Meet the Chef: Britney ValenzE

Chef Britney Valenze didn't choose food. It chose her early, and it never let go. "It is my blood," she says, and she means it literally. Her family ran a deli, and by thirteen she was working the counter.

Center City Deli sat on King Street, where the Rural Taproom is now. Britney's days started before the sun, with a forty-five minute drive into the city alongside her mother. She brewed the coffee. Set out the pastries they'd baked the night before. Washed dishes, filled napkin dispensers, flipped the chairs down, walked across the street for the newspaper. By the time customers started coming through the door, she was taking orders and helping build sandwiches. She didn't drink coffee back then, but she loved the smell of it mixing with the sandwiches as the place came alive. "I still remember that smell when I walk into certain coffee shops," she says. Most days ended with a trip to the corner dollar store, tip money in hand. What made it good wasn't the work. It was spending the day with her mom.

That sense of food as something shared runs through her whole upbringing. Britney is one of nine children, and dinner was non-negotiable: every night as a family, every Sunday without exception as the kids grew and scattered. Her mother cooked from scratch, daily, because with a family that size there wasn't another way. Bread came out of the oven often enough that homemade strawberry jam is still one of the standout memories she shares with her siblings. Her father cooked less, but differently, improvising, testing flavors, refusing to call a dish finished until it felt right. She didn't always appreciate it at the time. She remembers resenting his soft-centered omelettes. She appreciates it now. "I learned different things from each of them," she says, "but we came together as a family each night over the food, which is the memory that means the most, and why I try to put as much love and care into what I do."

She carries a clear food identity into her own cooking: vegetables first, protein second, the kind of cook who wants every side dish on the Thanksgiving table. Her shelf reflects it. Half Baked Harvest and Vegetables: The Ultimate Cookbook are the two she returns to, both built around making vegetables the point rather than the afterthought. Off the clock, she reads historical fiction, memoirs, rom-coms, and fantasy in rotation, switching genres to keep her thinking varied. A 2018 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, she's spent the years since building the kind of consistency and confidence that only comes from repetition: the same dishes, refined again and again, until the technique disappears and the food just works.

Other Favorites:

Favorite thing to cook professionally: fish

Most prized kitchen possession: her chef knife, along with aprons gifted by chefs she's worked under

Chef she'd most want to stage with: Alice Waters (Chez Panisse)

Off the clock: working out, pottery, hiking, reading, time with her family

What's changed in the last five years isn't really about technique, though that's improved too. It's confidence: the kind that comes from knowing her food, trusting her instincts against other cooks in a professional kitchen, and finding new ways to push a dish further each time she makes it.

-Paul