Chef Jasmine Einalhori: How Failure Propelled My Business Forward

The executive chef opened up about how setbacks led to the long-lasting success of her catering company.

Executive chef Jasmine Einalhori is one-third of the team behind Sage Kitchen, a New York-based catering company focused on Middle Eastern foods — though it’s become much more than that since launching in 2014. Spurred by a changing culinary landscape, one most recently devastated by a pandemic that has upended our relationship with food in more ways than one, Einalhori and her team have had to reinvent their company multiple times. That history includes a Manhattan storefront that was forced to close on the eve of its one-year anniversary, a new “fill the fridge” culinary concept and a whole lot of food bank-related projects. In this Voices in Food story, Einalhori tells Anna Rahmanan about what she has learned from apparent failures, the fragility of restaurants and the shifting gastronomical world that she’s had to contend with. My friends and I have had a catering company, Sage Kitchen, for seven years. At one point, we got bored and wanted to interact with people more, so we took all the profits from the catering company and turned them back into a restaurant. It was a very unique decision because I don’t know of many people who built a restaurant with zero investors. Our one-year anniversary would have been a week and a half into COVID-19. We were so close to getting through the toughest year, so it was heartbreaking.