Chef Chad Welch is an American Culinary Federation Certified Executive Chef and Certified Culinary Administrator, a Jacques Pépin Foundation ambassador, and the executive chef with The Urban Stillhouse, an elevated dining concept with locations in St. Petersburg, Florida and Somerset, Kentucky. Horse Soldier bourbon bottles are formed with steel from the World Trade Center.

He did not plan to become a chef. A Navy paperwork error put him in the galley instead of the engine room in 1992, scaling Armed Forces recipe cards to 5,000 portions aboard the USS America aircraft carrier, cutting frozen Cornish game hens on a band saw on his first day at sea, and cooking through storms that sent equipment crashing across the kitchen floor.

• What Navy galley cooking actually teaches about systems, scale, and pressure before culinary school
• Why the shift from scratch kitchens to convenience products cost the industry a generation of skill
• How the pre-Google era of memorization and mentorship built a different kind of chef, and what that means for anyone training today

André Natera and Chad Welch cover his first post-Navy restaurant job doing scratch pub cooking, his Mexican food upbringing and deliberate choice not to cook it professionally, the classic versus molecular cooking debate, and his work with the Jacques Pépin Foundation. The episode closes with the Horse Soldier Bourbon origin story and career advice from a chef whose entire path began by accident.

This episode is sponsored by Rational USA. Learn more at https://rationalusa.com

Guest

• Chad Welch on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/handthatfeeds/
• The Urban Stillhouse St. Pete → https://www.instagram.com/urbanstillhousestpete/
• The Urban Stillhouse Somerset → https://www.instagram.com/urbanstillhousesomerset/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/