Area chef continues her culinary odyssey at museum eatery

Kaytlin Dangaran didn’t just build a restaurant from the ground up over the past two years.

She’s also raising one of the world’s tiniest sous chefs.

Dangaran, the executive chef and general manager of Bistro, has found balance in her life here in Sarasota, where her day includes time to not just manage the course of a thriving eatery but also without fail to get in the kitchen and make sure she cooks for her family.

It’s a gesture of love for Dangaran, who learned to cook at the side of her mother from an early age. And so it’s no surprise that her son James, not even 3 years old, insists on his own knives and cutting board in her kitchen at home.

“My 2-year-old is obsessed with cooking,” says Dangaran. “I had to buy him plastic knives. Like little kid knives. In the mornings, he runs into my room, ‘Mama, crack egg.’ He loves to cut. He asked for steak and eggs this morning. I was like, ‘You are 2 and a half!’”

Bistro, housed at the Sarasota Art Museum, is the project that brought Dangaran to town, completing her cooking odyssey that has taken her across a continent and back. The 36-year-old is a Tampa native and studied foreign affairs and cultural anthropology at Florida State University, and she enrolled at the French Culinary Institute in New York after completing her education.

And that was only the beginning of her culinary journey. Dangaran helped open a suite of Italian restaurants in Manhattan — Dell’anima, L’Artusi and L’Apicio — and she also spent a couple years learning her craft at trendy hot spot Cotogna in San Francisco.

That stop in San Francisco, brief though it may have been, is notable because it’s where Dangaran met her husband, John, who runs front of house at Bistro.

The couple also worked together at a cafe at the Perez Art Museum Miami prior to relocating here, but running Bistro has become a family affair.

“We met working together so it works,” says Kaytlin of their working dynamic. “We found a good medium to make it work. But I don’t think that can work for everyone. The good thing with John is that when it comes to service and running the restaurant, I defer to him. He worked at Quince, which is Michelin starred. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to those kind of things. And when it comes to food, he says, ‘You’ve got it.’”

John, for his part, is even clearer on their working dynamic. His wife is his boss both at home and at work, and he likes it that way.

After years of working the crushing hours of restaurant dinner service, John and Kaytlin have been able to settle into a working schedule that allows them to take care of business and their growing family.

“We tag team; one person will come in earlier and open up the restaurant,” says John. “The other will carpool and take the kids to school. But we’re both typically home for bedtime, which is great. That’s one thing that Sarasota has given us the opportunity for, which is invaluable. … When we have a tough day at work, we’re always like, ‘Same team. At home and at work.’”

A Big Move

With two toddlers and a restaurant to run, that team has been busy.

The Dangarans moved to Sarasota in September 2019, and Bistro was just a construction site at that point. The eatery opened about a year later with the world in the throes of the COVID pandemic, and it took about a year to grow a steady flow of customers.

Now, the place is packed, and the Dangarans are kept busy running the day-to-day operations and also catering for exhibition openings and corporate events. Kaytlin, long accustomed to the long hours in the kitchen, is now learning to run a staff.

“My favorite thing about being a chef is you’re never bored,” she says. “There’s always something new to learn. I’ll never know all the techniques. There’s always that drive for knowledge.

"When I took over Bistro, I also got the opportunity to do the general managing, which is a lot of financials. And I did not go to college for accounting or anything like that. But it created this whole new area where I could learn all these things I don’t know.”

Now, aided by sous chef Jeremy Thayer, she’s designing not just a seasonal menu for the customers at Bistro, but also themed menus for exhibition openings. Dangaran says she loves that her dining room is not just a homey atmosphere but also a working gallery space.

And every time she designs a menu, she’s relying on local staples. Dangaran said that her background in Italian restaurants means she is constantly searching for ingredients that are local and fresh, and in Sarasota, that means produce and milk and artisanal honey.

When designing a menu, she likes to either do something new and fresh or a dead solid take on a classic dish. On her Bistro menu, for instance, she singles out the French Onion soup — a tried-and-true bistro staple — but also the spring grain tartine.

“It’s C’est La Vie bread toasted, and it’s got smashed avocado with preserved lemon vinaigrette which gives it a nice tang,” she says. “Everything’s spring. Favas. Asparagus. Spring peas. English peas. Then we put a six minute egg on top and cover it in edible flowers.”

Love What You Do

Dangaran cites advice from her dad, who ran an international cable company, regarding how she chose her career.

He told her to do what she loves, because she’ll spend so much of her life doing it.

And she took that literally; for Dangaran, food and feeding people has always equalled love. She can recall starting out in the industry and working as a pastry chef even though she didn’t like it and wasn’t good at that aspect of craft.

She wanted to be a chef so badly that she was willing to put in the time and the energy to make it happen no matter what that meant.

“Working in a kitchen is tough,” she says. “It’s long hours. It’s hot. It’s carrying heavy pots and pans. There’s a lot of physicality that is involved in not necessarily being a chef but in all the steps you need to get to be a chef. There’s 17 different levels you have to go through before you get there, and that’s why there’s this beautiful camaraderie between chefs.”

Does she have any thoughts on what it means to be a woman in an industry traditionally run by men?

Dangaran says that it’s just like any other industry; her path has been more difficult at times, but she’s gotten where she is because she was willing to make sacrifices. And she's aware that every choice she makes has a repercussion on her home life.

“Everybody’s like, ‘What’s your secret? How do you do it?’ I have a nanny,” she says. “That is the secret. Nobody does this on their own. I have a nanny and she lives with me. Raising kids is just difficult in general, but I always tell people, ‘I’m not a general manager, a chef and a full-time mom.’ No. I have help. That pressure is across the board whether you’re a working mom or a stay-at-home mom. You never think you’re doing the right thing.”

But every day, no matter how busy she’s been at work, Dangaran is back in the kitchen at home, serving meals to her family with love. It’s always been important for her to have a family meal be a nightly priority, and now her young kids are even getting in on the act.

“We always joke that Jack is going to be the youngest master sommelier,” says John Dangaran. “He’s always wanting to smell wine. We never let him taste it, but he loves the crystal glass. And he loves tasting the salt. James is the one who likes to cut.”

Right now, the Dangarans are in a sweet spot, raising both their toddlers and their young eatery, and there’s nowhere else they’d rather be in the world. They’re thrilled to be working for Constellation Culinary Group, and they love the regulars who have been dining at Bistro. But what’s their ultimate ambition? Would they like to open their own restaurant together some day?

That depends on whether you ask John or Kaytlin about their future.

“My husband is always talking about it. He would love to open his own restaurant,” she says. “For me, that’s maybe less my dream. My dream is to grow businesses and learn and be able to get different skillsets. After doing the financials, running the financials of your own restaurant with your own dollars sounds anxiety-ridden to me. It’s high-risk.

"I don’t know if that’s ultimately something I want to do; but I know I have a partner that definitely wants to if I do.”

John smiles and nods when asked about that part of their relationship.

It’s the elephant in the kitchen, if you will, the ambition that will always be there even if it never happens.

“I’d love to open a restaurant some day,” he says. “I joke that I’ll open a coffee shop and she can help out on weekends. We both had parents who were entrepreneurs. My mom owned her own business, and her dad owned his own business. That’s always been instilled in us. It’s not necessarily about money; it’s pride of ownership. We have a bit of that here; this is our baby. It was a construction zone and now it’s a full-fledged restaurant. And it’s gorgeous.”