The founding principle
One tree.
Many fires.
We learned the craft of survival from a single breadfruit tree at the back of the house. We are passing that lesson forward.
I grew up in St. Mary, Jamaica. We did not have much. What we had was a tree. It was older than my grandmother, and my grandmother said it was older than her grandmother. It stood at the back of the house with its leaves as wide as a man's chest, and every season it gave us what the dry months and the empty cupboards could not.
A breadfruit, picked young, is dense and starchy and unforgiving. You cannot eat it raw. The fruit is a riddle — and the riddle has four answers, one for each fire.
Boiled
The yielding
Drop the breadfruit into rolling salted water. The skin softens. The flesh whitens and gives way to the fork. It tastes like a potato that has lived a longer life. This was the fire of the everyday — Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — the fire that kept us alive when there was nothing to celebrate and nothing to mourn.
Roasted
The sweetening
Bury the whole fruit in coals. The skin blackens to charcoal. Inside, the flesh turns gold, and a sweetness comes out of it that no boiled fruit ever knew. This was the Sunday fire. You waited for it. You smelled it from the road.
Fried
The transformation
Slice the fruit thin. Drop it into hot oil. Fifteen seconds and the texture changes forever — crisp on the outside, custard-soft on the inside. The same fruit. A different fruit. We ate it with our hands at the kitchen table.
Fire-Charred
The mastery
Held over open flame on a green stick, turned by hand. The skin smokes. The flesh near the skin caramelizes black; the flesh at the heart stays tender. This was the fire of weddings and funerals. The fire you only made for something that mattered.
I learned to cook on that tree. Long before I held a knife in a Manhattan kitchen, before the white coats and the tasting menus and the names on the door, I learned the most important thing a cook can know:
The same thing, given different fire, becomes a different gift.
That is what a young cook is. The same fruit. They arrive in a hundred different shapes, and the master decides which fire to apply. Some need to be boiled until they soften. Some need to be roasted slowly. Some are ready to be dropped into the oil. A few — the rare ones — are ready for the open flame.
Breadfruit is the platform that does what my mother did at the back of the house in St. Mary, only at the scale of a craft and a continent. We bring the apprentice to the right fire. We hold the wood. We do not let either side walk away from the table before the fruit is done.
Breadfruit was founded by Chef Godfrey McKenzie. He grew up in St. Mary, Jamaica, in his mother's kitchen — a schoolteacher who used a wood-burning stove not only to feed her own family but to bake bread for poor neighbors in their village. Long before any of the rest of it, the lesson was already there: food is the power to touch lives. That sentence is underneath everything Breadfruit has ever been.
The trade picked him up in Miami, where he took his first bakery job. There he met Keith Rinaldi, the master baker who taught him the centuries-old European techniques that ordered everything that came after. From Miami he moved to a cruise line, and from the cruise line into thirty countries — kitchens in Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas. Hundreds of cooks have come up under him. Too many of them walked out the back door for two dollars more an hour.
In 2012 he settled in Northern Virginia for a senior pastry position. He met his wife Tatiana there. In 2018, when a corner space opened on Catoctin Circle in Leesburg, they opened Dolce & Ciabatta — a bakery built around a German stone oven and a single discipline: artisan bread, unbleached and unbromated flour, liquid levain prepped from scratch. He says he listens to the loaves coming out of the oven.
“Listen to them crackle, as if they are talking.”
In 2022 he founded Breadfruit Academy on a single question: what if real skills came from real kitchens, not classrooms? Over thirty graduates later — some of whom started as dishwashers — the answer is on the line every night in bakeries and restaurants across the DMV. The Academy is the proof of concept.
Breadfruit, the platform, is what proof of concepts become. He built it because the model was broken, someone who has lived both ends of it had to fix it, and the kitchen is only the first craft we are going to repair.
— The full first-person narrative, in his own voice, will replace this draft when he has signed off on every word.