Profiles

While David Stein was creating his business at Triangle, Inc., Francis Gouillart, academic, business consultant, and co-author of “The Power of Co-Creation” and his group of angel investors were exploring Malden as a possible city to put the theory of co-creation to work on a local level. “Co-creation is a management initiative, or form of economic strategy, that brings different parties together (for instance a company and a group of customers) in order to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome.” As a blue-collar city and the second most ethnically diverse in Massachusetts, Malden fit the criteria as a community they wanted to work with. Their goal was to try a social experiment by empowering people, especially women and minorities, through food service, by reaching out to Malden food businesses and supporting them by encouraging, coaching, and investing in start-up businesses as equity partners, hiring from the community and supporting community growth in food service. Gouillart and his group had heard of Stein and were interested in working with him.  When they finally met, they found […]

Long-time Malden resident, David Stein, is as warm and colorful as his red-flowered pants.  We spoke at the Polka Dot Commissary on Pearl Street where he described his life as a chef, entrepreneur, musician and partial owner of Stock Pot Malden. In 1976, David Stein was washing dishes in Mystic Seaport at Howard Johnson’s on the highway.  “I liked the line cooks,” he remembers.  “They were cool.”  A year later he was working at his first cooking job, part-time, in the cafeteria where he attended college. He moved to Indiana and in the late 1970s, to the San Francisco bay area around the time when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, the first farm to market restaurant, and the California New American cuisine movement began to take off.  By this time he had been a line cook in a steak restaurant while playing music with his wife, both semi-professional musicians, and had cooked at a few other jobs.  He realized his passion for both cooking and music and that working as a cook allowed him to play the […]