Justin West’s Rise from Celebrated Chef to Meat Salesman

Visionary Behind Julienne and Wildwood Is Now Santa Barbara’s Market Forager

Justin West | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

By Fri Feb 23, 2024 | 03:58pm

Door-to-door meat salesman is not the future that Justin West envisioned 15 years ago, when his restaurant Julienne was widely touted as the best place to eat in Santa Barbara by none other than celeb-a-chef Anthony Bourdain. (His old menus, still visible on Yelp, would likely put Julienne atop the pack today as well.) But slanging strips and shrimps is much closer to #cheflife than a gardening career, which is what he was on the verge of starting during the dark days of the pandemic, following the divorce that closed Julienne and then the closure of two subsequent restaurants.

Far before then, though, West needed to escape the grueling, dawn-to-midnight routine running a bustling kitchen. “I knew that I wasn’t going to be a chef at that level any longer,” he said of his mindset when Julienne closed in late 2016. “I just love being a dad.”

As the son of a chef himself, he was confronting deeper psychological issues too. “I started to question why I’d ever done what I had done,” said West, who started cooking at age 11 in Eugene, Oregon, where his dad and uncles ran a popular barbecue joint. “I figured out that a lot of my cooking was driven by the desire to be better than my dad, which maybe wasn’t all that healthy, but it was the truth.”

Wildwood Kitchen — which ran in The Mill from 2015 to 2018, hammered by the economic one-two punch of the 2017 Thomas Fire and subsequent 1/9 Debris Flow in 2018 — was followed by SoulCal Smokehouse, which opened in the S.B. Public Market in January 2019. When that wasn’t working, West closed SoulCal in October 2019. 

“That was one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made, honestly,” said West, even though he and his partners ate $50,000 to pay all the vendors and shut down properly. “The pandemic happened four months later.”

He’d started driving Uber and Lyft, still in “full-on hustler-entrepreneur” mode, toting around a binder with new ideas that he’d bounce off passengers. He’d just taken a solid job with Pure Joy Catering when the pandemic hit, which killed all the company’s gigs as well as his driving business.

Like the rest of us, he was shopping for the last scraps of groceries at Lazy Acres during those first two weeks of slowing the spread. “It was just a madhouse — they were sold out of everything,” said West. “It was an exciting time to be a chef. We can make food out of whatever is available. But I realized at that moment that many people are just straight-up afraid of their kitchen.”

He ran into a former Julienne regular with a cart full of stuff that she didn’t know how to cook. He told her to wait before checking out, went outside Lazy Acres, called his meat vendors, and set up a deal to get her proteins directly, then added farmers’ market goods too. Through word of mouth, he was delivering food to 60 families around town, just helping people out and not really making money as he waited for COVID to blow over.

“Those were insanely long days,” said West, who called himself the Market Forager. “I’ve got a lot of respect for the UPS guys in town. You go crazy from driving 12 hours and never leaving Santa Barbara. I’d get home and think, ‘I could be in Oregon right now, but I’m still in Santa Barbara.’”

He decided to try something brand-new and was about to take a landscape job at Lotusland while launching his own gardening service. “My plan was to use my business acumen and name around town to just switch industries,” he said.

But right when he was about to start, one of his delivery customers called, said he could tell West was struggling, and put him in touch with a Ventura-based meat dealer named Sean Cooney. They met on what West later realized was the birthday of his late father, who had died suddenly in 2011. Cooney taught him how to make a living out of delivering meat, selling him his first freezer box that West put into the bed of a Ford Ranger in October 2020. 

“He’s been a father figure to me,” said West. “He mentored me in the meat and seafood game and taught me how to sell door to door.” The critical strategy was establishing steady clients. “If you don’t have a customer list that you’re actively building,” said West, “you’re never gonna make it.”

Justin West | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

He spent 2021 doing that, avoiding private chef and consulting gigs to build up Market Forager. That’s around the time he knocked on my door, and sold me a load of frozen meat. Our freezer is now regularly stocked with smartly packaged servings of steaks, mahi-mahi, scallops, pork chops, and even rather delicious chicken tenders, among specials like osso buco and grass-fed ground beef.

West is not a natural salesman — “shitty” is how he describes his skills. But he loves talking up the food and sharing recipes, and that’s worked well enough to grow his customer base. 

By 2022, he was working as a private chef again and consulting on projects. In the spring of 2023, he took on another job in charge of food and beverage at The Mission Club, a membership-driven golf course in Lompoc that’s open to the public. He developed a daily menu for the snack shack he renamed The Hook & Slice, and started doing Friday sit-down dinners at a steakhouse he called Range. “It’s been a great showroom for Market Forager,” said West, who sources proteins from his vendors for those menus. 

Now he’s moving into the next phase by developing one-off wine dinners, testing the concept for Mission Club members though two initial dinners featuring MCV, a Paso Robles brand, and Transcendence, whose owners are club members. On March 5, West is preparing the first open-to-the-public wine dinner with Melville Winery, pairing five courses with bubbles, three pinot noirs, chardonnay, and syrah. The cost is $125 per person, including tax and tip.

“My whole goal is to build value in the club membership and be able to attract more members,” said West. “That’s the answer to success at the golf course.”

Meanwhile, he’s relaunched the Market Forager website, and is now selling subscription meat boxes. It’s been pivot after pivot, but this celebrated chef remains very much in the food game rather than trimming your hedges, all while being able to be a dad and hit the slopes in his free time. And today, probably only in Santa Barbara, one of the best chefs of a generation will show up at your front door with a box of meat, excited to suggest how to cook it for dinner. 

See marketforager.com and missionclubgolf.com. 

Some examples of the Market Forager Meats | Photo: Courtesy
Some examples of the Market Forager Meats | Photo: Courtesy
Some examples of the Market Forager Meats | Photo: Courtesy

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