As dynamos go, Chef Nikki Dailey seems pretty grounded. “The first time I came to Carpinteria, I saw kids playing, you know, kids on bikes,” she recalls. “I saw a girl running around in a princess gown on the streets. There was something very real about it. So I told my husband, let’s open a cooking school here.”
Today, not quite a year later, she has, if not a school, at least a small empire. “The cooking classes, a team-building seminar at Deckers, a catering service, and, oh yeah, the food truck. Do you think,” she asks in all earnestness, “I should do a restaurant?”
It might hinder her. Dailey, an attentive listener as well as a gregarious talker, comes to these accomplishments from globe-trotting experiences very near the top of the cooking universe. It helps to have kicked off at an early age. “When I was 4,” she laughed, “I used to do a cooking show for my stuffed animals. I’d line them all up with plates and forks and cook for them.”