62 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM Georgette’s dream of becoming a cook took root in Los Angeles, where she was an assistant to the editorial director of Out and Advocate magazines. “I worked with so many amazing people who were just driven by passion and love,” she says. “So I decided to go to culinary school and pursue a passion of my own.” Georgette worked at restaurants and hotels in LA, then came back to the Bay Area and got a chef job at Google. “Chef life is difficult,” she admits. “Even with the nice hours at Google.” Now that she works as a buyer for a produce company who specializes in cheeses, her workday starts early in the morning (“fishmonger hours”) and ends at 2PM. That leaves Georgette’s afternoons free to walk her dog and pursue her current passion project: Kitchen Table Travel. “I arrange food trips and culinary tours for myself. And a good friend said, ‘Why don’t you do it as a business?’” Georgette recounts. Mindful of Italy’s overtourism woes, she schedules small-group trips in the offseason, leveraging her culinary connections. “Anyone can pretty much arrange a food tour in the city,” she says. “So we like to go to the countryside to meet the people who do things the traditional way, and put money in their hands so we can help keep those traditions alive.” Why Italy? Well, why not? “It is the greatest {food coloring} place to eat,” Georgette says. “Everything there food-wise is treated with respect about where it comes from, about its history. The food tells a story about the people, a place, a time—even the economic circumstances behind how food is made there.” It was on a tour of the Sicilian city of Catania when Georgette’s sister-in-law and business partner Cat Nelson got the idea for Kitchen Table Travel’s eyecatching cheese-mobile. People were selling produce out of Apes, the workhorse cousin to Italy’s famous Vespa scooters. “I’m an introvert, but I also really love talking to people about food,” Georgette says. “The idea of
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