Seizing Opportunities: Meet Chef Kevin Kopsick

Bakery Chef Kevin Kopsick works on Cheddar rolls in the Project Host Bakery.

You know the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” but what does that process actually look like for someone experiencing significant challenges or disruptions in life? 

Project Host Bakery Chef Kevin Kopsick knows a thing or two about taking a challenging situation and making the most of it, as it was losing his job as an instructor at Johnson and Wales University that ultimately led him to Greenville and Project Host.  

Chef Kevin and his family had lived and worked in South Florida for 30 years when the news came in 2021 that Johnson and Wales, where Kevin had been employed as a Bakery and Pastry Instructor for the past 12 years, would be closing its North Miami and Denver campuses, due to low enrollments and new stresses and strains caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was the position I thought I would retire from,” says Chef Kevin of his job at Johnson and Wales, but that was not to be. “I found myself, like many people, in a challenging situation, and I always taught my students that in life, we face challenges, but those are also opportunities.” 

Now it was Chef Kevin’s turn to practice what he preached, so he and his wife Damaris and three children decided to embrace this significant disruption to their lives as a chance to embark on something new. 

“I don’t want to say we were stuck in South Florida, but we needed my income and had never really thought about relocating. But then this opportunity came up to rethink our lives, try something new, and see something different.”  

In years past, Chef Kevin and his family had visited friends who’d settled in Greenville, and when their lives were suddenly untethered from South Florida, they began to consider Greenville as a place to settle. The culture, geography, and progressive, up-and-coming feel of Greenville appealed to them, and so they put their house on the market and moved. After an opportunity to adjunct at Greenville Tech’s Culinary Institute of the Carolinas fell through, some local contacts put Project Host on Chef Kevin’s radar, and the rest is history. 

In some ways, the spirit that got Kevin to Greenville and Project Host is the same one that got him into the culinary industry in the first place. Kevin hadn’t grown up with a desire to pursue a career in the culinary field. He had the right foundation—his mother and grandmother were both great cooks—but, like many a child coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Chef Kevin’s desire was to pursue rock and roll. 

School had always been a struggle for Kevin, and the only thing that kept him interested was music. Upon graduating high school, he tried to make it as a musician and worked various kitchen jobs to support himself, but, as Chef Kevin puts it, “My garage band never made it out of the garage.”  

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for Kevin to fall back on academically, but he had kitchen experience and a love of food. An opportunity came up at a gourmet food shop for Chef Kevin to work as a baker, and that’s when things clicked into place.  

“That very first day at that job, when I pulled that first loaf of bread out of the oven, that was my ah-ha moment. I realized that baking fed my creative needs, that I had an innate ability to do it well, and it could pay the bills.”  

From there, Chef Kevin started pursuing baking more seriously and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America. With the requisite credentials and new knowledge, Chef Kevin moved to Florida to serve as the Pastry Chef at a new restaurant a friend of his was opening, and things really took off from there. 

Chef Kevin ultimately ended up working for the “Father of New World Cuisine,” Norman Van Aken. 

“That really shaped who I became professionally. It gave me the opportunity to experience the restaurant industry at an extremely high level. I learned from him many things: Foods that I’d never seen, flavors and textures I’d never experienced, the art of service, and attention to detail. Those were my formative years. Working with Norman was the highlight of my career.” 

Celebrity encounters and James Beard dinners were some of the things Chef Kevin got to experience as a part of his work with Chef Van Aken. Eventually Kevin felt he had worked his way as high as he could in the industry, and at that point he switched to teaching. Now, Project Host is a kind of coming full circle, presenting Kevin with a balance of both paths he pursued in his career—creating for consumers and teaching—which excites him. 

“I’ve done everything in this industry and achieved most of my goals. If there is still something in this field for me to do, it should be something like this work at Project Host. Getting back into the bake shop, using all the skills and knowledge that I’ve developed over the years in a more tangible way, rather than simply following a curriculum and doing demos. I’m actually producing, working hands on, and getting back to why I got in this business in the first place: because I love to bake and make people happy.”  

As for Project Host’s students and interns, Chef Kevin hopes perhaps to be a part of the kind of serendipitous moments that shaped his path in life. 

“I’m here trying to inspire the next generation of chefs and cooks and bakers. I’d like to inspire them to challenge themselves, to learn every day and give themselves opportunities to improve their lives, to have a career and put food on the table. It’s a difficult industry, but it can be very rewarding as well. It was Norman Van Aken who once said to me, ‘We don’t choose this industry, it chooses us.’ Maybe for a lot of the students coming through here, this is their opportunity to improve their lives. There are people here who want to help them, and they can turn it into something rewarding.”   

By Claudia Winkler