How Chef Kaytlin Dangaran is bringing her love of food to the masses as Elior North America’s new Corporate Chef of Dining and EventsHow Chef Kaytlin Dangaran is bringing her love of food to the masses as Elior North America’s new Corporate Chef of Dining and Events

For Elior Chef Kaytlin Dangaran, food has always sparked an interest, even from an early age.  

“When I was younger, I was really always super interested in food,” she says. “I'm one of three girls, and I was the one that was in the kitchen, wanting to know what my mom was doing, helping her cook.”

Her passion for cooking only grew as she got older. Fast forward to today, Dangaran has just accepted the role as Elior North America’s new corporate chef of dining and events, where she will oversee food and beverage at a variety of institutions around the country including museums, zoos and more.

While Dangaran’s love of cooking developed early in her life, it wasn’t until college that she realized she wanted it to be her career. While studying Cultural Anthropology at Florida State, Dangaran became passionate about learning how cultural anthropology and food tie together. That intersection and connectivity informed her career path.   

“I love learning about how people eat, what your food memories are, what things can just invoke a memory just by smelling something, what your comfort foods are, how different cultures eat and their traditions,” she says. “It just really re-instilled in me that this was going to be a lifelong passion, and it was something that I really wanted to pursue.”  

After college, Dangaran packed her bags, moved straight to New York and enrolled in the French Culinary Institute (now known as the International Culinary Center) in Manhattan. She took classes during the day and got a job during the evenings at an Italian restaurant. 

“I just dove straight in,” she says. “And absolutely loved it.” 

After graduating from culinary school, Dangaran worked at a string of restaurants in New York and San Francisco. While she got a lot of experience working at restaurants on both the East and West coasts, she says, she did miss home, so a little over 10 years ago, she moved back to Florida and joined the Elior family as the Executive Chef at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. 

The new role offered a different structure to that of restaurants, and Dangaran found herself falling in love with catering and working in a museum. 

Following Perez, she continued to work at different museums in Florida until she accepted her current role. 

As Corporate Chef of Dining and Events, Dangaran will go from overseeing one facility to taking the lead on multiple facilities across state lines and is looking forward to doubling down on ways to create an innovative dining experience for guests. 

A big focus for her right out of the gate is sustainability, she says, and she is excited to work with Elior chefs to figure out new opportunities to go green and serve more plant-based meals to diners. 

Another priority for Dangaran is sourcing locally, which was instilled in her as a young chef working at Italian restaurants post-college. 

“I'm hyper seasonal and local when it comes to my food,” she says. “I feel like you're only as good as your ingredients, and your ingredients only as good as how close they are to you and how they're how they're the best in season.”

While the position will bring many changes, one thing that won’t change is Dangaran love for all things cooking. 

“I'll never be bored, I’ll never know all there is to know about cooking. There's something so inspiring about that,” she says. “I just really love what I do.”