Chef Bob Ballantyne

Bob’s career started out as many of the chefs in the mid 40s did, he got a job washing pots for a large kitchen run by the City of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. Befriended by an extremely talented chef name Jack Wilson, Bob would spend two years under Jack’s tutelage learning the ropes of preparing food and more importantly running a large commercial kitchen.

The City Dinning Hall was located in the Pocono Mountains and serviced 3500 meals per seating with three meals per day plus an evening event for the staff of the property. At the end of his second year, Bob received Chef Wilson’s recommendation to the City of Philadelphia that he be hired in his place for the following year, as Jack was retiring. At age 16, Bob would take a place as the youngest Second Chef ever hired by the City to handle the large summer kitchen works.

Following the City Kitchen Mr. Ballantyne would find himself in the donut business for a short while, where he would stumble upon a chef from Sicily named Vincent Mastrocola, who would teach Mr. Ballantyne’s apprenticeship in the world of running a Pizzeria.

Chef Mastrocola would expose Mr. Ballantyne for the first time to the need for making money on every meal. This was sorely lacking in the training at the City Kitchen. Along the way he would gain more experience in the deli sandwich business, Italian restaurant business and helping his brother in his ice cream parlor business. All this cooking knowledge, mixed in with his father’s love of cooking the game that they took while hunting, produced an experience and back ground for recipe development.

Mr. Ballantyne would enter the United States Marine Corp electronics programs and leave the commercial cooking world for better than a decade. While he continued to cook for entertainment functions and for his own pursuit of developing great food, he would return to commercial cooking after meeting a young couple starting a catering company.

The Cowboy and The Rose Catering would prove to be a great place to work. Owners Zane and Mary Lou Lawson had the desire, the skill and the palate to create extraordinary food. So it was quite often that Zane and Bob would find themselves cooking in the kitchen to create a new dish that would wow the masses. It is the cooking of Bob’s youth, lots of people all being served the same menu. And over the past decade it has been and still is an awful lot of fun. Hard work, lots of stress, but when the dragons are slain at the end of the day and 600 plates have gone out to feed the guests, it is a fantastic feeling to sit back and say, “another one done correctly!”

Carried as a Chef de Cuisine at the catering company Mr. Ballantyne finds himself developing menus for the special request dinners. From Asian to Zimbabwe, if a client requests it, Mr. Ballantyne gets the call to do the research and start finding the dishes that will make the event. This is the most enviable position in the business in his opinion. At this stage of his cooking career he is picking when he wants to work and on what, which allows total emersion into the specific area of interest.

Mr. Ballantyne also volunteers at the local soup kitchen once per month. “I like working at the soup kitchen as it is like a big market basket competition.” Says Ballantyne, he continues “you never know what came in for donations so you go the night before, look at what is available, build a balanced menu idea with what you have in the walk-in, the only difference is you then feed 250 people with the creation instead of having it judged.” He gets asked by students what they can do to improve their experience. He recommends finding a local soup kitchen and volunteering there. They all need help and they all can benefit from trade industry people coming in and offering the best practices.