Brandon Harpster is the National Corporate Chef for Training and Events at RATIONAL USA. He trains chefs across the country, runs RATIONAL's culinary academies, and develops cooking programs that translate connected kitchen technology into repeatable, scalable results for working operators.

This episode starts with a brunch disaster. A steamship round failed overnight at a country club, no monitoring, no alert, no way to intervene. Harpster uses that story to frame the entire case for connected cooking, and then spends the next hour proving it.

• How the iCombi Pro handles delta-T roasting, built-in resting, and consistent brunch egg production at volume
• How the iVario Pro runs overnight stock for better clarity and yield with no one in the building
• How a 15-minute risotto program that requires only three stirs is a repeatable kitchen system, not a shortcut

André Natera and Brandon Harpster cover the iCombi Pro, iVario Pro, and iHexagon across real kitchen scenarios including Peking duck skin development, brisket hybrid smoking workflows, zone heating, sous-vide-style cooking, and pasta-in-sauce preset functions. They also discuss what RATIONAL's corporate chef network actually does, how the training academies work, and what a field role in this industry looks like for chefs who want to move off the line.

RATIONAL

• RATIONAL USA Linktree → https://linktr.ee/rational_usa
• RATIONAL USA Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/rational_usa/
• Chef Brandon's Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/brandon.harpster/
• RATIONAL ChefLine → https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/customercare/contact-us/chefline/ | 866-306-2433

Chef's PSA

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/

Chef Chad Welch is an American Culinary Federation Certified Executive Chef and Certified Culinary Administrator, a Jacques Pépin Foundation ambassador, and the executive chef with The Urban Stillhouse, an elevated dining concept with locations in St. Petersburg, Florida and Somerset, Kentucky. Horse Soldier bourbon bottles are formed with steel from the World Trade Center.

He did not plan to become a chef. A Navy paperwork error put him in the galley instead of the engine room in 1992, scaling Armed Forces recipe cards to 5,000 portions aboard the USS America aircraft carrier, cutting frozen Cornish game hens on a band saw on his first day at sea, and cooking through storms that sent equipment crashing across the kitchen floor.

• What Navy galley cooking actually teaches about systems, scale, and pressure before culinary school
• Why the shift from scratch kitchens to convenience products cost the industry a generation of skill
• How the pre-Google era of memorization and mentorship built a different kind of chef, and what that means for anyone training today

André Natera and Chad Welch cover his first post-Navy restaurant job doing scratch pub cooking, his Mexican food upbringing and deliberate choice not to cook it professionally, the classic versus molecular cooking debate, and his work with the Jacques Pépin Foundation. The episode closes with the Horse Soldier Bourbon origin story and career advice from a chef whose entire path began by accident.

This episode is sponsored by Rational USA. Learn more at https://rationalusa.com

Guest

• Chad Welch on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/handthatfeeds/
• The Urban Stillhouse St. Pete → https://www.instagram.com/urbanstillhousestpete/
• The Urban Stillhouse Somerset → https://www.instagram.com/urbanstillhousesomerset/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/

Everyone wants the spotlight.

Until it actually hits.

Andre sits down with Emmanuel Chavez from Tatemo in Houston to talk about what happens when your restaurant gets attention before you’re ready for it.

Tatemo went from a tortilla operation to a full tasting menu fast. Recognition came with it. So did pressure.

This conversation gets into what it takes to run a tight kitchen with almost no space, how leadership changes when expectations spike, and the mistakes that come with building something in real time.

• What early success actually feels like• How to run a tasting menu in a small kitchen• Why leadership matters more than technique

Follow Chefs PSA and send this to a chef who thinks they’re ready.

Emmanuel Chavez on Instagram

LINKS & RESOURCES

Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/Shop Chef’s PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.comVisit Chef’s PSA Website → https://chefspsa.comSponsored by RATIONAL USA → https://rationalusa.com