James Beard Award-Winning Chef Stands Behind New Culinary App to Empower Kitchen TeamsGavin Kaysen announces his partnership with opsi, a workflow app for chefs. Known across the country for his award-winning restaurants and advocacy for the culinary profession, Kaysen was opsi’s first investor and advisor.

The pace of innovation in restaurant tech has increased dramatically over the past decade, and it’s only getting faster. While some restaurants are testing fully automated kitchens, others opt to keep technology in a supporting role. But what’s the right choice for your restaurant? Should you download this app or that one? Should you get rid of your paper training manual? Should you replace all your cooks with robots?

It’s no secret that technology for chefs can have a massive potential to increase productivity and simplify workflows. If you work in a restaurant front of house, you’ve seen these benefits in action. The past few decades have seen a major boom in the number of POS Systems available and a similar increase in reservation management applications. Despite these substantial increases in available technology, enter any restaurant kitchen, and you’re likely to see a notable lack of tech. 

Minneapolis, MN - Anthros Inc., a national provider of human relations solutions, announced today their investment in opsi, a workflow app for chefs. Anurag Dandiya, CEO and founder of Anthros Inc., led the investment and is acting as an advisor to opsi.Opsi was founded by chef James Passafaro and Matt Luckey in 2019 to address the lack of workflow tools for chefs within the hospitality industry. The idea for opsi was born while Passafaro was working at RN74 in San Francisco. Passafaro connected with Luckey, a product manager in technology startups and a friend since high school, to develop an application that would provide support to chefs and their kitchen teams.

At age eleven, James Passafaro, co-founder of opsi, helped plate a dish for the first time during a special dinner at the Perona Farms restaurant. That night, he worked side by side with culinary giants Ming Tsai, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Louis Palladin, and Robert Irvine. James didn’t know enough about the chefs to be star-struck, but there was something about that night that kindled his desire to be a chef. “It wasn't like, wow, this is Jean-Louis, or wow, this is Ming Tsai,” James says. “It was like: wow, these people are having fun. They enjoy this. These are their friends, and like, this environment seems f*#cking cool.”

Restaurant kitchens are dynamic, fast-paced environments where priorities change with every passing minute. Before service begins, chefs spend hours preparing their kitchens and teams for success, and the work of keeping a kitchen efficient and organized does not stop when the last guests leave. Every service presents familiar and new challenges for a chef to juggle, so it's key to control whatever variables you can.