Meet Grant Buchanan of GB Culinary in Boulder County

Today we’d like to introduce you to Grant Buchanan.

Grant, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
It all started the typical way a cook starts in this business, a dishwasher. I needed a job and they needed someone to wash dishes. From there, a few people called out of their shifts and I stepped in to help where needed and my dishwashing job turned into a line cook job pretty quickly. I roamed from kitchen to kitchen for a few years just trying to absorb everything I could and ended up working in a very unique kitchen in close proximity to a great chef who became my first mentor. After some time watching and learning from him, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to become the best I could, it was time for me to take it seriously and go where I thought I had the best chance… France. I packed my bags and went to Paris to live, work, and further my education with absolutely no knowledge of the language outside of “kitchen French.” Upon returning to the states, I worked around the best French restaurants I could find in Atlanta and ended up taking a catering job on a whim. While it wasn’t my ideal way of catering, it taught me an enormous amount about the industry and little did I know a solid foundation for what would one day become GB Culinary. Being unhappy in that position, I decided to make a change and headed for the high Rockies. Once here, I worked my way through some kitchens until I met my wife (also a hospitality industry lifer) and decided to give Boulder a shot. While in between jobs, I started to do some private dinners and small events. Those events became bigger and bigger until we were catering jobs all over the Front Range within a year. It is then that my wife and I decided if we were going to make a business of this we would only be happy doing it our way. So, we bought a small acreage farm and began building GB Culinary from the dirt up.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I don’t think any business owner can tell you its been a smooth road… at least not with a straight face. Between the learning curves and the growing pains in the catering business coupled with the even larger learning curves and even larger growing pains learning to operate an organic farm, it was never easy. We lost crops over things that were easily preventable… we just didn’t know any better. Learning to create systems in a catering world when really all I knew was the restaurant business was a hurdle I never could have expected. Not only being able to cook in the middle of a field with no electricity or water but being able to do it week in and week out was never something I imagined having to learn. All of the ups and downs were hard but educational.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about GB Culinary – what should we know?
We are a unique company in the catering world. We don’t strive to be the biggest, land the largest client, host the biggest event or pump out the most meals. We work hard to create relationships within our industry that allow us to work with other like-minded individuals, groups, and companies to create events and gatherings that promote values and ideals we hold close to the heart – sustainability, transparency, creativity, and integrity. We are a full-service catering company that operates with the idea if we don’t already make it we will figure out how to. We cook from scratch in all levels of our menus and source as much as we can from our own farm. If there is something we don’t raise or grow, we source them from our closest neighbors. We are not a “farm to table” catering company, we are a farmer and a chef who want to feed people the only way we know how – clean and honest. As the owner of the company, I am most proud of my staff who hold true to what people know GB Culinary for which is honoring our word. When we say we will do something we do, and we do it well.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Integrity. From doing what we say to be transparent in our approach to the whole process of throwing an event. It has been a huge reason we have been successful and our clients and partners return to work with us.

Contact Info:

• Address: 13810 N. 115th St.
  Longmont, CO 80504
• Website: www.gbculinary.com
• Phone: 7205262039
• Email: events@gbculinary.com
• Instagram: gbculinary
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gbculinary/

Image Credit:
@fromthehipphoto, @poppyandco, @thefoxes

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