried the fundraising thing, and let
me tell you, it is brutal,” says Kalb. He and
his business partner (and now fiancée), Melissa
Saka, raised money for eleven months, and
at the end of month ten, had exactly zero
dollars. Finally, someone he’d cooked for a
few times who was blown away by the food
decided to get his group together and invest
$40,000 into Jackson’s idea. “Forty thousand
dollars may sound like a lot of money, and
I can tell you, restaurants are expensive,” he
says, adding that this amount might cover half
the kitchen equipment in a new restaurant.
Splitting their time between Santa Monica
and Long Beach, they settled on El Segundo
as the halfway point and lucked into their
current spot. “I believe this of anyone with
any sort of success in any magnitude… teeny
tiny, huge, massive… there has to be a stroke
of luck,” Jackson says. The landlord was not
ready to lease to someone who was young
and had little money or experience. But
he found himself at a crossroads. Nearing
graduation, he found himself trying to decide
between going to culinary school or trying
to get into college to learn the business side
of restaurants.
Very luckily, he says, he got into Cornell
University’s hospitality program, which he
didn’t know at the time was ranked number
one for that field. While there, he worked for
three Michelin-star rated Chicago restaurant,
Alinea.
After graduating, Kalb went to what he
calls “restaurant boot camp”, or working for
Hillstone Restaurant Group. The rigorous
nature of this company enabled him to learn
how a well-run restaurant business looks.
After about two years of this experience, he
knew he wanted to open his own restaurant.
So he took what money he had and booked
himself a one-way ticket to Italy.
For his four months in Italy (until he ran
out of money, he jokes), he picked up jobs
here and there in multiple kitchens, learning
how they treat the dining experience and
process their food. “Their restaurants are See Jackson Kalb, page 5