Salt Cure: article by Julie Gordon

A disabled chef launches a new career
by going with the grains and spicing up
the ever-popular Tupperware party

By Julie Gordon

Until she landed at Le Dome, Joni Fay Hill was a rising star on the LA restaurant scene: sauté cook at Luques under Suzanne Goin; celebrated salad maker at Rix Supper Club in Santa Monica; sous chef and then executive chef at a steak house called Balboa.
Then the curtain fell on her career as a chef at the iconic restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Hill ran the sauté line. Or, rather, the line ran her. She worked lunches and dinners, six days a week. The restaurant sat 400. Prep cooks were in short supply. She worked till she dropped, at the end of her four-month stint at Le Dome, unable to hold a sauté pan.
Diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, Hill donned wrist braces. She went to hand therapy three days a week. Doctors told her they wanted to operate; that she’d never cook again. Discouraged, she drifted aimlessly for a year, realizing she needed to reinvent herself.

A mad scientist in the kitchen

Hill was at home, cooking in her kitchen, “playing around” with some specialty salts she’d become acquainted with as a chef, when she reached for her camera and took a few pictures with her close up lens. Her salt cure began immediately. Each crystal appeared so different. “I started to fall in love with the differences of each salt I came across. Maldon salt from Essex just fascinated me, because it’s like tiny pyramids,” she says. Hill delved deeper and deeper into artisanal salts, and, “like a mad scientist in the kitchen,” started experimenting with the various textures and inherent tastes of various specialty salts.
She brought out her food dehydrator and zested lemons and limes. Played with peppercorn mixes. Drifted into green teas. Hill gave her creations to friends as gifts and heard the inevitable. “You should sell these.” Artisanally made salts—from France, Hawaii, England, and Japan—did exist. But surprisingly, Hill found nobody yet doing what she was doing—adding a chef’s touch to a most elementary building block of fine cuisine.
“I treat each new salt like a sommelier treats food and wine,” she says. “ You have to think what’s going to be paired perfectly with this texture of salt.”
Her fledgling business, Salistry, now offers more than a dozen flavored salts, most of her own creation. Buyers shopping at the company website (www.saltistry.com) can read product descriptions like these:
•Herb grey salt—An amazing addition to steaks & roasted vegetables. Organic grey salt, oregano, thyme & basil create a beautiful balance to hearty, full-flavored dishes. Salt origin: Guerande, France.
•Heirloom tomato salt—Tiny Korean Fake salt is paired with sun roasted heirloom tomatoes to make an indescribably aromatic & flavorful infusion. Perfect for buttered noodles, salads, tuna. Salt origin: Korea.
Hill also offers the following sea salt infusions: Coconut Black Lemon Thyme, Six Pepper, Smoked Chili, Mushroom Herb, and Lime Flake. Saltistry sells its creations for $12 each in ball jars and in five different samplers ($18), each offering small amounts of five salts. Other products include handcrafted salt boxes for the table and award winning Bequet caramels from a Montana company that Hill resells with a small bag of lavender grey salt.
The four-year-old business remains tiny. So far, it’s just Hill and her business partner Denise Daclan, who handles the books and much of the marketing in between gigs as a contract photographer for Boeing. Having outgrown her home kitchen, and with the business not yet big enough for its own production facilities, Hill heads for a commissary kitchen or the restaurant kitchen of any number of chefs she knows when her inventories run low.
As with many startups run by creative individuals with scant business training, growth has been slowed by the need for on-the-job learning about entrepreneurial nuts and bolts like packaging and distribution and marketing. “A friend who works for a company that puts coupon mailers in Sunday newspapers sat us down,” says Hill, explaining the mentoring included a lot of great bootstrapping advice about branding their product. “She told us the consumer hears only sound bytes and recommended starting a blog.”

A chef’s take on a Tupperware party

The woman also put them on the path to a low cost/high return form of word of mouth advertising--salt parties, in the mode of a suburban classic. After holding more than a dozen, Hill says: “We’ve now got them down to a science. The model is the Tupperware party. Thirty to forty people max. All the host does is supply the guests. We bring product, we sell product. We bring all the food for free and the drinks.”
The hand of an accomplished chef is clearly behind such finger food as: Watermelon and cantaloupe with coconut black salt; Sweet potato steak frites with smoked chili salt; Charred broccolini with genmaicha pink salt; Duck confit with roasted grapes with lemon thyme salt. And after a couple Saltinis (vodka, baby tomatoes, six pepper salt, a clever, decomposed Bloody Mary) everybody’s in the mood to buy.
“Especially around the holidays, people really go crazy. ‘I have to buy this gift and that gift.’ We’ve had some people spend as much as $1,000 or $1,500,” says Hill. Shopping frugally at LA area Korean and Japanese markets, she can hold down her food costs, making each event highly profitable. But more importantly, each gift becomes an advertisement for the company’s unique wares. Many recipients not only reorder for themselves, but log on to the Saltistry website to buy someone else a distinctive gift.
To date, these salt parties have all been in and around Los Angeles. Thoughts of taking them on the road to other metro areas have necessarily been shelved while other, more pressing issues, like product labels and packaging, were finally wrestled to the ground. The latter, especially, dogged Salistry, holding back growth. On the eve of production, the Japanese company that had designed a new pillbox-like sampler with five compartments for different varieties of salt, pulled out, leaving Hill and Daclan in the lurch. Though they scrambled, and found a Chinese company to pinch-hit, production problems ensued.
Recognizing that Salistry is still a long ways from being ready for broker-driven chain store orders and selling through distributors, the plan is to expand sales through small cheese shops and gourmet food stores that can be approached and serviced entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur. So far, Salistry’s salts are sold in about a dozen retail locations, most in the LA area, but also in Dallas and as far as Nantucket.
“It’s selling great. It surprised us, actually,” says Linda Taylor, a co-owner of Winnow Gallery & Goods, which started displaying some of Saltistry’s products in January in the artisanally made “consumables” section of the popular Newport Beach, Calfornia home furnishings and design store. “We’re getting a lot of repeat business and lots of people are buying the salts as gifts.”
“I know in my heart and so does Denise, that the real model is the Tupperware style party,” says Hill. And we’re going to stick by our guns. It’s the best way to get the word out.” And, she believes, inexpensively drive business to the company website, which can effectively sell nationwide. Recently made-over by Hill herself, the website is vastly improved over version 1.0, which less successfully showcased popular products like the specialty caramels.
And what about all that time at the computer keyboard redesigning the website? Did that aggravate her old carpal tunnel maladies? Not at all. “Now that I’m not flipping a sauté pan and hauling 50 pound bags of potatoes, I’m fine,” says Hill, stressing her new business is not salt in her old wounds, but rather an enjoyable new career that spices up her life with new challenges.