The Culinary Alchemist

09/25/2026

🍁 IT’S OFFICIALLY FALL, Y’ALL! 🍁
We’re celebrating the season with a little autumn magic at Havana 66!
Introducing this weekend fall cocktail special: our Apple C***r Mimosa! 🥂

Crisp apple c***r, bubbly Prosecco, a caramel sugar rim, and a beautiful fresh apple garnish. It’s everything we love about fall, served in a glass!

🍎 🥂🍾 Apple C***r Mimosa — $10
Come on down to Havana 66, grab a seat, and raise a glass to sweater weather, changing leaves, and all things fall!
Cheers, y’all! 🍂✨

***rMimosa

09/23/2026

Our cozy cabins await you at Observer Ranch! Wake up to the Sangre de Cristo mountains after enjoying the stars! Learning Center is in the background- sign up for a class, challenge a fellow camper to a game of chess, discover a new book in our Library 📚

Observer Ranch is:
-5 minutes from Skydive Colorado Springs
-15 minutes from Desert Reef Hot Springs
-20 minutes from Colorado Jeep Tours
-15 minutes from Royal Gorge Route Railroad
-10 minutes from Raft Masters | Whitewater Rafting in Colorado
-30 minutes from America’s Highest Suspension Bridge

Book your stay today at www.observerranch.com

09/22/2026

If you don’t support The Burnt Chef Project! They are doing amazing things for the hospitality industry across the globe!

Give them a follow!

Talk to someone. Reach out. Start somewhere. We'll be here whenever you're ready.

🔗 Free, confidential support available 24/7: https://www.theburntchefproject.com/free-mental-health-support

09/22/2026

A LITTLE SOMETHING I’M PROUD TO OFFER THROUGH THE CULINARY ALCHEMIST ✨🇺🇸 🖤🌿

As The Culinary Alchemist continues to grow, I want my services to remain accessible to some of the people in our community I deeply value.

If you are a veteran-owned business or restaurant, an active-duty service member, a veteran, or a senior! The Culinary Alchemist LLC is proud to offer you ✨25% off all services.✨

And I mean ✨ all services and all service tiers.✨

Whether you need a simple consultation or a more involved, hands-on package, the discount applies.

That includes:

✨ Restaurant consulting & operational assessments
✨ Pre-lease restaurant evaluations
✨ Menu development & restaurant systems
✨ Personal chef services
✨ Personalized meal planning
✨ Mobile bartending for weddings & private events
✨ Food & beverage photography
✨ And future Culinary Alchemist services as we continue to grow

You don't have to own a restaurant to qualify. If you're an individual veteran, active-duty service member, or senior looking for personal chef services, meal planning, bartending for a special event, or another service I offer, the same 25% discount applies to you.

For veteran-owned restaurants and businesses, it applies across my consulting tiers as well.

25% off. Across the board. No lesser version of the service.🖤

The Culinary Alchemist is built around hospitality, and to me, hospitality means taking care of people.

I’m proud to make this a permanent part of how I do business.

✨The Culinary Alchemist LLC ✨🇺🇸
Restaurant • Culinary • Bar • Hospitality

🖤🌿✨

- Stephanie Smith

09/21/2026

✨ THE CULINARY ALCHEMIST IS GROWING✨

When I started The Culinary Alchemist, the vision was simple: take nearly two decades of hospitality experience and use it to help restaurants create better food, stronger systems, healthier kitchens and more memorable experiences.

But food and hospitality have never existed only inside restaurant walls.

So, I’m expanding. 🖤🌿

✨The Culinary Alchemist LLC✨ is now offering:

🍽️ ✨RESTAURANT & HOSPITALITY CONSULTING

Restaurant assessments, menu development and revamps, kitchen and bar organization, workflow, cleanliness systems, prep and mise en place, plating, beverage development, staff training, food-cost guidance, opening support and pre-lease evaluations.

👩‍🍳 PRIVATE CHEF EXPERIENCES
Customized private dining for date nights, anniversaries, birthdays, vacation stays, dinner parties and intimate celebrations. Thoughtful menus designed specifically around you, your guests and the experience you want to create.

🥕 PERSONALIZED MEAL PLANNING
Chef-designed meal plans built around your actual household — your budget, schedule, cooking ability, preferences and family size. Plans can include organized grocery lists, recipes, prep guidance, ingredient crossover and strategies for reducing food waste.

🍸 MOBILE BARTENDING & EVENT BAR SERVICES

Professional bartending for weddings, private parties and special events, including bar setup and breakdown, customized cocktail menus, shopping and quantity guidance, signature cocktails and zero-proof options.

📸 FOOD & HOSPITALITY PHOTOGRAPHY

Professional content for restaurants, bars, breweries, food trucks and hospitality businesses — from plated dishes and cocktails to chefs at work, interiors, atmosphere and social-media content.

One business. A whole lot of hospitality.

Whether you need someone to walk into your restaurant and help figure out what isn't working, design a beautiful private dinner, take the stress out of feeding your family, run the bar at your wedding, or finally get photographs that make your food look as good as it tastes — that's what The Culinary Alchemist is becoming.

Because hospitality isn't just about putting food on a plate.

It's about the systems behind it, the people creating it, the story surrounding it, and how someone feels when it's placed in front of them.

✨The Culinary Alchemist LLC✨

*Restaurant Consulting • Private Chef Services • Personalized Meal Planning • Mobile Bartending • Food & Hospitality Photography

Serving Fremont County and surrounding Colorado communities. 🖤🌿✨

✨Now accepting inquiries for new services.

💌 Send me a message to talk about your restaurant, event, dinner, meal-planning needs or photography project.

Or shoot me a text at +1 (719) 499-9946

09/16/2026

Today’s inquiry brought up a service I hadn’t considered offering before — and it turns out, there may be a real need for it.

I was asked whether The Culinary Alchemist could walk through a potential restaurant space before the lease is signed and evaluate it from an experienced hospitality operator’s perspective.

My answer? Absolutely!!

I didn’t offer it before… but I do now. 🖤

Choosing a restaurant location is one of the biggest decisions a new owner will make.
It’s easy to walk into a space and envision the dining room full, the kitchen running and your concept finally coming to life.

My job is to look beyond the vision and ask:
Does this space actually make sense for the restaurant you want to build?

Tell me your vision, and I can help you build it!

✨ THE CULINARY ALCHEMIST ✨

Pre-Lease Restaurant Evaluation Package

BEFORE THE WALKTHROUGH

We’ll begin with a consultation about your concept, menu and service style, anticipated seating, bar program, staffing needs, hours of operation, takeout or delivery plans, and your overall vision for the property.

ON-SITE OPERATIONAL EVALUATION
I’ll walk the property with you and evaluate it through the eyes of a chef, bartender and hospitality operator, including:

• Kitchen layout, prep space & production flow

• Refrigeration, freezer & dry-storage capacity

• Existing restaurant equipment & obvious equipment needs

• Dishwashing, receiving, waste & BOH workflow

• Bar layout, storage, refrigeration & service functionality

• Dining room & FOH workflow

• Server stations, POS placement & service bottlenecks

• Guest traffic & overall functionality

• Storage for food, beverages, chemicals, linens & supplies

• Concept compatibility

• Potential opening needs

• Operational concerns worth investigating before signing the lease

YOUR PRE-LEASE EVALUATION REPORT
Following the walkthrough, you’ll receive a written Culinary Alchemist Pre-Lease Evaluation Report organizing the findings into:

🟢 Existing Strengths — features already supporting your concept

🟡 Consider Before Committing — items that may require modification, investment or additional planning

🔴 Professional Investigation Recommended — concerns that should be evaluated by the appropriate licensed professional before committing to the property.

You’ll also receive a preliminary Opening Needs List, organized into:
Essential Before Opening • Operational Improvements • Future Upgrades

OPTIONAL NEXT STEP
If you decide the property is right for you, The Culinary Alchemist can continue working alongside you as the restaurant begins taking shape — from kitchen and bar organization to menu development, beverage programs, SOPs, opening and closing procedures, workflow, inventory systems, training and opening preparation.

✨A pre-lease evaluation does not replace a licensed building inspector, contractor, electrician, plumber, engineer, attorney, fire authority, health department or other specialized professional. ✨

This service is an operational hospitality assessment designed to identify questions, opportunities and potential concerns from a restaurant operator’s perspective.

Sometimes the best time to hire a restaurant consultant isn’t after something has gone wrong.

It’s before you sign the lease.

🖤 Before you invest in the space, invest in understanding it.

If you're considering opening a restaurant, purchasing an existing operation or taking over a restaurant space and would like another experienced set of eyes before making that commitment,
The Culinary Alchemist is now accepting inquiries for Pre-Lease Restaurant Evaluations.

Apparently there was a service missing from my list.

If you need something more comprehensive or on the simple side, shoot me a message or email!

If there’s a need for it, I’m your girl. 🖤

No need to jump into a lease and then find out half your kitchen equipment needs to be replaced, starting a restaurant is expensive and tedious, let me help you ..help yourself!

Stephanie Smith , Founder of
✨The Culinary Alchemist✨

08/31/2026

Your Employees Are Human Beings Before They Are Employees.

Restaurants are built on people.

Not just cooks.
Not just servers.
Not just bartenders, dishwashers, hosts, managers, prep cooks and bussers.

Human beings.

And people have lives that don't stop existing when they clock in.

The bartender behind the bar laughing with guests might be wondering how they're going to pay rent.

The server smiling through a six-table section might have spent the morning crying in their car.

The dishwasher buried in a mountain of plates might be dealing with something at home nobody in that kitchen knows about.

The cook absolutely crushing service might be running on three hours of sleep because life didn't give a damn that they were scheduled for a double today.

And sometimes someone calls out.

Sometimes someone is late.

Sometimes a normally incredible employee has a terrible week maybe a horrible month.

Yes—restaurants need accountability. Reliability matters. Standards matter. The business still has to operate.

But ✨compassion and accountability can exist in the same building.✨

Somewhere along the way, this industry became strangely proud of suffering.

We've bragged about working sick.

We've worked through injuries.

We've cried in walk-ins and walked right back onto the line.

We've buried people we loved and showed up for dinner service because "we couldn't leave the team short."

We've treated exhaustion like a badge of honor and burnout like the admission price for belonging in hospitality.

But maybe building better restaurants means finally understanding something incredibly simple:

Your employees are not equipment.

They're human beings.

They have children and families that depend on them.
They have relationships.
They have bills.
They lose people.
They get sick.
Their cars break down.
Their pets have emergencies.
They struggle financially.
They have days when life becomes heavier than the apron they're expected to put on.

And when you have a genuinely great employee going through a genuinely difficult moment, how you treat them in that moment matters.

People remember the manager who asked, "Are you okay?"

They remember the chef who said, "Go take care of your family. We'll figure it out."

They remember the owner who saw a human being standing in front of them instead of an inconvenience on the schedule.

And you know what?

Those are often the restaurants people WANT to work for.

When employees feel respected, supported and valued as people, they don't just show up for a paycheck.

They show up for each other.

They protect the restaurant.

They care about the guest experience.

They take pride in what they're building.

And when the inevitable Saturday-night sh*tshow arrives, they're far more likely to stand beside you and fight through it.

Hospitality shouldn't only apply to the people sitting at the tables.

Sometimes the people who need it most are the ones standing behind them.

✨The Culinary Alchemist ✨🫶🏼

*Building better restaurants by remembering the humans who build them.*

Human. Kind.

Be both 🖤🌿✨🫶🏼

08/28/2026

✨THE CULINARY ALCHEMIST ✨

🇨🇺 BEHIND THE PLATE ✨🖤🌿🍸

There is something almost magical about the days before a restaurant opens.
Not the polished version everyone sees when they walk through the doors.
The other version.

The boxes. The inventory. The deep cleaning. The recipes scribbled on paper. The liquor bottles spread across the bar while you figure out what stays, what goes, and what you can turn into something beautiful. The menus rewritten twelve times. The prep lists. The missing equipment. The last-minute grocery runs. And, apparently, a printer fighting for its life. 😂

This is the part of restaurants I have always loved.

Because before a restaurant becomes a restaurant, it’s just a room full of ideas and a group of people willing to work hard enough to bring them to life.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to step into Havana 66 and help develop, organize, and bring its bar program to life as this new concept prepares to open its doors in downtown Cañon City.
I’ve been digging through inventory, developing cocktails, writing recipes and prep lists, organizing the bar, and figuring out how to create something that feels like Havana 66 — not just another place pouring drinks.

And on Friday, September 4th, it all comes to life. 🌴🍹✨

Havana 66 will be celebrating alongside Luna Grace Boutique and Luna Grace Spa Wellness & Rejuvenation at 605 Main Street from 4–7 PM.

There will be shopping, specials, food, goodie bags for the first 50 guests at Luna Grace Spa, and Havana 66 is coming out swinging with 50¢ drinks during the celebration!

And when the official celebration winds down, DON’T GO HOME. 👀🔥

Havana 66 will keep the night going with an after-hours celebration featuring those famous St. Louis-style pork steaks, cold drinks, and plenty more from the kitchen.
And yes…

THE CULINARY ALCHEMIST HERSELF WILL BE BEHIND THE BAR. 🖤🌿🪄

✨Making Magic Happen! 🍹🥃🥂🍾🍸✨

I’ll be there slinging drinks, introducing some of the cocktails I’ve been developing, and making a little bar magic happen all night long.

After all these years in hospitality, I still get excited watching an idea become a restaurant.

Because restaurants aren’t born when someone hangs an OPEN sign on the door.
They’re born in these weeks.
In the cleaning.
In the mistakes.
In the tasting.
In the conversations across the bar.
In the recipes that don’t work until suddenly they do.

In a group of people looking at an empty room and collectively deciding:
“We’re going to make something here.”
And then one evening, the lights come on.
The music starts.
Someone sits down at the bar.
And you hand them a drink.
That’s the alchemy. 🖤🥃✨
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4TH

📍 605 Main Street — Downtown Cañon City

✨ Luna Grace Boutique + Luna Grace Spa
🌴 Havana 66
🍹 50¢ drinks from 4–7 PM
🔥 After-hours St. Louis-style pork steaks
🍸 And yours truly behind the bar making magic happen.

Come see what we’ve been working on.

✨The Culinary Alchemist✨

Behind the Plate: Real restaurants. Real experiences.
Real lessons for the hospitality industry.

08/12/2026

There are certain meals that change the way you taste food forever.

For me, one of those meals came from a little restaurant tucked away in Punta Gorda, Florida, called The Perfect Caper.

At the time, I was a young pastry chef who had worked my way up from being a hungry, curious dishwasher—completely fascinated by food, restaurants, and everything happening behind the scenes.

The Perfect Caper felt different.

It was dark and intimate, with these massive white marble tables that glow against the dimly lit dining room.

I remember sitting there drinking $12 ch*****ne—which, at the time, felt incredibly fancy—and taking everything in.

And then I discovered The Warm Goat.

Warm herb encrusted goat cheese surrounded by all these beautiful accompaniments, each one completely different from the next.

You could add a little of this, a lot of that, try different combinations and essentially create an entirely different bite every single time.

It was basically Build-A-Bear for cheese.

And I was in love. 😂

I have made my own version of The Warm Goat many, many times since leaving Punta Gorda.

But looking back now, I realize it wasn't simply the dish that stayed with me.

It was the restaurant.

The atmosphere.

The experience.

The feeling of sitting somewhere and realizing that someone had thought about all of it.

And maybe that's why restaurants have fascinated me for my entire adult life.

I don't love restaurants because I love food.

I love restaurants because they're one of the few places where every art form meets.

Architecture.

Lighting.

Music.

Writing.

Hospitality.

Psychology.

Chemistry.

Agriculture.

History.

Craftsmanship.

Conversation.

Memory.

And then...

Someone hands you a plate.

No wonder I never left the industry.

I was never just cooking.

I was studying one of the most human experiences we have:

✨Gathering around a table.✨

And all these years later, out of curiosity, I looked up The Perfect Caper.

They're still there.

And so is The Warm Goat.

The dish that fascinated a young chef all those years ago is still sitting on the menu.

And somehow, seeing that felt incredibly full circle.

Because maybe The Culinary Alchemist didn't begin when I created a business, designed a logo, started writing about restaurants, or decided to put everything I've learned into a book.

Maybe it began much earlier than that.

Maybe it began with a curious dishwasher who became a young pastry chef, sitting at a glowing white marble table with a glass of ch*****ne, completely mesmerized by a plate of warm goat cheese and realizing that restaurants could be so much more than somewhere we go to eat.

I just didn't know what I was looking for yet.

✨This is where the story begins.✨

— Stephanie Smith
✨The Culinary Alchemist 🖤🌿✨

08/01/2026

**🥘 Behind the Plate | Supporting Local**

One of my favorite parts of this community is watching passionate people pour their hearts into what they do.

Congratulations to my friend, Chef Graves, and the entire young Graves Boys team. Your dedication, hard work, and commitment to your family and our community deserve every bit of the recognition you're receiving.

And if you haven't had their famous fry bread yet... you're seriously missing out. It's absolutely delicious and well worth the stop.

As always, I believe great communities are built by supporting the people who work tirelessly to make them better. Here's to celebrating local chefs, small businesses, and the passion behind every plate.

With appreciation,

With so much love- Stephanie Smith

✨The Culinary Alchemist✨

It's just a matter of time before we have a restaurant here in Cañon City. Thank you to the thousands of local eaters who have pushed us to thrive. With a great concept and a food trailer attached to it, i'm just DREAMING big! It may take time but count on this culinary conquest to happen. Love you Cañon City. Outside our town, eyes are on Cañon. Let's give them more reason to come visit!