About Iman Kawa
Iman Kawa is a Michelin-trained chef with ten years of professional kitchen experience and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. She built her career in fine dining before transitioning to food entrepreneurship, founding Better Than Your Mothers, a luxury custom cookie brand. She competed on Next Level Chef Season 4 as a professional chef, bringing her fine dining background into a high-pressure competition environment. She is also a practitioner of Muay Thai, a discipline she connects to the mental and physical demands of professional cooking.
Episode Overview
André Natera sits down with Iman Kawa to talk about what it takes to compete at a serious level in a culinary competition and come out with your identity and perspective intact. She breaks down the strategies she used to handle high-pressure cooking challenges, what the experience taught her about performing under stress, and what television does not show about what is actually required to succeed on a show like Next Level Chef.
They cover her transition from fine dining kitchens to building Better Than Your Mothers as a luxury food brand, the parallels she draws between Muay Thai discipline and kitchen performance, and what perseverance and consistency look like when you are building a business in a category that demands both creativity and execution. It is a candid conversation about what culinary ambition looks like outside the traditional restaurant path.
Topics covered in this episode:
- What competing on Next Level Chef actually requires and what viewers do not see behind the scenes
- Strategies for managing high-pressure cooking challenges in a competition format
- The transition from Michelin-trained fine dining to food entrepreneurship
- Building Better Than Your Mothers as a luxury custom cookie brand
- What Muay Thai and professional kitchen performance have in common
- The role of perseverance, discipline, and consistency in culinary success
- What a culinary career looks like when you build it outside the traditional restaurant track
Guest
@imannkawa
@betterthanyourmothers
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