Get To Know Porters Neck Village’s New Executive Chef, Gwen Gulliksen

We are so excited to welcome Porters Neck Village’s new executive chef, Chef Gwen Gulliksen, to our culinary team. As the founder of Cape Fear Food Coalition and previously serving as an executive chef in a number of restaurants across the country, Chef Gulliksen’s career before coming to Porters Neck Village is incredibly expansive and impressive. With her experience as a Michelin Star chef, educator, and advocate for heart-health and sustainable food and food insecurity, we are overjoyed to welcome her to our community!

Read our Q&A interview with Chef Gulliksen to learn more about her background, interests, and how she plans to bring her new ideas for flavor, nutrition, and community engagement to residents here at Porters Neck Village in Wilmington, NC.

You’ve previously worked in Michelin Star restaurants, traveled and cooked internationally, worked as a culinary educator, and been deeply involved in food insecurity initiatives. What made you interested in cooking for senior living?

I am the youngest of a very large extended family, and my oldest cousin recently moved into a luxury senior living community in Chicago. Good food was one of the most important factors when she was choosing which community to move to. After speaking with her, I started thinking about how important this food service sector is, how it’s changing very rapidly, and how it seems to have been ignored by chefs with extensive fine dining experience.

What countries have you worked and cooked in, and has this impacted the cuisines you prepare at Porter’s Neck?

I have been very fortunate to travel and work around the world with my various culinary awards, grants, and celebrity chef stints on Crystal Cruise Lines, including going to Mexico, Central America, Chile, Greece, Italy, France, China, and Japan.

Each of these parts of the world has very distinctive culinary traits that I use regularly in all of my cooking. I’m starting to add them to my menu repertoire at Porters Neck Village (with good resident feedback!) and plan to teach about different techniques, ingredients, and specific flavor profiles.

How has your passion for sustainable agriculture and experience with gardening influenced your culinary career?

My very deep passion for sustainable agriculture started when I was a little girl in Indiana. I was heavily influenced by my uncle’s mother’s one-acre garden, which I thought was a treasure chest of color, flavor, and sunshine. I’ve always had a garden, since I was seven, growing green beans in the backyard. In graduate school, I collected farmers’ market produce and distributed it to local soup kitchens — complete with my recipes and volunteer training.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was exposed to the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market as a chef. I not only cooked and ate the delicious produce, but also made deep connections with the amazing people who grew it, and realized what an extraordinary labor of love it was. I learned so much from these farmers, and I went on to build a national Santa Monica Farmers Market program where I shipped freshly harvested products to fine dining chefs all over the country.

Since moving to Wilmington, I started working with Feast Down East and Willow Dale Farms and secured multiple garden grants at Girls’ Leadership Academy of Wilmington (GLOW). I am extremely happy to have been given a kitchen garden plot in the Porters Neck Village garden — I’ll start with organic fresh herbs this summer to bring lovely flavors to all of our menu items.

In 2016, you founded the Cape Fear Food Coalition. What are some of its accomplishments that you are most proud of?

I founded CFFC to help coordinate local efforts for food relief and education in our growing food-insecure population. I’ve worked closely with Willow Dale Farms, the MMK Community Center, Meals on Wheels, Bladen Community College, and GLOW, writing grants and setting up programs to assist in these efforts. I’m proud of all the work I’ve done with these organizations, including the amazing outdoor educational kitchen and free farmer’s market at Willow Dale Farms, as well as the big new community kitchen at the MMK Community Center.

What inspired you to start the blog Cooking For The Heart?

Many loved ones in my life have been affected by heart conditions. I felt a real need to start teaching some sort of culinary education to anyone who was interested in simple dietary changes, specifically to help prevent or recover from heart disease.

I was a Dean Ornish Chef at the UVA hospital program, and here in Wilmington I’ve worked with the dieticians at the Ornish Cardiac Rehab. There are some very easy, delicious changes people can make for heart health — that’s my focus for the Cooking For The Heart website. I’m grateful to WECT News for committing to running a series of twelve cooking demos with me to help get the word out to others.

How do you determine Porter’s Neck menu, and what is your favorite menu item to prepare?

My approach is resident input. Since my arrival, I have gleaned so much valuable information from the residents regarding menu favorites and future menu wants. I am so grateful to them and have started incorporating these ideas into the menus already. Our residents have great cooking experience, have traveled and dined all over the world, and many have food service backgrounds. The engagement has been so incredible that I already have hundreds of suggestions to work from!

I’m also engaging the culinary team, documenting favorite recipes they’ve made in the past and going through the hundreds of previously made recipes that I found in our archives. And, of course, incorporating recipes from my personal extensive recipe file and huge culinary library to find old favorites and new recipes to share. What I love most about cooking, other than sharing it with people, is that it is a constant learning experience. I love to teach, and I love to learn!

Innovative Dining at Porters Neck Village

We know living the good life begins with good food, which is why we’re so excited to have Chef Gulliksen continue to evolve our authentic fine dining at Porters Neck Village. With diverse menu items (and more to come) you’re sure to find something delicious to savor.