The Dough
Our Mission
Our mission is simple: We aim to elevate what we expect from our communities and meals, through emphasizing flavor over supply chains, and acting as an incubator for collaboration and conversation, in our dining room and yours.
The way we see it, if you find a new friend around us, we are doing something right.
We are our ingredients, and the community is an ingredient. It’s why BBQ tastes best in a backyard, and why no chef can beat nostalgia or the taste of a memory. Like sourdough, environment and who works with you, is flavor.
This said, we are chefs, and all we really want to do is cook.
“Just let us cook.”
Our Story
Sourdough Social Club is not its founder, but every child does have a mom, and this ones called Jacob.
Tired of being told, or reading about, what to think of the world, Jacob took the money he had made flipping burgers in a ski chalet and serving for a locally known chef, and on a particularly hazy night, he purchased a ticket for Australia.
That was 16 years ago.
In between he loved, loss, and failed brilliantly as he grew up. Experiencing “other” ways, culture, people and our idiosyncisis in all their beauty as he integrated himself among them. As a foreign speaker, he learned quickly that food is a language, and communication is everything.
So he set out to learn, migrating accross four continents, he gained experience anywhere that would take him. Growing grapes, working citrus and cooking on vineyards in Australia, learning Nasi Goreng with a grandma scolded him in Indonesia, and even a taquiria in Germany. Although he does say he “learned to be a chef” not in culinary school, but cooking in starred and famed institutions in San Francisco and pastry in Minnesota … he learned that wasn’t it.
Food is not meant to be pretentious, its meant to be inviting. Not a glass drank with a pinky up, but a shared belly laugh, with boozed rosy cheeks, in a warm room with good people. Food should not be elitist, across the world he saw everday people eating food that was both reasonably priced and fresh.
So in 2016 him and a chef partner founded Salami Social Club in Berlin. Somewhere for the community, after he realized there was no where in his neighborhood to get food after ten … and boy were they right, because everyone deserves to belong, and delicious is delicious.
But all good art should have an end and this end, was the start of the pandemic. First locked down in Germany, he saw a city pull together. Second locked down in the states, he saw a city pull apart, and it did not feel right.
Years later, when he found himself hungry and in a place that reminded him of that neighborhood those years ago, he couldn’t resist.
Seizing and opportunity to re-enter, he became the Chef for a restaurant on Bainbridge Island called Docs Marina Grill, and it was here he found inspiration again. Brought in as a crisis actor, he re-established himself while building a network, and re-learning the ins and outs of cheffing in the States.
Over the next three years he was won over and it was the people, the proximity of agriculture, and the quality of people he met doing the work, sucked him in.
Sourdough Social Club exists because it turns out, creating dope product is good, but feeding someone’s soul in today’s world is better.