Navigating a New Chapter: Interview with Chef and Entrepreneur, Phil McDonald
This week’s interview is with Phil McDonald, a chef and entrepreneur known for his concept Black Bear Bread Co, a multi-location bread bakery and cafe. I first learned about Phil when I frequented one of Black Bear’s locations in my new adopted home, the 30A area of Florida, a stretch of scenic beach towns along the Florida Gulf Coast known for its crystal clear waters and white sand beaches. Phil grew up nearby in Destin, Florida. He made his way back to the area when his now business partner asked him to return and help elevate the quality of his local pizza business.
Unbeknownst to me, I reached out to Phil during an interesting moment in his story. While he remains a partner in Black Bear, he has wound down his involvement in day-to-day operations to begin another chapter. He’d realized it was time to start something new.
Often this blog focuses on the beginning of a new chapter, but I was intrigued to talk to Phil about another experience that defines many “no directions” stories - the decision to step away from one path and ask the question: What does it mean to start something new, especially when it means stepping away from something that you learned so much from and loved building? I wanted to hear his perspective on all the things that starting a new chapter requires: Tackling the vulnerability of the unknown, giving yourself the time and space to figure out what’s next, and trusting yourself.
We spoke about all of that as well as:
How a summer restaurant job turned into his career
The literal black bears that inspired the Black Bear name
Confronting failure with a healthy sense of “Oh, well!”
The signs that let Phil know it was time for a change
Learning to manage the pressure cooker environment of a growing business
Phil’s dreams for what’s next
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
How did you get your start in the restaurant world?
I was going to school in Gainesville at the University of Florida. I was a journalism major. I picked a random major because I didn't really want to go to school. I just thought that was what I was supposed to do. I had no passion for or interest in school. I ended up going home to Destin for the summer and got a job working in a fine-dining restaurant as a dishwasher. The chefs were always busy, focused, and playing with all kinds of cool ingredients. I was fascinated by all of it and thought, “I think this is what I want to do.”
I went to the chef and told him, “I want to be a chef.” He laughed at me and said, “Why don't you be a good dishwasher?” I took that literally and before I knew it he was giving me shrimp to peel. Next, he let me clean mushrooms, and I started moving around the stations. I thought it was the best opportunity ever. The chef got fired, or something happened where he and the owner didn't get along, but I ended up leaving when he left and got a job at another restaurant. It just went from there, and I kept working my way up the ranks. I'd work at each restaurant for about a year, maybe 2 years, and then go to the next thing. By 2010, I was dialed into my career when the oil spill happened. I had a private chef and catering business that was tanking because of it. I ended up getting paid by BP and took the money to travel abroad and throughout the United States. I went to different cities and worked in restaurants for free in “stages,” which are sort of like culinary internships in the restaurant world. I never went to culinary school so I treated that time as my culinary school. I went to Portland, San Francisco, New York City, and New Orleans. In San Francisco, I worked at a number of celebrated restaurants including Flour and Water and Gary Danko. I worked for a chef named Alon Shaya in New Orleans, Jean Georges in New York, and then Vitaly Paley in Portland.
Did you ever end up going back to school?
No, never. I never touched a textbook or a classroom again. About five years into my career, I thought about going to culinary school but the chef I was working for at the time said, “You already know enough. You have the passion and the drive for it. You don't need to do that.” He said, “I'm telling you right now, you're just gonna have student loans you can't repay. You're doing the job. Just continue to work for people who have integrity and are doing good things, and you'll be fine.” So that’s what I did.
What led you to the point of actually opening Black Bear and deciding to open your own restaurant?
The dream was always to open my own restaurant. I wanted to do a pizza concept for the longest time (and still do). Black Bear came about after I moved back to the area from New York. I moved back because my partner, who owns Bud & Alley’s, wanted me to help him with his pizza place.
I was on the fence because I was really liking New York and working for an awesome team at Marlow & Sons. They were really good to me, it was fun, and I was making all kinds of friends. My partner talked me into coming back because my passion was pizza. He had a wood-fired pizza restaurant that needed help improving its quality. I thought this would help me get the experience to eventually open my own pizza spot.
One thing that I noticed was missing from the area was good sourdough bread. Black Bear wasn't even named yet. I just wanted to do this thing with sourdough bread. I told my partner, “Let's do a sandwich shop with sourdough bread that’s only open during the daytime.” I was adamant about doing something daytime-oriented because I was married at the time and getting ready to have kids. I’d done nights for twenty years and was tired of it.
I thought that doing a little cafe with cool bread serving breakfast and lunch was going to be the perfect way to balance my life. I was a little wrong on that, but that's okay. We just started baking bread in the pizza oven at the pizza bar, and I started trying to sell it at the pizza counter. The first few loaves were awful, but, eventually, my sous chef and I made a starter that we still use to this day at Black Bear. It's 7 years old now.
I submitted a business plan to my partner. It didn't include pastries or anything at the time. It was just bread, a sandwich shop, and we were going to serve Stumptown coffee. There wasn’t even a name yet. We hired a baker to help me out at the pizza bar. My partner had a location in Grayton Beach that was sitting there not being used, and we used it to start baking the bread. One night, a family of bears ransacked the dumpster. They were eating the starter we were throwing away (you discard about 80% of it every day). There were yeast paw prints all over the parking lot. The baker working with me at the time, Brittany, said, “I know you guys are struggling with a name, but I think it's kind of cute to name it Black Bear. What do you think?” I didn't say anything to her face but I just thought, “I'm never gonna name it that. That's dumb.” And then I slept on it and woke up feeling like that had to be the name. Just like that it was born. We immediately got the LLC and started selling bread at the farmer's market.
It sounds like you fell into it serendipitously. What was that first year or two of properly operating Black Bear like for you? Were you scared?
I was never scared in the sense of, “What if we fail?” That wasn't even on my mind. I guess I had that New York mentality because I was still fresh from living there. I just was fearless with it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I knew we were filling a hole in the marketplace. I knew that if we could just educate the market on bread — that it was going to work. We were already beta testing at farmer’s markets and had lines down the street.
I trusted in my abilities to execute the menu and the food because I had worked rigorously under chefs for so long and knew I had the discipline. I also knew we had a unique opportunity to bring Stumptown coffee to the area and have an aesthetic that was different. I knew what the locals wanted. It was never about the tourists or about visitors, although we welcome them with open arms. It was about building something for the community. We kept that in mind the whole time.
Regarding failure, I definitely have the mentality of “Oh well.” Don’t get me wrong, it sucks when you fail at something. I have failed before and it's not fun, but I don’t think that fear should ever stop you from doing something.
I think every entrepreneur eventually figures out that running a business can be all consuming, even if you think you have a game plan. Black Bear expanded to multiple locations and you had kids. How did you stay invigorated and inspired as the business grew and there were more demands on your time?
I looked at it as a chance to learn someeting new. Instead of just being a cook, I really embraced the opportunity to learn how to run a business. I leaned heavily into the marketing and brand-building aspects of it.
My partner provided the capital and I created the logo, the menu, the aesthetic, and the vision. I leaned heavily into figuring out things like: How do we sell this? How do we package this even better? We created the brand and the logo to make it look like it had been there forever. That was all really fun because we succeeded at it. I realized that I didn’t have to be toiling in the kitchen every day, and it was exciting to realize that I could shift my focus.
I don’t think that corporate structure and multi-unit locations are my cup of tea. That’s one of the reasons I’m departing. It becomes hard because you're relying on other people to run the business and that becomes a lot. My kids are young. I have twins that are 6, and I have an 8-year-old.
What Black Bear started out as is not what it is today. When we started, we were doing seasonal food all day, and I was changing the menu every week. When you expand to multiple locations, you have to create a core menu and be consistent, and you have to change the structure of the entire restaurant. At that point, you’re not really creating anymore, you’re producing. There's nothing wrong with that, it just isn’t for me.
As I thought about my kids, I said, “They're only this young once.” I was working so hard and my mood was really starting to shift. I started to get overwhelmed because there was so much to do. As you get bigger, the money also starts to change things. My kids were missing their father, and I just couldn’t miss out on that part of their lives.
I'm very proud of what I've accomplished personally in this endeavor, and I’m comfortable with where things are headed. I'm good because I have other things I want to do. I have no interest in becoming rich or anything. I want to make money and live a nice life, but my quality of life is important. Surfing, being outdoors with my kids, seeing my friends again. I was a line cook for twenty years and didn’t have a personal life. As the business grew, I started to lose my personal life again with Black Bear. As I got into my forties, I decided I wanted to create a different sort of life for myself.
It's not easy to come to a realization like that and really trust your gut and intuition. What signs let you know that it was time for a change?
I outsourced myself. I was standing around going, “What do I do?” I had to create stuff to do, and I was starting to get in the way. I finally had the thought of “Maybe it’s time for something else” happen in my brain in a way that it never had before.
I outsourced so much that I became pretty much irrelevant because we had changed to a format of consistency. Everyone was doing their job swimmingly and just killing it. Black Bear has such a great team. I started taking time off which was great, but I didn’t want to just sit around. I started dabbling around with other projects. I went to the Bahamas and helped my friend get a culinary program started on his yacht. I realized I could start a culinary consultation business and not have to manage a whole staff anymore. Now I work with my clients to create a program and recipes and then hand everything off.
I do want to start a pizza concept so I’m taking some time off, reevaluating, and spending time with my children.
As you look back on the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another, what do you think are the biggest learnings you're taking away to inform what’s next?
You have to be resilient to failure. You have to be resilient to the workload in front of you. You have to get up every day with the same enthusiasm you had in the beginning or else things start slipping. For example, the light that goes out in the corner of the restaurant might not get fixed in a week, whereas when you first opened, it was fixed in an hour. That's the stuff that you have to keep consistent. And that could be for any business. It doesn't have to be a light. We're talking about a client or the standard of care you provide. The standard has to be the same on day 3,000 as it was on day one. Otherwise, what are you doing?
The decision to do something new is a unique type of exciting and terrifying. Then there's this whole other phase of actually figuring out what's next, which can be just as terrifying and exciting. What are you learning about yourself in this new phase where you're figuring out the next chapter?
I'm learning how much I really enjoy cooking and how much I really enjoy helping people. I'm learning that life is about time with your children and your loved ones. I’m learning I can now do anything I want because I did something so hard.
I was told by so many people that we couldn't do bread in Florida because of all the craziest crap, like people wouldn’t like bread because of the weather. The comments definitely scared me sometimes but they never deterred me from trying. I thought, “Oh, man, maybe they're right, but I guess we’ll see. We don’t know. How do they know when they’ve never done it?”
I think I’ve now learned that there's nothing that I can't do if I attack it diligently, and I go after it wholeheartedly with good intentions. I was never scared of failure, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I can say, “This is what we’re doing, and this is how you do it.” At Black Bear, we didn’t experience the stress of failure, but I definitely experienced the stress of getting so busy that you can’t keep up. I've learned to manage that better. When you get into that situation where the business becomes a pressure cooker, you can change and sometimes rub people the wrong way. I’ve learned how I’m not going to behave in those situations anymore. Instead, I can say, “We’re going to calmly get through this.”
What’s your pressure cooker game plan now? How do you manage things differently?
Eat the elephant one bite at a time. I’m serious. When you get stressed out, you start going through the laundry list in your head and start to spiral. Now I say, “What can I control? What's the 1st thing we need to do?” Nuts and bolts. Start there and then move on from the nuts and bolts. That’s really what it is.
I think one difficult part of discovering what’s next is almost having to remove an attachment to how fast it has to happen. It’s so easy to start thinking, “I should have figured it out by now.” You have to get comfortable with moving forward one step at a time and trust that eventually, you’ll know the right thing when you see it. Have you experienced that?
Yes! I think you're absolutely right because I do get impatient. I'm comparing my day 3 to someone else’s day 6,000. I have to catch myself. Right now, I’m building a new website with new branding using the graphic designer I worked with to do all of Black Bear’s stuff. It’s easy to think “We need to get this done right now!” It’s hard for me to not feel like we need to strike while the iron’s hot. I start worrying that people will forget about me from Black Bear, which creates this false sense of urgency. I have to remind myself that it’s fine and we don’t need to rush the process.
You’ve mentioned a few things but I’d love to learn more. What’s next for you?
Right now what is next is consulting and doing some exclusive private chef stuff. Eventually, I want to do ticketed private dinners at my friend’s barn. Host 40 to 50 people at one table and serve everything family style. I love the idea of people sharing a meal over a wood fire.
I’m also talking with a friend about setting up a local media company around food. Whether that's restaurant reviews or just sharing knowledge about local sourcing and things like that. Something around curating a local culinary scene. There’s a lot of money here but it almost feels like there is more money than ideas. I want to see more local staples. We now have a great butcher shop, we have Black Bear. We don’t need more fine dining, but we do need more local places where you can go get local quality stuff. Or if you're going to open a restaurant do something really pure and intentional like wood-fired sourdough pizza. Something singular you can focus on where you don't need a staff of 30 people to execute. Staffing is definitely an issue. You can have the highest ambitions in the world of doing Michelin star quality, but we’re reliant on transient people to help us.
A pizza spot is definitely the end game for me. I’m working on developing my recipe every day.
The theme of this blog is no directions because I love the idea that there are 1 million ways that you could live your life in terms of where you live, how you work, when you work, and pursue things you’re passionate about. What’s your “no directions” life looking like these days?
My “no directions” life looks like staying disciplined because I feel like that's what sets me free. I have my quirks like my night-time routine where I prepare my coffee for the morning. I prepare my starter every day. I cook for my kids. I'm just trying to live with intention, positivity, and less stress. I’m focused on my end game of creating something that the community needs and wants.
My “no directions life” also looks like time at the beach. It looks like time to ride my bike, time to lift weights, and time to surf. It looks like taking my kids to national parks this summer.
I didn't know the full context when I reached out, but I am honored to share this version of your story. I think there are a lot of people out there who are also asking themselves “what’s next” and confronting the vulnerability of what it means to ask that question. I think hearing your message of, “I am ready for something different. I’m proud of what I’ve done, and I know that I’m going to be okay with wherever this chapter leads” is a message that will really resonate.
It’s definitely going to be scary as hell, but if you have a solid foundation of a skill set, you have to believe in that. As long as you do that, you'll be fine.