Maegen Loring

Chef, Restaurateur

Early Years

If one were to plot Maegen Loring’s course to the opening of The Park Restaurant in San Luis Obispo, California, it would form a circle that began when she was a small child in Tucson, Arizona being schooled in the family kitchen by an artist-mother who approached cooking with the same passion and creativity as her pottery and other fine art creations. This influence had a perfect counterweight in her math professor father who gave her a respect for attention to detail that is an essential part of running any successful business, but especially a restaurant.

Maegen remembers that her aspirations to cook and be involved in anything having to do with the kitchen came at a very early age. While her route to The Park has included many people and experiences that inspire the dishes she creates today, there are no prestigious culinary school credentials hanging on the wall and she never made the usual chef-wanna-be trek to Europe in search of culinary tutelage. Her talent came naturally from the get-go, as she feels that she was born with a sense of culinary confidence as sharp as the finest professional cutlery. The chef states this in a matter-of-fact manner that is not boastful; it is simply the way she has felt for as long as she can remember.

Her first real paying job came at the age of sixteen in Detroit, working for a full-service catering company that exposed her to many culinary disciplines, depending on the job at hand. These jobs ranged from small intimate events, to opulent wedding receptions and everything in between. She then graduated to a position at a restaurant in nearby London, Ontario (Canada). The owner immediately recognized her talents and scheduled Maegen to work the opposite shift from her with virtually no supervision. So, at the tender age of eighteen, she found herself overseeing a staff and operating a professional kitchen.

Maegen does admit to being blown off her main culinary course for many years into the world of business, working for an air express company that included transfers to various parts of the country. But even then she found ways to keep her spoon in the pot by moonlighting as a pastry chef, or doing a little catering on the side in spite of her lucrative day job. In hindsight, she appreciates the business experience that gave her the necessary management training that would eventually prove valuable in running her own business. One of those transfers was to Phoenix, where she met her architect husband Jeff.

In 1995 the couple moved to the burgeoning central coast of California, where Jeff could pursue his career and Maegen would be closer to family. Here the abundance of wineries and the bounty of fresh local produce made it impossible for Maegen to ignore her childhood ambitions any longer and, with Jeff's support, she started her own catering company. Chef Maegen was back on course! After eight years of building a following through catering and at the urging of many of her clients, The Park became a reality in 2003.

Current Projects

Aptly named, The Park Restaurant's building is a part of regional history. Located in the historic Park Hotel, it was the original railway hotel, situated on the San Luis Obispo Station stop. While the building is currently occupied by apartments above the eatery, it remains the oldest continuously running restaurant location in the town.

This talented chef works daily to reflect the prolific agricultural resources of the region. She has turned the phrase “seasonal ingredients” into a fluid procession of weekly, and sometimes daily, changes in her menu; offerings that gain from the produce she finds by combing some eighteen farmers’ markets that can be found somewhere in the area almost any day of the week. She uses these niche finds to augment the regular deliveries that she orders from a very large organic farming operation in the area, and from nearby Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's organic agricultural program.

One would think that continually changing her menu to keep in step with local harvests would be an undue burden for an eatery open daily, but the chef countered that it would be harder for her to create the same dishes even if that included a monthly menu makeover. "What I enjoy more than anything is walking the farmers’ markets searching for the new item that will generate an idea for a dish. The discipline is to work with what is available, no matter how prolific or limited that selection may be from day to day. Without that challenge, the passion for cooking would soon become simply a job for me. The Park's fare is definitely driven by the ever-changing harvest of the fields and orchards that surround it, and so am I!"

Another local influence on The Park is the wineries of the Central Coast region, which in recent years have gained national and international recognition. Chef Maegen’s sensitivity to local farm production has turned her winery suppliers into appreciative customers. Many of the catering assignments that the restaurant gets come from the events that are put on by the wineries that the restaurant supports. The vintners know that the dishes provided by The Park will not only complement their wines, but continue the motif of featuring local produce, no matter the occasion or time of year.

In keeping with her own discipline, Chef Maegen has contributed several recipes for this article using produce items that peak, both in flavor and abundance, during this month of June. The dishes are unique and inventive but doable for those willing to experiment, using unusual combinations of familiar produce items to bring new experiences to your own table. Enjoy!