Ep. 1745 Ikimi Dubose - Woodson | Voices With Cynthia Chaplin

Welcome to the Italian Grape Geek podcast. Join us as we explore personal stories of travel and tasting with Italy's must know grape varietals. Chart your own course with My Italian Grape Geek Journal, your personal tasting companion to accompany the series, available now on Amazon. With thanks to Calangilo and Partners for their generous support with this project. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. I'm Cynthia Chaplin, and this is Voices. Every Wednesday, I will be sharing conversations with international wine industry professionals discussing issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion through their personal experiences working in the field of wine. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods. Hello, and welcome to Voices. This is me, Cynthia Chaplin. And today, I am so excited to welcome Ekimi Du Boiswudsen to Voices. Ekimi is the cofounder and CEO of Roots Fund in New York, and she was chosen as one of wine enthusiast future 40 in 2022. Roots Fund is creating new spaces in the wine industry and making change happen in areas of diversity and equity in our sector, which all of you know is very important to me. So I'm utterly thrilled to have you on the show today. Happy New Year. Thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Happy New Year to you as well. Happy New Year to all of our wine drinkers of the world. I know. And I hope everybody has something good in their glass today, something preferably Italian. But For sure. For sure. Well, listen. You've had such an interesting path into wine. I've been wanting to talk to you for ages. So let's get that out there for our listeners who don't know about you. I'm not sure there are many people left who don't, but we'll just be sure. You grew up in Brooklyn, and you traveled in The States a lot as a child. You visited your relatives while your mom was going to nursing school. And travel ultimately became a huge part of your life. And you worked in restaurants during college, and you saved up enough to backpack around the world. And you continue to work in these amazing restaurants in lots of far flung places all over the planet. So let's talk about what the plan was when you were young, you know, travel and hospitality, and where were you going with all of this at that point? Oh, wow. That's very great information that you have. Thank you so much for doing great research. I am a very well known stalker. Well, for me, I got into the restaurant industry when I was around 15 years old and wanted to work for one of the best chefs in New York at that time, chef Walter Plinder. He was Austrian. He had done Boku store. He had been an Olympic chef, and he had a restaurant, down with Marriott at Windows on the World and over in the World Trade Center. I remember it. Yep. I sat at the back door of that restaurant every day for months, introducing myself to him, asking him to work for him, and I came up in a time when we didn't see women in restaurants. It wasn't even about color at that point for me. It was just women didn't work in restaurants, and if they did, they were prep cooks, and it was a hard job to acquire. And one day, line cook, had called out, and they pulled the prep cook up to the line, and he was coming in and told me today would be the day I could wash dishes. And I started out there polishing silverware and eventually made it into the prep kitchen. And then one day, one of our line cooks was out sick and I got my chance to be on the line and it turned into the rest of my high school career I spent there. I had been trained there. I had studied with a lot of the chefs that came through there that came for his mentorship when they wanted to work on studying for like getting on a Baku store team. So I had seen that intense level of training and become completely infatuated with the culinary world. I got a scholarship from an organization called CCAP, which is based out of New York careers through the culinary arts program. That's also where I met the Roots Fund cofounder Carlton McCoy Junior. And that program put me through college at Johnson and Wales, very prestigious culinary institution. I got a degree there. And when college was done, I was so busy working the entire time unlike a lot of the students that I was studying with. I didn't plan for what was next after college. And I remember going into the career office, and there was this big board on the wall that was, like, pick your internship, pick your next step. There was nothing on the wall. And I went into my career coordinator, and he was like, hey. You should have planned this a year ago. I don't know how you missed this. So I was like, well, what do I do? I'm done with school. You know? How do I go to the next step of my career? I don't wanna necessarily go right back to New York and work in restaurants unless that's the only option. And at that point, I reached back out to my first chef and my mentor, and he told me you should travel the world and and study food. Like, the best way for you to learn about it is to go where the people are making it and study it with them. And that kinda led me on a backpacking journey through Asia, spending a lot of time in Europe, working in restaurants, just kinda doing stages and stints that were lasting two, three months, you know, literally going to a city with no idea of where I'm gonna stay, only having the name of a restaurant and a chef. And the chef, like, I went in that night at work, and he was like, okay. You're gonna come home with me. We'll find you a place to live. And I did that repeatedly and built up this big network of learning from some of the world's best chefs. And I realized at that point that it was bigger than food for me. It was more about culture. Like, I was studying culture and studying people, and food just happened to be the vessel. And that really just launched my career. And coming back to The States, you know, a lot of my friends were struggling to find jobs and I was getting offers like instantly because of some of the chefs that I had worked for that had given me recommendations. I never left the restaurant without a letter in my hand that a chef could recommend me and tell me and that was a powerful tool. And I came back in and worked in restaurants for years. I got recruited by Ritz Carlton and Marriott again to do all of the international food programming, working at some of their best hotels here in The States and overseas, opening up new restaurants. And it was a great career. And for me, my friends were in a lot of restaurants that were famous but they weren't making any money, they didn't have any benefits. And for me, you know, I helped raise my siblings at a young age. I had to have benefits. I had to have a really good salary. To live in New York City, to live in Boston, to live in these big cities, you have to be able to afford the rent and have a couple of bedrooms. So I was truly fortunate for, like, selecting that path, but it was a great career. And, working in restaurants all those years, you know, I injured my back and I ended up going into the front of the house for what was supposed to be a couple months and it turned into the next sector of my career, you know, going on that path of being a server, understanding the host system, going into the GM training program, and then eventually running front of the house programs just as good as I did in the kitchen. So I've kinda the double arm sword here, which is very rare in the restaurant industry where you find a chef and a front of the house manager that have worked equally in both fields and very knowledgeable and more importantly, more successful in both sides of the business. So that's kind of been my track record. It's so cool. It's such a cool story. That's why I wanted to get it out there, and you've put it out in the best way. You know, going from the oh, shit moment of I'm graduating and I don't know what to do next to sort of doing all of