About Us: Our Family Resume

family resume |manifesto | our name

The Rattigans
Residents of Asheville since 2006

Objective

To create a beautiful space and a beautiful menu; to see the emotional impact of our creations in the experiences of our guests; to achieve financial comfort, so that we can further hone our place in the community and lighten our environmental impact, all the while living as decent human beings.

Experience

2003: Jael flirts with the cute bartender (Dan) at her brother’s wedding.

2004: Take a vacation together in Costa Rica. Profess their love for one another. Decide to move there. Dan drops out of law school. Jael drops out of business school. Buy an abandoned cacao farm. Drive back to Costa Rica in a vegetable oil-powered 40 foot long school bus-turned RV, pregnant and eager to make bread and chocolate for the good people of Costa Rica. Learn Spanish. Open Bread and Chocolate,
a café and dessert shop in Puerto Viejo de Limon, on the Caribbean coast.

2005: Birth first baby (Sam) in the apartment above the restaurant. Realize they’re not beach people. Learn about theobroma cacao from Marcos, the artisanal cacao farmer down the road. Start to play with chocolate recipes. Get hitched, legitimizing their bastard son.

2006: Sell Bread and Chocolate to a young buck (younger than Dan!) from Baltimore. Repatriate, in same school bus, newly ordained missionaries of chocolate. Move to Asheville, preggers once again. Start French Broad Luscious Chocolates.

2007: Hone their chocolate repertoire. Birth Max at our house in West Asheville. Sell chocolates at tailgate markets, Earth Fare and on the interweb. Write a business plan at Mountain BizWorks for a retail location.

2008: Open French Broad Chocolate Lounge February 2. Open seven days a week, we haven’t been closed since.

Skills and Abilities

Jael and Dan: collaborative chocolate making and recipe development, vision realization, making babies (retired)

Sam: prevarication, argument, creative story telling, voracious reading

Max: climbing, dancing, defiance with a smile

Education

Jael: University of Wisconsin – Madison, University of Minnesota School of Business

Dan: Oberlin College, University of Minnesota Law School

Together: Self-guided, never-ending chocolate education – from textbooks, cookbooks, chef friends, online classes, cacao farms of Costa Rica, culinary tours throughout United States and Central America, and of course, in the kitchen. (nope, they didn’t attend culinary school)

References (see press and testimonials sections, or call our moms.)