From Business School to Blue Hill at Stone Barns

At just 25, Julianna Sherburne has a resume most professionals in the food space would be impressed with. Immediately following her graduation from the Kelly School of Business at University of Indiana, Julianna took a wild chance, applied and became a junior kitchen apprentice at Stone Barns at Blue Hill, one of the most well-known and renowned culinary centers in the US, run by world famous chef Dan Barber.

Julianna and I met nearly 3 years ago through a mutual friend, and were instant friends, jumping into conversations about the food world, her role at Blue Hill and being two business student undergraduates who have a passion for working in food.

While her role within Blue Hill has since shifted since we first met, Julianna’s drive, ambition and desire to absorb everything she can in the food industry is stronger than ever. We sat down to talk about working in a space that demands excellence day in and day out and how Julianna stays true and takes care of herself.

Frankie: You've worked professionally in food now for quite a few years, but from what I know, your background in school is in business, not food. Something I was curious about as someone who has a similar background is what kind of skills do you think that you learned in that setting are applicable and make you successful in these other settings? 

Julianna:  That’s a really great question, because it's something I struggled with for a while. I was like, ‘How do I understand my own value in these systems as someone who doesn't come from this place and this background?’

I was so scared and felt so behind. And then I realized, there are a substantial amount of people who, you know, they've been cooking since they were 15, or they've always worked in front of house, [or] they've been cooking and recording it on the internet. [But] then there's a much larger group of people that are like, ‘I worked in finance for 10 years, and I'm a cook now’. And so I think the greatest skills I would say are communication and relationship building - so much of the work I do is so rooted in bringing people together, and connecting dots and being an effective communicator of ideas, of challenges, talking to people to receive mentorship, asking good questions and things like that. And I think that networking is drilled into your brains in a particular way in business school, but I think you can warp that in a way that really works for pivoting careers, but also generally finding success in this work.

Frankie: So obviously, when you're working in a place where excellence is demanded time and time again, serving these really interesting clients, and every day's a new day with new people and new interesting things. How do you take care of yourself, take a step back and manage your own reactions and emotions to things when you're so invested, and when there is such a high standard at all times?

Julianna: This is the hardest thing. And I think it should be something that everyone thinks about more often, because it's true. I guess I'll speak more to my time most recently, which was as a captain. 

Every night, you're on your feet for a really large part of the day, you're talking, building a story that's different for every table and catering to the needs of these people in a restaurant that generally is chaotic. So it's a lot of mental management, and you have a team of people under you to manage, and your body hurts and you're tired, you're working 12 hours a day. Everything just builds up. And I think especially when I started, I was so invested in getting good that I threw that [self-care] part of it out the window. 

And so I think I started to feel the effects of it and was also in the phase of [battling] really hardcore imposter syndrome, and wanting to prove myself; not only to prove myself to other people, but for myself. I cannot not be good at ‘the thing’, which is really great, but in certain workplaces is really tough to manage. I've always thought it was something awesome about me, like, ‘I can do anything’, but I realized in that setting that I'll just take on more and more and more until I literally can't. And so I think once I figured that out, it was creating a lot of systems and coming up with more strict routines for myself. 

Once I did that I realized that doing that made me work that much better and made my progress that much greater in a smaller amount of time, and that that's really how you have to function in that space, with a lot of intention, both in your personal life and in your time at work.

Once you've done the job long enough, you can say, generally, if this, then this, and [you] create systems in your mind in a way that makes sense, and then that behavior becomes more natural to you.

Frankie: How did your relationship with Blue Hill change as you moved into a different role, and in a broader sense, how has your personal relationship with food changed in your experience thus far working with food at such a high level?

Julianna: My relationship with Blue Hill I think has evolved in a really interesting way from being this bright-eyed new girl who didn't know anything to now being someone who has a very high level understanding of how everything is executed, both from the side of the nonprofit farm and the for-profit restaurant. 

I’ve gone from someone who feels like I'm constantly absorbing just by being there, you know, learning how to fold the napkin, learning about this potato that I've never heard of, learning about this breeder or this system, [but] now, I'm more of an active participant in what's going on rather than like an observer and an absorber. And so when I go to work, go to tastings, or I'm in meetings and I'm actively talking to people and asking questions, doing things in my day to day to contribute to the research projects and to the general development of the space, which feels very, very cool. 

But also, there's times I miss being able to just be in awe of the place and just like, basking in all of its glory all the time. And so I think that's a big transition for me. It's like when you grow up and you find out the tooth fairy is not real. It's not that the magic's gone, but also you just start to think in a way that's more logistical and realistic than I did when I started.

I think that ties in really well to what my relationship with food and agriculture looks like now, compared to what it was before. I think now it's more so about the fact that I exist in this very specific system that has a lot of privilege, in terms of its proximity to a restaurant and the lack of risk that the farm has to take on. Given the accolades the restaurant has received, you bring in a specific crowd of people who want to hear you talk about specific things. And so understanding that as our baseline, now what I'm more interested in is learning about the bigger, greater systems that exist outside of the walls of Stone Barns. 

But I think I have a foundation now that's allowed me to look at things with a lot more reality in my mind, as I ask questions and as I make decisions and as I talk to people, because it is a very specific system and a very specific place that has a very specific set of parameters that we work within. 

Frankie: To wrap up, what would you tell little five year old, or even five years ago, Juliana, about where you are now?

Julianna: I didn't think [working in food] was a viable option, because where I grew up and what people did around me, it was not obvious what I wanted to do, like work in food, nor was there a place for me to go to learn about it and do it in a way that was semi serious. So I kind of suppressed a lot of that [when I] went to college. 

It kind of started to come out of me a little bit, and I felt it, but I didn't know how to pursue it, and I didn't know what could come of it. So I kind of always just pushed it off, because there was the business route right in front of me that I knew I could do, and I knew I could attack because it was the easy like option. 

It was so scary to [go] in and tell everyone that I’d just gone to school with who [were] getting jobs at consulting firms in finance, getting these very ‘serious’, very respected jobs, to tell them I was gonna go work at a restaurant, I was going to be an intern at a restaurant. 

And I even spent the beginning of my internship like, “Oh, I'm gonna give it six months. I'm gonna leave in six months and, like, go get a job”,... and I got there and pretty immediately it was like, “I am addicted to this. It is so awesome. It is so fun. I am learning so much, and feel like I can do so much in this space.”

Thank God I believed in myself enough to think that I could go do it, because I could do it, and I have done it, and I'm going to continue to do it forever now, which feels like five years ago, that was like, what I'm doing now, and where I am I would have never been been able to tell you it's what I wanted to do, because I wasn't allowing myself to imagine the possibilities.