Every weekday at Twitter’s New York offices, top chefs prepare a luxurious breakfast and lunch for the company’s 350 employees, using the highest-quality local ingredients. So please, says Amelia Ekus ’07, who manages the tech giant’s dining service, don’t call this a cafeteria. “I hate the word,” she recently told the online magazine Eater. “I don’t let anyone say it—it’s banned from the lexicon here.”
Hired to run Twitter’s, um, café last year, Ekus is the daughter of a cookbook agent who grew up surrounded by famous chefs. When Emeril Lagasse or Julia Child would come by, she would arrange the napkins, or set out a bouquet. “That’s where my love for the front of the house and hospitality comes from,” she explained.
After studying “food activism,” her self-designed major, at NYU’s Gallitin School, Ekus worked in New York restaurants before being recruited by food service management company Guckenheimer, which runs Twitter’s café. Twitter, like many big tech firms, offers high-end meals as an employee perk. The company’s budget, she notes, allows her to effect positive change in the food chain. “We have an initiative to source as much as possible from within 100 miles of the café,” she says. “We also work with many minority-owned and small businesses and use our buying power and relationships to help them grow their businesses.”
To build excitement among Twitter’s employees (or Tweeps, as she calls them), Ekus tweets a photo of the day’s offerings each morning. It’s always something new: In their first year, her chefs did not repeat a single dish.
Photo Credit: Jenny G. Zhang