Chef Brad Kent of Bagel + Slice: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became a Chef

An Interview With Vicky Colas

If you have a good idea and believe in it, then do it! My last good idea turned into a 350 unit restaurant chain that is still growing.

As part of our series about the lessons from influential ‘TasteMakers’, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Chef Brad Kent.

Chef Brad Kent’s life has literally come full circle, as he brings a lifetime of culinary education to his new Los Angeles restaurant Bagel + Slice. At the age of seven, Brad started cooking, gardening and learning about how food is grown. His original concept, a bagel and pizza shop, was inspired by his Jewish, New Jersey deli-owning grandfather. Bagel + Slice is located in Brad’s treasured neighborhood of Highland Park, California just steps from the campus of Occidental College, with whom the restaurant has a relationship that is mutually beneficial. After college Brad attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in New York where he honed his technical skills and simultaneously apprenticed with two of America’s pre-eminent, award-winning chefs; Charlie Palmer at Aureole and Joachim Splichal at Patina.

In 2007, Brad headed west where he established the first mobile, wood-fired pizza business, “Farmer’s Market Pizza.” His pizza passion and expertise culminated with the opening of the critically acclaimed Olio Wood Fired Pizzeria in Los Angeles in 2010. Ranked as one of the “Top-10 Destination Worthy Pizzas” by Zagat, Olio Pizza is currently located in Downtown L.A.’s beloved Grand Central Market. Taking pizza to the next level, Brad and his co-founders launched Blaze Pizza. By 2015, Blaze Pizza had become the fastest-growing chain of restaurants in history. Brad continues to help grow the company and enjoy in its critical and consumer success. In 2020, Brad immersed himself in research, careful planning and advance work in sourcing local and regenerative ingredients for Bagel + Slice. The concept was that he would offer extraordinary bagels and pizza all day in a warm neighborhood setting, and the message was one of sustainability, community involvement, health and safety.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to ‘get to know’ you a bit. Can you share with our readers a story about what inspired you to become a restauranteur or chef?

I first wanted to cook because I was drawn to powerful industrial kitchen equipment.

Once I had an opportunity to cook using commercial equipment I loved the challenge of taming the power with confident culinary finesse.

I know this all sounds silly but I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself a chef until after I had cooked for many years commercially and had the confidence that I had the skill set to finely control the desired outcomes of all the dishes I prepared.

Do you have a specific type of food that you focus on? What was it that first drew you to cooking that type of food? Can you share a story about that with us?

I do love making pizza. It combines all the skills of the very best type of chefs in a single dish.

Good cooking relies on exercising controlled restraint. It’s easy to powerfully season something to elicit a reaction from the diner. Perfect pizza requires understanding ingredient sourcing, food preparation skills, timing, gentle hands (when needed), patience, a comprehensive understanding of chemistry and microbiology as well as physics and the fine arts of sculpture and composition. The best thing about making pizza as a pizza chef is that your results will reveal themselves only minutes after you load the assembled pizza into the oven. Feeling the lightness of the pizza as it exits the oven’s mouth and feeling and hearing the crunch of the crust when you cut the slices give reassurances whether you did all the right things. Empty plates coming back to the kitchen confirm your successes.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you became a chef or restauranteur? What was the lesson or take away you took out of that story?

I push limits when working toward understanding cuisines and cultures. When I worked as a private chef on a motor yacht we spent a lot of time in the Bahamas. My first impression of the food was that I didn’t like it. I knew that meant I just didn’t understand it so I took $300 in cash and walked from the yacht harbor over the bridge to the poorer area of Nassau. I came upon a man that offered to sell me “anything I wanted” if I just let him know what it was that I wanted. I told him I wanted to meet the best home cook in Nassau and have that person teach me to cook for the day. I would pay him $20 if he connected me with that person. He agreed and asked me to follow him. We went on a long walk before he introduced me to a man named “Wayne John,” (he said “my name is easy to remember, it’s like the actor.”). Wayne was the a man that seemed to be well respected and also feared in his little neighborhood. His wife, Joy, prepared food for the very poor neighbors every day. She made about 50 meals a day and served them in recycled fast food containers. Her kitchen was very sparse but immaculate. We went to the store and purchased about week’s worth of food for the neighborhood and the two of us cooked together until dark.

The lesson is something I learn over and over. You can’t fully understand how to cook regional and ethnic cuisines unless you truly understand the cultures of the cuisines you are attempting to master. I also have learned that the good stuff in life always comes when you dig in deep, take risks and think differently.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? How did you overcome this obstacle?

There are no hard times working with food when you insanely passionate about it. You never go hungry and you can always find a job. I’ve worked without pay to learn from my mentors and worked other odd jobs for pay to make sure I could make ends meet. The hours were long and grueling and I really don’t remember ever complaining about the job. I always knew that the hard work would pay off and that the hard work really would never end. Knowing this comforts me and also ensures that I chose the right profession.

In your experience, what is the key to creating a dish that customers are crazy about?

Make sure it is something you think is delicious. Make sure it’s better than anything of its kind that you’ve ever had. If you’ve done your homework and prepare the dish with focus and care, it will be loved. Preparing food with love provides “insurance” that it will be appreciated. Add in lots of that (love) ingredient and you’ll be assured your dish is appreciated.

Personally, what is the ‘perfect meal for you’?

Last time I was in the Middle East I had “Turkish Eggs.” This dish was made with soft poached eggs over fried pita bread. It was topped with a creamy lightly warmed mild garlic yogurt. It was finished with extra virgin olive oil, pomegranate seeds, Aleppo chili, dry mint and sumac. It was served with a flawless cappuccino and a perfect flaky almond croissant. This was one of the most immersive sensory meal experiences I’ve ever had where seemingly every joy in eating was explored in my mouth.

Where does your inspiration for creating come from? Is there something that you turn to for a daily creativity boost?

Inspiration comes from energy. Sounds kooky but I really simply feel inspiration from the energy around me and I go with it. I guide it with my experience with food and cooking to distill it into recipes. Music does help me to calm my mind from being busy so I can “listen” to the energy telling me what to assemble.

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? What impact do you think this will have?

I want to serve a productive role in reversing climate change through the work we are doing at Bagel+Slice. I am working closely with USC and various departments there to use Bagel+Slice as a sort of research lab for ingredients sourcing, energy savings, reducing waste and eliminating chemical sanitizers and disinfectants through the use of ozone technologies. I am serving on a board for Global Supply Chain with the Marshall Business School Global Supply Chain Management to develop ideas and hopefully impact positive change we can share with a much larger audience.

What advice would you give to other chefs or restauranteurs to thrive and avoid burnout?

If you live, breathe and dream about food then it’s hard to burn out.

Thank you for all that. Now we are ready for the main question of the interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started as a Restauranteur or Chef” and why? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Don’t worry about making mistakes. My dad used to always fault me as a child and teen for working too hard and would often say, “the enemy of good is perfection.” It took me 22 years to open my first restaurant from the time I first dreamed it. I wanted to assure its success. It’s ok to make mistakes as long as you correct them as you go.

2. Restaurants are very resilient. You can mess up someone’s order and still stay in business. It hurts when you make mistakes. Own up to them. Apologize if you can and move on. No time to dwell on mistakes.

3. Network as much as you can early on. You will need help and it’s great to have some smart and experienced folks to lean on. They will be glad to help.

4. Get a mentor as soon as you can. Ask lots of questions and accept their offers to help. I didn’t know what a mentor was since I thought you had to do it all alone until my brother-in-law offered his guidance on my first restaurant. He didn’t know anything about restaurants but had a strong business sense. His advice was critical in getting the business opened since without his pushes I would have found excuses to not follow through. This was my real leaping off point and I am now a mentor to others.

5. If you have a good idea and believe in it, then do it! My last good idea turned into a 350 unit restaurant chain that is still growing.

What’s the one dish people have to try if they visit your establishment?

Bagel+Slice is bold enough to put the words “bagel” and “slice” into our name. These items are the foundation for our menu and everything based on these NYC street food staples is made with curated ingredients that are artfully combined into dishes that have balance and soul. You should have a Rosemary, sea salt and black pepper bagel right out of our oven. You also should have a slice of cheese or pepperoni pizza to start. These simple dishes will convince your mouth at first bite that you made a good choice. Come back and eat your way through the rest of the menu. Our flavors and textures are reason enough to become a regular customer but once you understand our purpose and commitment to our community that you will then understand what makes Bagel+Slice truly special. Love and purpose are ingredients that are in all our recipes. If you can’t taste that you should be able to feel it.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Bagel+Slice is a business in business for doing good. We are preparing very familiar and accessible foods that are made with mindfully sourced and regeneratively grown ingredients that help make the planet better. We research our vendor partners deeply to find those that serve their communities well and are also good stewards of our ecosystems. We search out partnerships with universities to help measure the positive impacts of our efforts so we can share our findings with a much larger audience to enact change on a much larger scale. We will expose our team members to the good work we are doing to help provide them with the tools and opportunities to grow with us if they choose or to simply provide them with a stable employment with better than average pay and benefits. We want to inspire our neighborhood community to work to build a stronger environment of people and things. We use the model of regenerative organic agriculture and its reliance on all living things in the soil having a purpose to build a stronger and more resilient ecosystem. We just simply work to apply that same model to our above ground community to make it better. Our goal is to replicate this over and over again until our positive impact is felt.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!