Meet John Eisensmith

We recently connected with John Eisensmith and have shared our conversation below.

John, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.

My confidence and self-esteem come from a life of setting super high goals, then going after them, getting feedback to do it better the next time (whether I achieved them or not), and recognizing how far I’ve come regardless of the outcome. As a kid, I was lucky to be in Boy Scouts and I had one pivotal hike that, in the first half, I was complaining, hating it, and just being negative about how hard it was. A few things happened during that hike that forever changed my outlook. First, I realized that I wasn’t going home and the only way out was to keep walking. And I could walk happy or I could walk mad, but it was going to walk regardless. So why not look at the things I can enjoy and enjoy them and not focus on the hard parts because they will be hard no matter what. The second thing is I amazed myself with what I could accomplish. One evening when we were setting up for camp, we looked at the map and out across the outlook we were camping on and saw the various mountains we were going to climb in the next few days, a little daunting of an idea to a chubby 15-year-old who was on his first full-pack hike. But then the amazement came when, a few days later, we were on top of those mountains, looking back, we could clearly see the mountain we just were on top of a few days ago. I’ll never forget that feeling of being amazed at how just one careful, sweaty, hard step at a time brought us over literal mountains. It was a paradigm-shifting experience for sure.

I then took that approach and attitude into my career and started as a kid from nowhere, rose to the top of kitchen after kitchen, worked my way into ownership of multiple restaurants, and then into my own business. I learned all the way and my biggest thing has always been, “where can I improve?” I passionately look for improvement and work hard, one step at a time, in all aspect of my career to continually improve. And after years and years of creating dish after dish (sometimes in the best restaurants of major cities and for billionaires) and pushing for feedback, I have grown my confidence in my ability to create and execute delicious food from whatever I can dream up with ever-increasing skill. As I transitioned to a full-time culinary teacher, I also sought feedback on my teaching style until I also got consistent feedback on how much my style, not just my knowledge, has helped people.

Confidence comes from the experience of simply doing, being willing to make mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes to grow and improve without letting the ego hold you back. Self-confidence comes from taking that learned experience and putting it into action day in and day out while remembering how far you’ve come and looking ahead to how much you can still grow to never think you’ve “arrived”. life is all about continual improvement and helping others. I remember someone teaching me how to hold a knife, and now I pass that knowledge along and add my learned experience to the lesson while looking to learn more myself. I know what I know but I’m always looking to learn more!

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I started cooking when I was 15 and realized quickly that I wanted to do this as a career because every day I was super excited to go cook and school was easy and pretty boring for me. I thought if I wanted to do this as a career, I wanted to go to the best culinary school in the country. I found The Culinary Institute of America and went there straight out of high school, cooking in restaurants all during high school and in college. After entering the CIA, I had my mind opened to all the amazing experiences, exciting challenges, and depth of understanding on so many levels that fine dining had to offer and I was hooked!

I did my internship in Duck, NC at a 4-star restaurant (Bluepoint Bar and Grille) and upon graduating, moved to South Beach Miami to work at Wish Restaurant in The Hotel in the heart of South Beach. I rose to become the “go-to” guy in that kitchen before moving to Nantucket, MA to continue to expand my experience. Before leaving Miami my chef, Michael Bloise, got invited to cook at The James Beard House and told me that nowhere I was in the world, I was coming. In Nov. 2006, he flew me to NYC to be his sous chef for the weekend for his dinner at the historic house. Certainly a highlight of my career and one of the reasons I refer to Miami as my “finishing”; because things were simply right or not and there was no in-between and I was doing it on the biggest of stages…

I knew I wanted to own my own restaurant and in Nantucket, after getting on some of the world’s largest stages in the kitchen, I wanted to do every other restaurant job as my primary job, so I truly “knew” what everyone did. During my 4 years there, I was a sous chef, bartender, bar back, extreme fine dining, and short order server, and began my own private chef business and catering company doing parties for the uber-wealthy (Johnson and Johnson’s and Halmi’s of the Hallmark channel among others) before taking over a restaurant with a new owner as the GM/Executive Chef and flipping it into another concept.

I left the island in 2009 and moved to Durham to work with my best friend from day 1 of culinary school who had just opened his new restaurant, Revolution. I quickly topped out there and found my way to Six Plates Wine Bar as their new Executive Chef. The owner and I clicked and then after getting a write-up in the NY Times, we started blowing up! I began working my way into ownership, opening 2 other restaurants (Mattie B’s Public House and Black Twig Cider House) before it was time for me to do my own thing as my partner and I were going in different directions. I had planned a slow back away from my restaurant group but on the day we told the staff I was leaving, my mom died out of the blue. Immediately, I had much bigger priorities and it turned into a mic drop but also gave me a paradigm shift and reminder of what’s important. I took time off and realized that what I loved about food and cooking was helping others have a good life. I had cooked all the fancy food in the big places and had multiple restaurants under me… But happiness and love were always at the heart of it… I also realized through cooking dinner parties for my friends (one of my best ways to share and show love), that even people in the industry didn’t understand the fundamentals of cooking. I looked at how the CIA taught professionals and began building what would become The Essential Series to teach home cooks the same way they teach professionals, but designed for home cooks so they could get the joy and confidence the pros enjoy, but with each and every meal in their own home.

I consolidated and redesigned the Assoc. Program at The Culinary Institute of America to teach home cooks the fundamentals of food and cooking to home cooks, in 12 hours, so they can feel comfortable and confident in the kitchen cooking their food their way seasoned to their tastes. In addition, to truly teach people about food, I have to teach them about themselves because each individual person’s “stuff” comes out in their food. So to cook the way you want, you have to work on yourself and I began teaching that too with inspirational speaking to help folks beyond the kitchen. Because the same principles that you use to adjust yourself and your food in the kitchen, you can use to adjust yourself outside of the kitchen. Thus my speaking career was born! Now I inspire and educate in and out of the kitchen to help others have a more meaningful, passionate, purposeful, and delicious life in any way that fits their needs!

I began Season to Taste in 2019 and have been changing how people look at their food and cooking, and their lives, ever since… Creating The Essential Series and getting to see the change that occurs in each and every cohort that comes through my kitchen has been the greatest joy of my career! I open up food and cooking to people while giving them the knowledge and ideologies to feel confident and comfortable cooking whatever they want, with ever-increasing skill! And to enjoy their lives on a deeper, more meaningful level by truly knowing what goes into food and thus gaining a greater appreciation of something they have to do 3 times a day…

And because my goal was to give this life-changing information and skills to folks who need it the most and can’t pay for it, through my video series (I filmed the entire Essential Series), I am now offering it to anyone who can’t afford it for Free! You can’t take it with you and to better help the world, I’ll gladly share it with anyone! That’s how I help beyond me! Thanks for helping share my story! 😀

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Focusing on the foundations, Determination, and Optimism.

Whatever you are doing or want to do, there are always fundamental skills and knowledge that you must master to understand and perform on the high end. Don’t decree or grumble with it, embrace it. Experience is the best teacher and you can read and think all day about something, but at some point, you have to go do it, make the mistakes, learn from them, and grow. Focusing on the foundations and getting those down allows you to grow with confidence.

Determination is possibly the most important because anything you do, unless you happen to be truly naturally talented in an area, will take so much longer than you ever thought possible. This is true because at the beginning of any pursuit, you are truly ignorant, you don’t know what you don’t know and more foundations will arise that you must master before you can take the next step.

Here’s where optimism comes into play. Know that you will overcome, learn, improve, and succeed! As long as you are still doing it, you haven’t failed by definition. Having optimism allows you to pick yourself back up time and time again whenever things get tough! If anyone ever looked at the percentages of businesses that fail (90%+), they’d never start one. If you want to do your own thing, you have to know why you want to do it, have a passion for it, learn whatever you need, and not give up! If I have learned anything in business, you can have all the plans you want, but then you put them into play and move and adjust. That’s why you have a mission, not a perfect plan because life gives you more curves than you could ever guess. Stay true to your values and mission, learn whatever you need to learn, stay driving, and keep your head up because you are tough and you’ll make it through!

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am always looking to find folks moving in the same direction to help get the word out. Most people think learning to cook is done one recipe at a time. In doing it through basic knowledge, techniques, and skills, you can get a huge leap forward in understanding, confidence, and freedom in the kitchen. I like to say learning to cook by recipes is like living your whole life on turn-by-turn directions and never looking up. Instead, I show them around the town, show them every place they can visit, and I also teach folks how to drive. That way with every dish they make, they feel more comfortable, but can also just put something together and it’ll be great. When you focus on the fundamentals, there’s no way the end result can’t be good!

I love partnering with non-profits, schools of all varieties, and with any tech companies looking to help get the message out. And if any institutions are looking for how to drive passion and purpose in their team, I became an inspirational speaker to broaden my ability to help beyond the kitchen. Because when you really want to control your food, you need to control your self and that is where the individual-level stuff comes out. When I realized that folks were taking away so much more than just good food from my classes, I developed my Speaking abilities to stretch beyond the kitchen! I’d love to inspire your team as well!

Anyone looking to connect can reach out via email ([email protected]) or through the website www.SeasontoTasteNC.com.

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