![]() Sourcing sustainable ingredients has been a critical step in actualizing his vision ingredients are vetted to validate labels like fair-trade and organic. Kent’s educational background in business and marketing, food science, and culinary arts, along with his working knowledge of food systems and restaurant supply chains, makes him uniquely qualified to build and grow an environmentally conscious and community-minded business. ![]() It’s all on the table.”Ĭhef Bradford Kent’s commitment to only sourcing sustainable ingredients means that he has over 20 different purveyors. “I have Olio Downtown, I have this new restaurant, and I have my house - that’s all that I got. And no, I did not get independently wealthy,” he says. Yes, I’m a co-founder, but I’m not the major shareholder of this company. “I didn’t do as well with Blaze as people would think. But Kent isn’t some millionaire pursuing a risky passion project because he can stomach a loss - he’s got skin in the game. Given Kent’s success as the chef-owner of Neapolitan pizzeria Olio inside Downtown’s Grand Central Market and his role as the co-founder and chief culinary officer of national chain Blaze Pizza, critics can easily poke holes in his idealism. The restaurant is committed to social, environmental, and financial sustainability - an ambitious triple-bottom-line approach that Kent hopes to prove over time and replicate internationally through partnerships with universities. When Bagel+Slice opens this Thursday, May 12, serving good food is just the start. But the college’s extensive application process to find restaurant tenants that met its rigorous community investment standards, which were set in place to combat the gentrification of the area, sparked a shift in his thinking about what it meant to run a restaurant dedicated to serving its community. Chef Bradford Kent didn’t see beyond his own ambitions when he initially applied to become a tenant of the 1,300-square-foot space at Oxy Arts, a commercial building in Highland Park owned by Occidental College dedicated to community-based arts programming.
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