Lessons from Local Leaders:
Jenn & Chris Chavez
From Deployment to Dinner Party: How Chris and Jen Chavez Are Bringing Virginia’s Finest Ingredients to Your Table
He went from serving his country overseas to serving crab frittatas with hollandaise in your living room. The story of Chris’s Dishes is one of reinvention, resilience, and the quiet magic of a meal made with intention.
There’s a moment Chris Chavez describes that captures everything about who he is as a chef — and as a person. He’s standing over someone’s kitchen, partway through a dinner service, when he makes a quick chicken stock from scratch using the bones left over from the dish he’s already preparing. Watching him, a guest leans over to another and whispers: who does that?
The answer, for anyone who has experienced Chris’s Dishes firsthand, is obvious. Chris does that. He always has.
But to understand how a two-decade Army veteran ended up crafting bespoke dinner parties in Northern Virginia — sourcing honey from a roadside farm two miles from the venue, adjusting every menu around allergens and personal tastes, and occasionally cooking barefoot in flip-flops in Hawaii — you have to go back to a harder chapter of the story.
A Veteran Looking for a Way Forward
After 20 years of military service, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Chris Chavez came home carrying what so many veterans carry: a sense of displacement, a need for purpose, and a body and mind shaped by experiences most people will never fully understand. He tried different therapies. He looked for outlets. Nothing quite clicked.
“I was, for all intents and purposes, one of those veterans that was just going the wrong path,” Chris says plainly.
What he had always been able to do — quietly, instinctively, without much fanfare — was cook. Not for joy, exactly. Not in those early years. More out of necessity, out of the same practical efficiency that had carried him through years of military life. It was his wife, Jen, who first suggested culinary school. Chris said no. He knew what the restaurant industry could do to a relationship, and he wasn’t willing to risk that.
Then he walked into an open house at a local Virginia culinary school with his service dog, Avery, and everything changed.
“I had this little short Frenchman chef run up to me and start talking to me, shaking my hand like we had known each other for years,” Chris recalls, laughing. The chef showed him a tub of water with a pear, some star anise, an orange slice, and cinnamon sticks floating in a bag — a simple demonstration of the sous vide method. “He explained to me the process and I was hooked. I was like, this could be really fun.”
Jen came home from a work trip that weekend to find Chris waiting with news. She assumed he’d enrolled in cybersecurity, maybe a business program. Instead: culinary school. Three weeks later, he was already in.
“The rest was history,” she says. “It was gone pretty much.”
The First Bite Face
The first private event Chris ever cooked was, by his own cheerful admission, a disaster. The meat was overcooked. The shrimp were tough. The sauce broke. The dessert looked wrong. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of beginning that most people wouldn’t include in their origin story — and exactly the kind of beginning that matters.
Eight years later, that same client hired Chris’s Dishes again. He spent the entire evening showing photos from that original dinner to every guest in the room, marveling at the transformation. People couldn’t believe it was the same chef.
“I was like, all I’ll take y’all’s word for it,” Chris laughs. “I just tasted and put it out.”
That arc — from a broken sauce to a room full of stunned, satisfied guests — is the arc of Chris’s Dishes as a whole. And it’s one that Jen watched unfold in real time, measuring its authenticity not by revenue or reviews, but by something she recognized from years before: the look in her husband’s eyes.
“He was passionate about being a soldier from the time he was three years old,” Jen says. “And when school continued and he would do these one-off events, you could see the passion continuing to evolve. I looked at him one day and I was like — you’ve got that glimmer in your eye. He’d found it again.”
She calls it his second chance. His second passion. The moment, she says, when the stars aligned.
Keeping It Intimate, Keeping It Real
Chris’s Dishes didn’t start with a philosophy about small gatherings. Like most businesses, it started with yes — to everything, everyone, any size. It was COVID, of all things, that handed them clarity.
When gathering restrictions forced events down to 10 or 20 people, Chris and Jen discovered something unexpected: the smaller the room, the richer the experience. Guests had time to actually talk to each other. Chris had time to engage, explain, and connect. People weren’t just eating food — they were watching it be made, learning where it came from, asking questions, laughing with the people beside them.
“We found those dinners to be so interesting,” Jen says. “It gave us time to engage with people. It gave us time to learn about people’s palate. It gave them time to watch Chris cook.”
That realization became the foundation of how Chris’s Dishes operates today. Six or seven couples. Twelve to fourteen people at most. No standardized menu handed to you with boxes to check. Instead, a phone call — because Chris wants to hear your voice, not just read your form — followed by a menu built specifically around you.
“I don’t want to ever want somebody to think, here’s the standardized menu, you get to pick from that,” Chris says. “I know how to cook. You want us in your house, we’re gonna bring it to you. We’re gonna give you the full, effortless part of it.”
They tried the larger format once — a 75-person event, six staff, a wine station, a bar, guests spread across a sprawling space. At the end of the night, they looked at each other and said the same thing: that’s not us.
“We are not caterers,” Jen says simply. “We are a personal chef service to bring intimacy to your home.”
The Taste of Virginia Philosophy
Ask Chris where his food comes from and you won’t get a shrug and a mention of the nearest warehouse supplier. You’ll get names.
He knows who supplies his eggs — what the chickens are fed, how they’re kept. He knows the farms where his herbs and vegetables are grown. He can tell you, mid-service, that the piece of chicken on your plate came from a farm five miles down the road from your house.
“That should be an intimate relationship,” Jen says, “because it’s going in your body.”
This is the philosophy at the heart of what they call the Taste of Virginia concept: a commitment to sourcing locally, telling the story of every ingredient, and using food as a vehicle to connect guests to the land they’re living on. It’s not marketing. It’s personal. Both Chris and Jen spend their own free time driving out to farms to pick apples and peaches, visiting wineries on the Eastern Shore, exploring what Virginia’s food landscape actually has to offer.
“A lot of people who come to Virginia — especially active duty service members — don’t realize what this state has to offer,” Chris says. “Virginia has a lot to offer, and as long as you can get out and investigate where things are at or what’s going on, you will find a lot of food, a lot of different things for food. And that’s what we want to bring to people’s plates.”
When Chris does a dinner in Vermont, he stops at a roadside honey stand on the way and sources from there. When he cooked in Hawaii — more on that in a moment — everything came from local purveyors on the island. The provenance of the meal is part of the meal.
No One Gets Left Behind at the Table
When Chris started culinary school, one of the first things he began viewing everything through was a new lens: Jen has Celiac disease. She can’t eat gluten. And for most of her life, that had meant quietly sitting out certain dishes, politely declining things that would later make her sick, accepting that some foods were simply not for her.
Chris looked at that reality and had one reaction: I can fix this.
He spent time sourcing the right flour blends, experimenting with techniques, adapting dishes that had never been designed with Celiac in mind. The first time he made her a brick-fired gluten-free pizza, her reaction, by both of their accounts, was borderline theatrical.
“You would’ve thought I had won the Nobel Peace Prize,” Chris laughs. “She was like, I don’t understand it — it tastes exactly like wood-fire pizza.”
One Sunday during a snowstorm, he casually decided to make biscuits and gravy. Jen mentioned she’d never had them. He went into the kitchen, worked out a gluten-free version from scratch, and brought them out. She was floored.
That same spirit extends to every client with a dietary restriction or allergy. Vegan menus. Dairy-free modifications. Peanut and seafood allergies. A very dear friend of theirs who is allergic to peaches — a fruit that appears in so many dishes she loves — gets a version of every dish that preserves the exact same depth of flavor, the same sweetness, the same summery quality, without the ingredient that would send her to the hospital.
“The person with the gluten allergy is the most important person in the room,” Chris says, “because that affects them the most. And at the end of the night, I can let everybody know that this entire meal was 100% gluten free — and watch the looks on people’s faces.”
No one sits at the kids’ table. No one gets a lesser plate. No one misses out on the experience because of what they can or can’t eat.
Cooking in Flip-Flops in Hawaii (And Other Commitments)
The story of how Chris ended up cooking a backyard barbecue in Hawaii on his first vacation since retiring from the military is, depending on who’s telling it, either a testament to extraordinary dedication or evidence that some chefs simply cannot turn it off.
One of their very first clients found out Chris and Jen were on the island — their first real vacation — and reached out. A small gathering at an Airbnb. Just burgers, baked beans, macaroni and cheese. Nothing fancy.
Chris had left all his knives at home. His chef’s coat. His aprons. He was, by every measure, off duty.
He said yes anyway.
“It took a lot for us to do that,” Jen admits. “But it was one of our first clients, and we love just doing this. It’s fun.”
They ran to Target for a cheap apron, sourced everything locally on the island, and served a backyard barbecue that made their clients feel, somehow, like they were both in Hawaii and at home at the same time. Chris cooked in flip-flops.
It’s a story that doubles as a philosophy. Chris and Jen have driven to Key West for events, up to Vermont, out to Kentucky. Wherever they go, they source locally, they engage with whoever they meet, and they arrive with the same intention: make it feel like it was made for you. Because it was.
What They’re Building
When asked about legacy, Chris and Jen give two different answers — and together, they form something complete.
Chris wants word of mouth. He wants someone at a dinner party to turn to the host and say: you need to call this couple, because they’re going to bring their home to your home and make it the wow factor so you won’t forget it. He tells a story of running into a former client at an event in Old Town Alexandria — her hair different, his beard fully Paul Bunyan by winter standards — and watching the recognition slowly cross her face. Chef Chris. She grabbed the hostess immediately: You hired them? Let me tell you what they did for us.
Jen’s vision runs a little deeper. She wants people to understand that you can have one full life and then start another. That passion can be found again after loss. That a pivot is not a failure — it’s sometimes the bravest thing a person can do. She wants veterans, in particular, to hear that.
“For veterans — there is something out there for everyone,” Chris says. “Don’t settle for ‘I’m okay.’ Go out there and find your new lease on life, your new passion. Don’t reflect on the past. It doesn’t do any good.”
They also give back. To the veteran community. To organizations supporting service dogs — because Avery, Chris’s now-retired service dog, is woven into the fabric of their story and their business in ways that still move Jen to tears mid-interview.
“You can see the parlay between how he helped himself and how external elements helped him, and how that comes through in his food,” she says. “There’s pride. There’s passion. There’s tenacity.”
A Meal You Won’t Forget
Clients who become friends. Friends who become family. People who go silent for a year or two and then reappear with a question that starts, crazy ask, but are you available in the next two weeks? The first thing out of their mouths at a Valentine’s Day dinner isn’t about the food — it’s about Avery.
This is the world Chris and Jen Chavez have built: one where a meal is never just a meal, where an ingredient always has a story, and where the moment you open your kitchen door to let them in is the moment the experience actually begins.
“The moments all become memories,” Jen says. “And it’s not just one moment. It’s from the moment somebody reaches out to us and we send a reply. Because the next thing we’re going to do is call you. I want to hear what you’re trying to do — so I can make it more special for you and your guests.”
That’s Chris’s Dishes. Personal. Intentional. Rooted in Virginia. Made, in every possible sense of the word, from scratch.
Chris and Jen Chavez are the husband-and-wife team behind Chris’s Dishes, a personal chef and private dining service based in Virginia. They specialize in intimate dinner parties, locally sourced menus, allergy-conscious cooking, and bringing the full farm-to-table experience directly into your home. To inquire about an event, reach out to Chris’s Dishes directly.
Reach Jenn & Chris Below
Website:
https://chrissdishes.com/
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