Today we’d like to introduce you to Noel Christian.
Hi Noel, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started my culinary journey straight out of high school in 2003, going from Cherry Hill High School West to The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia. Culinary school gave me a foundation in classical French techniques—and yes, I can make a pretty decent omelet—but I would say most of the chef I am today was shaped by actually working in kitchens.
My first restaurant job while attending culinary school was at P.F. Chang’s China Bistro in Marlton, New Jersey. If culinary school taught me technique, P.F. Chang’s taught me speed. From there, I worked at Hilton properties in Cherry Hill and Atlantic City before intentionally moving through different restaurants and concepts. I wanted to learn as much as possible, so I gave myself opportunities to experience completely different styles of food—from sports-bar kitchens and rolling sushi at Swanky Bubbles to preparing cold appetizers at José Garces’ Tinto in Center City and making guacamole at Tortilla Press.
Eventually, I found my longest professional home in corporate dining with Compass Group. I spent nearly a decade there, becoming a Chef Manager and working at multiple locations throughout New Jersey and Philadelphia. That chapter of my career taught me much more than cooking. I learned leadership, organization, food costs, consistency, managing employees, and the business side of operating a kitchen.
After almost ten years, though, I felt like my creativity was dwindling. I had spent my career executing other people’s menus and ideas, and I reached a point where I wanted to find out what I could create for myself.
When one of the Compass accounts I worked with closed, I decided it was time to take that chance. On January 4, 2017, I started Nonopreps.
It began with about six friends and family members trusting me to prepare their weekly meals. Nearly ten years later, I’ve cooked for hundreds of people and built a consistent community of clients throughout the Philadelphia area. What started as a small meal-prep business has also grown into catering and private in-home dining, which has become one of my favorite parts of what I do.
Looking back, every kitchen played a role in getting me here. Even jobs I thought were temporary gave me a technique, a flavor, a lesson, or a business skill that I eventually brought with me to Nonopreps.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road.
One of the biggest turning points in my life happened very early in my career. I was living with my father while I was establishing myself as a cook, and in 2007 he passed away from cancer very quickly. At just 22 years old, I suddenly had to figure out how to support myself and navigate adulthood on my own. Looking back, I think that experience created an independence and resilience in me that I didn’t realize I would eventually need as an entrepreneur.
There were also challenges within the restaurant industry itself. Professional kitchens at the time could be very straight, white, male-dominated environments, and navigating those spaces as a gay Latino man wasn’t always easy.
Early in my career, I would sometimes enter a new kitchen trying to appear as straight as possible because I didn’t know how people would treat me once they knew I was gay. Eventually, that part of me would become known, and there were situations where I experienced mistreatment or realized that no matter how hard I worked, there wasn’t necessarily a path for me beyond being a line cook.
For a long time, I questioned whether moving from restaurant to restaurant made me look inconsistent. Today, I see it differently. I was searching for opportunities to grow. Every time I felt that I had learned what I could or realized there was nowhere for me to advance, I went somewhere else and learned something new.
Even starting Nonopreps came with uncertainty. I walked away from the stability of corporate dining without knowing whether people would actually continue paying me to cook for them. There wasn’t a huge investor or a big launch behind the business. It started with me cooking for about six people.
Those struggles ultimately became part of the reason I created something of my own. I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how to fit into other people’s kitchens. Eventually, I realized that instead of waiting for someone else to create a place where I belonged, I could create one for myself.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Nonopreps is a Philadelphia-based meal-prep and catering business, but I think what makes it different is that I’ve never wanted it to be limited to one type of cuisine. The menu itself is always changing from week to week, season to season and also what my heart and mind feel like doing.
My background is Puerto Rican, Chinese, and Panamanian, so food has always been one of the ways I’ve connected to the different parts of who I am. One of my goals when I created Nonopreps was to give people the opportunity to experience foods and flavors from my cultures while also giving myself the freedom to showcase everything I had learned throughout my career.
A Nonopreps menu might have Puerto Rican or Caribbean influences one week and Asian or Latin American influences the next. At the same time, I’m still using classical techniques I learned in culinary school and lessons I’ve picked up from more than two decades of working professionally in kitchens.
I don’t believe my food has to fit neatly into one category because neither my background nor my culinary career fits neatly into one category.
That freedom is probably what sets Nonopreps apart. For years, I cooked someone else’s menu and followed someone else’s idea of what belonged on the plate. With my own business, I can take everything I’ve learned and create food that represents me. I finally get to cook without someone telling me that a certain flavor, dish, or idea doesn’t belong.
I’ve been fortunate to have some memorable opportunities along the way. I created a welcome basket for Martha Stewart during a visit to Philadelphia, the owner of Geno’s Steaks was a client for a period of time, and Nonopreps has been recognized twice by *Philadelphia Magazine* as a meal-prep service to look out for.
I’m incredibly proud of those moments, but what I’m most proud of is actually much more personal.
I’ve cooked for some families long enough that their children were in fifth grade when they first started eating my food and are now entering high school. There are clients who have trusted me to feed them week after week and year after year. With meal prep, I don’t always get an immediate reaction to my food. Sometimes the greatest compliment is simply seeing someone’s name appear on my order list again the following week.
More recently, I’ve gravitated toward private in-home events because I love getting to experience that reaction firsthand—watching people gather around a table, seeing someone take the first bite, and knowing that something I created became part of their celebration or memory.
After nearly a decade of Nonopreps, I’ve realized that what I’m most proud of isn’t simply that I built a business. I built a community around food.
For most of my career, I was adapting myself to fit into someone else’s kitchen. Nonopreps became the place where the kitchen could finally adapt to me. I get to bring my Puerto Rican, Chinese, and Panamanian heritage, my identity, my creativity, and more than two decades of culinary experience to the same table.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I would say adaptability has been the most important quality behind my success.
The culinary industry is constantly changing, and I’ve learned that you have to be willing to change with it without losing who you are. I’ve gone from being a culinary student to a line cook, from working in hotels and restaurants to becoming a corporate Chef Manager, and eventually from having a stable corporate career to becoming an entrepreneur.
Every stage required a different version of me.
I’ve also learned not to be afraid of saying, “I don’t know how to do that yet.” Some of the most valuable skills I have today came from putting myself in situations where I wasn’t the expert. I moved through different kitchens because I wanted to learn. I watched other chefs, asked questions, made mistakes, and took pieces of knowledge from every experience with me.
Running Nonopreps has required that same adaptability. I’m not only the chef. I’m the menu developer, purchaser, prep cook, business owner, customer service representative, marketer, delivery coordinator, and sometimes the dishwasher. You learn very quickly as an entrepreneur that no job is beneath you when your name is attached to the business.
But I think there is another side to adaptability that took me longer to learn: adapting doesn’t have to mean changing yourself to make other people comfortable.
When I was younger, I sometimes thought succeeding meant figuring out how to fit into the room. Today, I think success is being able to walk into that room as yourself, use everything you’ve learned along the way, and trust that what you bring has value.
That’s probably been the biggest evolution in my career. I spent years learning how to work in other people’s kitchens. Eventually, I learned how to trust myself enough to build my own.
Pricing:
- meals range from $12-23 depending the complexity and proteins in the meals.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.Nonopreps.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/Nonopreps
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/nonopreps-philadelphia?utm_campaign=www_business_share_popup&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=(direct)
- Other: https://share.google/oqEZdA1nloBQ1z6lc
