Culinary Concepts Southwest emerges from the fresh, vibrant kitchen of Laura Chamberlin
Local chef and business owner Laura Chamberlin has spent a long time in professional kitchens
wondering how best to share food sustainably.
“Food is my love language,” Laura said. “That’s just the way I share.”
Soon, her company Laura Chamberlin Professional Chef, will rebrand as Culinary Concepts
Southwest to honor the ways her business has grown and the culinary experience clients can expect.
Despite her lifelong love of cooking, Laura did not intend to work in food for a living. When she was working towards becoming a veterinarian and needed a gig to get through college. Her restaurant job was supposed to pay the bills, but when it was time to decide what was next, she felt an urge to go to culinary school. After graduating, she co-founded Flagstaff restaurant and wine bar, Brix, with a classmate and his wife. She was the restaurant’s Executive Chef.
Within the restaurant’s first year, Laura was invited to cook at the James Beard Foundation and Brix made Conde Nast’s Top 99 New Restaurants in the World.
After three years with Brix, she moved on to private chef work and began working with Canyon Explorations, which led her to becoming a professional river guide for a few years. In 2016 she received a call from high altitude training facility HYPO2 requesting a menu built for athletes in search of nutritious, tasty, and quality meals. Her vision for her own brick and mortar business began to take shape.
In 2021, she bought and customized a commercial kitchen on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Street where she has since been preparing catering services, pop-up dinners, and weekly meals inspired by global flavors and local foods.
Food influenced by the world, inspired by the region
Laura jokes that when potential clients inquire about her speciality, her response is pretty simple.
“Good food,” Laura said with a laugh.
She’s created menus for clients and events with all varieties of influences — French, Italian, North African, Cuban, Japanese, Indian, Mediterranean, Mexican, and Southwestern begins to cover some of her influences. But what can always be expected of her dishes is freshness, color, and vibrance.
Her food is also a celebration of the region.
“I get inspired by working with local foods,” Laura said. “I feel like it’s a challenge to see what’s available and then build menus around that.”
Farm-to-table culinary experiences are increasingly popular, but in finicky climates like Northern Arizona, finding local produce can be especially difficult. Farmers in this high-elevation, dry climate often stick to heartier crops like kale, Laura said. But oftentimes, whether sourcing hyper-locally or more regionally, the food she finds inspires her. She points to fun ingredients like sunchokes and bok choy. Another way she gets creative is by making use for the less popular parts of vegetables, finding use of the greens of a beetroot.
“It’s a good professional challenge to figure out how to stretch the plants as much as possible,” Laura said.
Assembling a deeply sustainable kitchen
Throughout her time working in kitchens, Laura has returned to the concept of sustainability. She composts her scraps and avoids the use of single-use plastic, but to Laura, sustainability doesn’t only apply to the ways food gets to her kitchen or what happens to it after. She spends
time thinking about how the people behind the food tend to themselves.
Kitchens are notoriously difficult workplaces. Anyone with experience in the industry might be familiar with some combination of demanding work hours, hot stoves, and hotter tempers. Laura wants to provide a workplace that is cohesive, communicative, and respectful. The team works together to make sure everyone is comfortable with their workload, Laura said.
For the first years of her business she managed all her work alone, but as she fielded more requests, it became clear she needed to scale up. Over the last two and a half years, Laura began slowly building up her team. Now, the kitchen is staffed with an additional full-time
professional chef, a part-time chef, and a full-time marketer.
“I feel so fortunate to be able to do something that I love and work for myself and hopefully, provide a good work environment for other people,” Laura said.
From athletic events to weddings to weekly take home meals, her team can do it all. With about 75 events a year and 30 meal orders a week, Laura’s kitchen is busy.
As she eyes the future, she’s thinking of how to better convey what her team does. “Private Chef” and “Caterer” may be accurate words, but that doesn’t quite cover the kind of vibrant food experience her team is cultivating.
“We can do really big events, but we try to temper that with not getting burned out because we want to show up to your event excited,” Laura said. “We don’t rent out tables or chairs because we focus on the food, and we want to provide good food.”
Laura’s work is all about “happiness and community,” she said, and she feels grateful her life’s path led her to this business. This summer, her kitchen will serve up its new name, Culinary Concepts Southwest, as her team ventures forward to make meals that nourish and excite
Flagstaff locals and tourists alike.
