Who we are

Born into the San Francisco bar trade.

Not a company assembled to chase a market. A group of people who have been feeding and watering this city, its festivals and its stages for two decades, now doing it under one name with a farm attached.

01 · Principal

Tavahn Ghazi

Founder

Tavahn was born into the San Francisco bar industry and has spent more than twenty years in it. He owns and manages The Little Shamrock, the oldest bar in San Francisco, which has been in his family for over forty-five years. That is not a line of heritage marketing. It is the building the business grew out of.

Between San Francisco and West Texas he has run rooms from both sides of the pass. He was restaurant manager and head bartender at Maiya's and Cochineal in Marfa, and he consulted on and designed the bar expansion at The Stonehouse in Nevada City. He is also a career musician and producer, which is how the talent side of this company came to exist at all: the bands were friends first and clients second.

He cooks Persian-household flavours with a health-forward Caribbean influence, and the same instinct for how a room should feel, food, playlist, lighting, florals, flatware and set decor, runs through every event this company produces. He is permaculture design certified, designs land with CreaSol in Atitlán, Guatemala, and with his wife owns a small bed and breakfast in Atenas, Costa Rica, where they are building a tropical food forest. He is also a co-owner of Homestead Cookies.

His work has run artist catering and bar service at Stern Grove Festival for five consecutive years, and before that the same for Live Nation.

02 · The team

Specialists, aiming at simple.

The reason a room runs smoothly is almost never talent in isolation. It is people who already know each other's shorthand, brought in for what each of them does better than almost anyone else in the city.

Chris Fernandez

Chef

A Bay Area culinary leader with more than twenty-five years building food programmes, developing teams and creating dining rooms people remember. Executive chef at Oliveto, Stars Bar & Dining and Poggio Trattoria, then executive chef and designer at Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, the restaurant and music venue Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh built beside the band's own studio. Lesh sought him out for it, and Chris built the kitchen, designed the team and wrote the menus.

From there, culinary director and then director of operations for the Moana Restaurant Group, then director of culinary and operations for Merchants Exchange Productions, running restaurant operations, large-scale catering, weddings, corporate events and nonprofit fundraising. He is now reopening the iconic Julius Castle. He designed the menu, the kitchens and the operating systems this company runs on.

Ann Cromley

Sourcing

A chef at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant that built American farm-to-table cooking and the Edible Schoolyard tradition our school programme descends from. She holds the line on where every ingredient comes from and what is not worth buying. That is the difference between a menu that claims good sourcing and a kitchen that can prove it.

Tanya Milosevich

Bread and pastry

A founding baker of Arizmendi, one of the great cooperative bakeries in America, and one of the few people in the country who has built a worker-owned kitchen from its first day. Bread and pastry across everything we do, and the door into cooperative practice, and how a kitchen is actually run by the people in it.

Brandon Arnovick

Desserts

Founder of Mission Minis, the San Francisco cupcake bakery he built from the ground up. He consults on desserts across everything we do: event menus, the retail baked line, and anything that ends a meal.

Andrew Lawton

Events

Production and sales. The door into rooms that need a hundred to five hundred people fed without the evening feeling catered.

Annie Lebowitz-Ghazi

Design and food education

Designer, food-justice educator, permaculture design certified. Co-owner, with Tavahn, of the Atenas property in Costa Rica. The door into schools and institutions, and programmes that teach with the food rather than beside it.

Michael Jinks

Finance

Runs finance and keeps the books, independently, for everything we do.

Khalob Freeborn

Systems and software

Bespoke software for retreats and hospitality, and the engine that turns orders into prep sheets, costs and purchase orders. The reason our numbers are the same numbers all the way through.

03 · A place at the table

Commercial success is what pays for the social impact.

Food brings people together and strengthens communities in a way very little else does. Our chef built his career on that conviction, and here it is the business model, not a paragraph bolted onto one.

This is not new to us. One of our bakers helped found Arizmendi, a worker cooperative that has fed this region for decades while being owned by the people who bake in it. The model works in a real kitchen with real margins. Every commercial engagement funds the other half of what we do: getting nutritious, carefully prepared meals to the people who need them.

The school programme is where you can see it most clearly. Children learn to grow food before anyone tries to sell their parents anything.

04 · The other half

A farm company as a sister, not a supplier.

Our Collective Edge designs and builds the growing systems: market gardens, homesteads, regenerative retrofits and the water infrastructure underneath them. Hospitality is where that produce meets a table.

Two companies rather than one, because they are genuinely different businesses with different clients. One name across both, because when they work together you get something neither could offer alone: food traced to ground we manage, served by people we employ, at an event we produced.

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