Newton Kosher Caterer Has a Taste for Success

Mikki Samet is so full of ideas and enthusiasm for her fledging Newton catering company, you can’t help but believe she has truly found her calling in life.

A mere nine months ago, Samet started her business, Taste. The company’s actual name is a bit longer than that.

“It’s really called Taste, Kosher Gourmet Meals by Chef Mikki,” says Samet. “I’m getting myself a professional chef’s coat, and I’m trying to figure out how to fit it all on there!”

When Samet attended UMass Amherst, she always assumed she’d be a writer of some sort. One of her pieces had been in Chicken Soup for the Soul when she was very young, and Samet envisioned a future of writing “novels and short fiction and journalism.”

Since she was double majoring in English and Art History, Samet spent her junior year in Florence, Italy.  It was there that her love of food really took off, sparked by a wine course and the amazing Italian markets.

Samet had grown up in St. Louis, one of three offspring of a single-father rabbi. Her mother had passed away when she was seven. So while in many other observant Jewish households food was a centerpiece, her family’s experience was less about “socializing and nourishing” and more about “getting full.” 

That doesn’t mean that food didn’t still have an important role for Samet and her family.

“I remember one of my dad’s proudest moments in the kitchen,” recalls Samet, warmly. “He created a lasagna that had beans in it. Because he thought beans were healthy, like canned vegetarian beans, and he was so proud of it. It was really sweet because we loved Mexican food, and he just wanted to provide that for us.”

After graduation in 2007, Samet married her high school sweetheart and moved to Newton. For the next three years, she was able to put her writing and art skills to good use as a copywriter for , a local baby and toddler chain. But she was still thinking about food all the time.

“After a long day at work, I could still spend hours cooking,” Samet says. “But I kept falling asleep with cookbooks on my face. I had a real obsession with food.”

When she decided it was time for a change, Samet had the full support of her husband, Ezra. She enrolled in Cambridge School of Culinary Arts Professional Chef’s program, in spite of some initial concerns about melding her observant, kosher background with the school’s traditional approach to cuisine.

Her worries were valid but unfounded.

“A lot of foundations of cooking are French, where everything is bacon and everything is cream,” says Samet. “But the director of the program, Roberta Dowling, was incredibly encouraging. She said, ‘This is something that we deal with, and we will make it work with you.’ I sighed a huge sigh of relief.”

A scant month after graduating from Cambridge Culinary in May 2011, with a solid culinary education informed by her own religious background, Samet started Taste.

In addition to catering and providing personal chef service, Samet originally was preparing a la carte side dishes and soups to supplement her clients’ Sabbath dinners. She has had to suspend this aspect of her business because of a recent move, but hopes to resume this service shortly.  

Samet is contemplating renting kitchen space so that she can prepare kosher l’Pesach (kosher specifically for Passover, as opposed to just “kosher”) meals for her clients. She is also eager to explore the possibility of a year-round shareable kosher kitchen, much like the CropCircle Kitchen in Jamaica Plain.

Some of Samet’s most popular dishes are foods you might find on any caterer’s or personal chef’s menu, though because of the laws of kashrut there are certain restrictions. She makes a panko-crusted mustard-coated cod that she says her clients go wild for, even those who don’t generally like fish. And she loves to cook with vegetables, especially when she can get them at or at the local .

“I like nurturing people,” explains Samet.  “It’s wonderful, the ability of food to bring people together. And I’m able to nourish people through my job. I never thought I’d be doing this, but when I look back it’s obvious how I got here.”