Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelley Terlip.
Hi Kelley, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Mike and I have very similar stories- we both went to college for things we were passionate about that were not cooking, I always tell people Mike was a musician in a past life, he plays guitar and piano. I graduated from Kansas State with a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and Horticulture with a focus on food and agriculture. So I guess you could say I was cooking adjacent, I have always had an obsession with food and the very important role it plays in the human experience. We both attended culinary school after we earned our degrees in other fields. Mike is from Rhode Island and he attended Johnson and Wales in Providence where he really started to fall in love with fine dining. I was a small town Kansas kid who had my passport ready to go the minute they handed me my degree. The summer after college I moved to Brooklyn and worked slinging home made lemonade on the Williamsburg waterfront and exploring the city on my days off. My next stop was Edinburgh, Scotland where I studied at Edinburgh New Town Cookery School. My sister studied abroad at the same time and we lived in a flat in Old City and spent our weekends traveling around Europe. Something that both Mike and I had in common before we ever met was our willingness to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to grow and learn.
After graduating, Mike moved to Fredrick, Maryland to work for Top Chef alum and James Beard semi-finalist Brian Voltaggio at Volt. He quickly learned why they say “never meet your heros” and left the job due to workplace toxicity, something we both have encountered throughout our careers. He moved back to Rhode Island and worked at Local 121 as the assistant pastry chef while also being the sous chef Citizen Wing food truck.
My first stop after culinary school was the Panhandle of Florida where I worked for a waterfront French-American restaurant as a line cook. Soon after I stared the job, I broke my leg. I obviously couldn’t work at all with my injury and in that moment I realized I needed to know how to do more than just cook.
We both moved to Philadelphia around the same time and what a time to be in the restaurant industry in Philly. It was that sweet spot where David Chang had kind of turned fine dining as we know it on it’s head, Anthony Bourdain was a household name and you had some really cool media out that catered to this new “foodie” culture. For the first time ever, working in a restaurant was cool. There was a lot happening in New York but it’s expensive and restaurant work certainly isn’t the highest paying field. This created an exodus of some guys with New York chops moving to Philly to pursue their passion in a more affordable city and a lot of talented cooks were following suit. We were two of those cooks.
Mike went the fined dining route in Philly. He worked for Marc Vetri, Jeff Michaud and Jeffrey Benjamin back before Urban Outfitters acquired a majority of the Vetri family of restaurants. He also worked for Joey Baldino, Townsend Wentz, Nick Elmi and Chris Kearse who collectively have worked for chefs like Daniel Boulud , Thomas Keller, Gordon Ramsay and Georges Pierre. I was not as hyper focused on line cooking and floated around usually pursuing opportunities with young, locally grown restaurant groups where there was a lot of opportunity to jump in and learn a lot about the business side of things.
I worked as an assistant for the founder and CEO of HipCityVeg right as they were opening Bar Bombon and their first DC location. Our office was a one bedroom apartment above the flagship location and there were only five of us that were considered “corporate.” I got to see every single part of running and opening restaurants and building a brand from the ground up in this job. Next, I worked at a craft beer restaurant as a FOH manager for a married couple who had been in the industry for years. This job taught me a lot about the reality of running a small restaurant that didn’t have investors involved like my previous situation. After that I moved on to work for a multi-unit restaurant group with a wholesale back end that involved a commissary kitchen. I started as a store manager but quickly started to take on more and more responsibility. Eventually, I was managing the entire operation, including recipe development and branding. I spent two and a half years there working from five o’clock in the morning till nine o’clock at night seven days a week and coming home to a list of things that needed my attention. That job taught me a lot but it also almost broke me mentally and physically. I then went on to work for CookNSolo, the restaurant group owned by Michael Solomanov and Steve Cook. I started as a store manager at a Goldie when they moved me to another location with a Dizengoff to train so I could move on to open another Dizengoff that was opening near a Goldie that I would also be managing. Then the pandemic hit and when we were all called back to work I was tasked with reopening each location, training a new manager then moving on to reopen the next one. Eventually I was overseeing about eight restaurants when I decided I had reached my ceiling there and felt like I needed to make a move. That is when I landed at Knead Bagels working for Adam and Cheri Willner. This was my first job managing just the kitchen and that freedom to focus on the culinary specific things really solidified my favorite part of restaurant work.
When Mike and I met we were still pretty deep in to the food scene and felt like we were learning a lot in Philadelphia We always talked about having our own spot one day but with only a few extra dollars in the bank after bills were paid every month, I don’t know how much either of us really believed it would ever happen. Once we were engaged the talk about getting out of the city started to get more frequent and after our wedding I think we both knew we were ready for the next step in our careers. We were working together at Knead Bagels at that point and it was a really good job for both of us. The only thing that I was going to lose that job for was my own spot. We have always talked about having kids someday and doing that in Philly with no family near was not an option. So we found a spot for rent in Girard, KS, about twenty minutes from my parents, and we saved enough money to get us by for about a month before we needed to open. We packed our bags and moved across the country with our two cats and a sourdough starter and the rest is history.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
This industry is notoriously tough. The work is physically demanding, the margins are slim and the criticism happens immediately. We both have faced a lot of challenges, separately, through out our careers. We could tell a lot of stories about toxic workplaces, physical and mental abuse, being underpaid and having our eagerness used as a tool to overwork us. Instead, i will say this, every time we were mistreated we took note of it in our heads and vowed to never do that to anyone else.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Bushel & a Peck?
We opened our own restaurant, Bushel & a Peck, in June of 2024. Our initial concept was a counter service restaurant that mostly served sandwiches made from house made ingredients. We took all the things we had learned in Philadelphia and used those techniques to elevate really classic and well known dishes. For example, our Love Club is one of our most popular sandwiches to this day. We sous vide the turkey for it, we make our own bacon, the creole mayo we make for it adds smokiness and herbs and spices and then we use pickled lettuce and onion so the acid can cut through all the fat so you really taste everything. When people dine with us we want it to be playful and evoke food memories but we also want people to taste the benefits of scratch cooking and the utilization of modern culinary technique.
Branding is also important to us. We don’t just work tirelessly on the food, we also work really hard on the overarching identity of the restaurant. Much of that identity is an extension of who we are as people. We have fun names for menu items like the “No. 13 Kelce Jam” named for my enthusiasm for anything related to Taylor Swift’s happiness. Our “Love Club” is after a song by Lorde. Even the namesake “Bushel & a Peck” is a song we would sing to each other so much that I vowed at our wedding to always love Mike “a bushel & a peck. The walls have pictures that are from my grandparents homes and we have a vintage “Ant-Man” comic book cover that Michael has had for years. We chose gold silverware and green walls to bring warmth in to the space. All of our beautiful woodwork was done by a locally owned company named Barnes Millworks and it really elevates the space. We use recycled China that doesn’t match. The tables always have fresh flowers on them that are arranged by my aunt who inherited her passion for flowers from my Grandmother. Someone once said it was like being at your cool aunt and uncles house that had traveled the world and that is EXACTLY what we are going for.
It has been quite a journey. Our initial location had a lot of structural issues and the overhead of the building was too much to be sustainable. It was also hidden off on a side street and hard to find. We did what we could with the circumstances our first year and we made it through but we knew things had to change. We ended up speaking with Dan Smith who was a regular in the restaurant at time who knew our brand and the area and also knew a lot about business. He offered to purchase a new space for us, fix it up, then rent it to us. It was and is truly the opportunity of a lifetime and we are forever grateful.
We opened in the new space before we had even been open a year in our old space. The response to the location change was overwhelming to say the least. Out the gate sales were up 400%. I texted my old boss that I was “living somewhere between exhausted and exhilarated” which is really the only way to describe it. The area was also asking us to do more than just sandwiches and we needed the time and man power to put out a more complex menu. We operate with a small, dedicated, talented team and we are very committed to the quality of food and service we are providing. With that in mind, we closed an additional day to give our full time staff four days on and three days off so they had ample time to not just recover but to also focus on their mental health and personal lives. It also allows us time to work in the space on days we are closed and do more catering, special menus, etc. We are open with our regular menu Wednesday through Friday from 11:00 A.M. until 9:00 P.M. and we do our Italian menu every Saturday from 5:00 P.M. until 9:00 P.M.
Overall, this restaurant is the cumulation of years of dreaming about owning a restaurant. We spent a lot of years working really, really hard and dedicating our lives to our craft and every piece of this restaurant is a reflection of that journey. We are so proud of it because we know how hard we worked to get here and any success we experience, we know we earned it.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
This is a complex question. I think we definitely were lucky that Dan was willing to help us out and really hand us an opportunity to run a business how we wanted to in a nice building with manageable overhead. I don’t think we “earned” that, i think we were very fortunate to meet someone who was so kind and generous and who believed in us and our product.
But overall, I think that luck is diminishing on long-term success. I think that persistence, perseverance, hard work, humility, dedication and staying true to your values far outweigh the role of luck in success in both life and business.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bushelks.square.site/
- Instagram: @bushelrestaurant
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556070864132
