About Benjamin Maides
Benjamin Maides is a Swiss-born, Omaha-raised chef whose career has been defined by a commitment to seasonal cooking, direct sourcing, and ingredient-driven technique. After graduating from Metro Community College’s culinary program in Omaha in 2006, he spent years working in California, Colorado, and northern Italy — including time at the acclaimed Bouchon in Napa Valley. He returned to Omaha in 2012, staged in several local kitchens, and co-founded Au Courant Regional Kitchen in the Benson neighborhood in 2016. The restaurant, built around a weekly-changing menu sourced directly from local farms, earned Maides a James Beard Foundation semifinalist nomination for Best Chef Midwest in 2020. He later served as Culinary Director at Flagship Restaurant Group, where he focused on restaurant development and test kitchen work. Alongside his kitchen career, Maides has worked closely with farms and producers, bringing an agricultural perspective to his approach to menus and technique.
Episode Overview
Most chefs claim to cook with the seasons. Benjamin Maides built his entire career around actually doing it. In this episode, he joins Andre Natera for a direct conversation about what ingredient-driven cooking requires in practice — the discipline, the sourcing relationships, the menu development process, and the real pressures that come with running a tasting menu restaurant while balancing farm work and multiple roles. The conversation covers his time in northern Italy, what he learned at Bouchon, how he thinks about technique, and the honest side of burnout, time management, and building a sustainable culinary career outside of major food cities.
What You Will Learn in This Episode
What Real Seasonal Cooking Actually Requires — The discipline and sourcing relationships behind a menu that changes weekly, why most kitchens that claim to be seasonal are not, and what it means to build a restaurant completely around what is coming out of the ground.
Lessons from Northern Italy and Bouchon — What working in Italy taught Maides about simplicity, restraint, and respect for ingredients, and what his time at Bouchon under Thomas Keller’s standards added to his understanding of precision and professional kitchen culture.
How to Build a Tasting Menu That Works — The reasoning behind menu structure, how to create a progression that feels natural rather than engineered, and what separates a tasting menu that communicates a point of view from one that is just a collection of courses.
The Realities of Running Multiple Roles at Once — What it looks like to be chef, co-owner, farm partner, and menu developer simultaneously, how time management actually functions in that context, and where burnout enters the picture.
Building a Culinary Career Outside Major Food Cities — How Maides built a nationally recognized restaurant in Omaha, what that required in terms of community trust and sourcing infrastructure, and why working outside of New York or San Francisco has its own demands and advantages.
The Connection Between Farming and Cooking — Why chefs who spend time on farms develop a fundamentally different relationship to ingredients, how that shifts menu thinking, and what it means to make agricultural relationships a core part of a restaurant’s identity rather than a marketing angle.
Connect with Benjamin Maides
Instagram: @swissbenny
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