Recipe for Success, Your Culinary Place Turns Edible Dreams into Reality
Imagine any headache or heartburn that a restaurateur endures in bringing a culinary concept to life—and you can safely bet that Chef Gordon Lippe has first-hand experience getting over it.
After graduating from the Lincoln Culinary Institute in West Palm Beach, Lippe learned about fine dining and hospitality the Ritz-Carlton way. He sold his first Sarasota business, the catering company Gordon’s Gourmet, to take a job as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s food and beverage director (and yes, he’s met both Barack Obama and Joe Biden). Then an irresistible opportunity arose back in Florida: The James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa wanted to develop a specialized nutrition program for its spinal cord injury unit.
“They didn’t need someone like me; they literally needed me,” Lippe says, “because I was someone who was going to go in, fight through the system, and make what I knew could be made.” Such as a hamburger recipe that’s nutritionally complete, completely delicious, and safe for a patient who can chew and swallow only with great difficulty. Lippe spent three years innovating at the Tampa VA, then decided to reclaim the commute time, bringing his skill and prodigious drive back home to Sarasota. It’s no coincidence that the Lakehouse West Retirement Estate started winning first place in the Herald-Tribune’s Sarasota Readers’ Choice awards when Lippe served as culinary director.
Several years ago, Lippe was determining where to steer his remarkable career trajectory. For the first time in his life, he found that his next move wasn’t chasing him down for a job interview. Should Lippe get back into high-end catering, for which Sarasota already knew and loved him? Or should he liquidate his well-appointed commercial kitchen in Gulf Gate and reinvent?
Lippe vividly remembers mulling this over with Malin Parker, executive chef and owner of the neighboring Screaming Goat Taqueria. Forget a light bulb—the floodlights switched on when Parker asked the simple question, “Have you thought about renting your kitchen out?”
“When he said that, something very odd happened. You know how, usually not in very good times, they say you see your life flashing before your eyes? Well, this was a weird sensation like that. Remember when you were a kid in school, doodling in your textbook? You’d draw, say, a little stick man in a sailboat on one page, then you’d draw it a little differently on the next pages, and then you’d flip through it and look at the picture move.
“That is exactly what happened. It was as if someone took that flipbook and showed me exactly where I could take this company.”
The company he’s referring to is Your Culinary Place (YCP), Lippe’s full-service commissary kitchen, ghost kitchen host, and culinary business incubator that currently occupies more than 4,000 square feet in Gulf Gate.
“Your Culinary Place essentially eliminates the food business’s top four barriers to entry, which are also the top contributors to a 95% attrition rate within three years,” Lippe says. “Those are the need for a ton of capital; the need to sign a long, expensive, personally guaranteed lease; the build-out; and the equipment costs.”
The final page of Lippe’s flipbook vision lands on his retirement, turning YCP over as a booming, 150-store, publicly traded national franchise to his daughter, Larissa (who, at 18, already possesses her dad’s entrepreneurial spirit). That’s not coming for at least 20 years, Lippe says, but you can probably guess what the flipbook page for YCP’s one-year anniversary failed to illustrate: a pandemic.
Lippe had to scrap YCP’s first birthday bash slated for March 15, 2020—a food truck rally and indoor farmers’ market. Within three months, YCP’s portfolio of 26 active clients was crushed down to seven businesses as the hospitality industry reeled. But over the ensuing year, as the industry adapted and fought to survive, YCP surpassed 50 active clients and today serves between 25 to 55 businesses in a given month.
“What’s really been cool is to see the change in not just the business but also in me,” Lippe says. He acknowledges that he launched YCP with the motives and aspirations of “any good capitalist,” measuring his business’ success by his clients’ success.
“I’ve always known that if they win, I win. But COVID showed me there’s a step beyond that,” Lippe says. “COVID showed me that, no matter what, I had to stay open through all of this, whatever I had to do, because it was no longer about me. It was me and all the other businesses attached to me. I could have affected 100 to 300 people throughout this community— business owners, their employees, families, and everything—just by closing my doors.”
That page certainly didn’t show up anywhere in Lippe’s flipbook, either. He’s vowed he’ll never see it happen.
“And by taking that attitude—really shifting it to doing whatever I can to make sure my clients win in everything they do—I get to set the whole attitude here from the top,” Lippe says. “This is about the community of people who are here, working, and succeeding.”
>Your Culinary Place: 6592 Superior Ave, Sarasota; 941-922-9222; yourculinaryplace.com
What Is a Ghost Kitchen?
Instead of a dedicated brick-and-mortar operation, ghost kitchens leverage shared culinary spaces (such as the commissary kitchens at Your Culinary Place in South Sarasota) to realize their culinary brands. Also known as “virtual kitchens,” “dark kitchens,” and “cloud kitchens,” ghost kitchens may well present a crystal ball for the restaurant industry’s future in a post-pandemic world. At the pandemic’s onset, research by Euromonitor counted more than 1,500 ghost kitchens in the United States and predicted the ghost kitchen movement could grow to a $1 trillion global market.
With the ubiquity of delivery apps and the popularity of restaurant “pop-ups” and “kitchen takeover” events, ghost kitchens thrive on low overhead and the freedom to focus on their products. Have you seen any of these local “ghosts” lately? Zoinks!
Tralia
Anthony Petralia’s Italian-inspired concept specializing in “Detroit-style” deep-dish pizzas has been fired up for two years. With a storefront as Petralia’s ultimate goal, his pizzas are available for takeout on Saturday nights via the Tock reservation app. You can also discover a rotating Tralia menu on Sundays and Mondays at the 99 Bottles taproom in downtown Sarasota.
Rokkin Ramen
Another Petralia creation, Rokkin Ramen can be found at 99 Bottles as well. After two days of cheesy, doughy self indulgence, by Tuesday night perhaps you’ll be ready to tuck into bowl of handmade noodles or nibble on a savory morsel of dim sum. Petralia developed his ramen recipe in the kitchen at Seabar; when Seabar closed, he took advantage of ghost kitchen agility to continue serving hungry locals bowls of good, steaming, slurpy stuff.
99 Bottles’ NY Bagel Brunch
Taproom proprietor Mark Tuchman heard Sarasota’s persistent cry for an authentic New York bagel—and 99 Bottles has finally answered the call with its NY Bagel Brunch. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays through Sundays, taproom patrons can sink their teeth into the real deal. Parbaked and flash-frozen in New York, shipped to Sarasota, and finished in the oven at 99 Bottles, the bagels come in varieties from “plain” to “everything” and everything in between. Enjoy one slathered in schmear with your breakfast beverage of choice, or carry out a sackful to become the hero of mornings at home, the office, or your next “BYO” affair.
>99 Bottles: 1445 2nd St, Sarasota; 941-487-7874; 99bottles.net
