Credit: Hedley & Bennett

No Plan, Just Guts: The Wild Rise of Ellen Bennett

15 Minute read

16 Jul 2025

Paul Feinstein

Journalist

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A onetime line cook with zero startup experience, Bennett built Hedley & Bennett chef by chef, leap by leap—and never looked back.

It started with a lie.

Not a big one—just the kind of bold, bullshit-on-a-burner that only works if you believe it harder than the person you're saying it to. Ellen Bennett was still working the line at Bäco Mercat in Los Angeles when her chef mentioned, offhandedly, that someone was making aprons for the kitchen.
“That’s me,” she said without hesitation.

It wasn’t. She didn’t even have an apron company. But she would by the time service ended.

That first order—forty aprons—was the start of Hedley & Bennett, a now-iconic culinary gear brand worn by line cooks, Michelin-star chefs, and now, home cooks tuning into her new TV show. But nothing about Bennett’s path was traditional, predictable, or particularly planned. In fact, if there’s one constant in her career, it’s this:

She jumps first. The rest catches up later.

Baptism by Broth: Mexico City, Age 18

At 18, Ellen Bennett didn’t apply to colleges. She boarded a flight to Mexico City with a suitcase, no plan, and a little push from her mom, who thought a change of scenery—and some distance from a boyfriend she didn’t like—might do her daughter good. What was meant to be a one-month visit turned into four years of full immersion.

“I fell so deeply in love with that city and the culture and the vibe and the flavors and the smells and everything that everyone loves about Mexico,” Bennett says. “But circa, you know, 2007.”

She enrolled in culinary school—Centro de Estudios Superiores de San Ángel—and supported herself with a rotation of improbable, perfectly Ellen jobs: lottery announcer, union translator, kitchen assistant at a fonda. The fondas became her informal training grounds—humble restaurants serving a single set lunch to working-class diners. She studied with the grandmas in the back, absorbing the language of real Mexican home cooking.

“Could I afford culinary school in the U.S.? Absolutely not,” she says. “Somehow this indirect road led me to find my way in Mexico.”

For someone who had grown up between two cultures—Swedish-leaning routines in LA and meat-filled weekends with family in northern Mexico—it was a kind of coming home. But it was also hard. She had no car, no friends, no shortcuts. Just instincts and drive.

“Living by yourself when you’re 18 years old in Mexico fucking City is no mother fucking joke,” she says. “It was so goddamn intense… I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have friends. I did everything on public transportation. It was fucking sketchy as balls.”

But she survived. And more than that, she thrived.

“I was building notches on my confidence belt, if you will,” she says. “It was just like, can you do this? Okay, yeah, I did it. Okay. Cool. Can I live in a foreign country? Yes. Can I get jobs when I don’t know anyone? Yes. Okay. Can I get my citizenship? Can I fucking work for ten minutes, work as a lottery announcer, learn how to speak Spanish better? Can I have no accent? Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

By the time she left Mexico, Bennett had a culinary degree, a Mexican passport, multiple jobs, and a life she had fully built from scratch. But that still wasn’t enough. “Complacency,” she says, “was the enemy.”

Reverse Culture Shock: Back in L.A., Broke but On Fire

By the time she left Mexico, Ellen Bennett was 22, fluent, fearless, and fully on her own two feet. She had a diploma in culinary management, a Mexican passport, and more hustle than most people twice her age. But instead of cashing in on comfort, she sold everything and bought herself a one-way ticket back to L.A.—by way of a whirlwind global trip.

“I went on a trip around the world with, like, a pretty scrappy, you know, amount of money—it wasn’t like crazy slush fund or anything,” she says. “I’d go to the airport, I’d be like, Where are you gonna go today? Italy.”

The trip lasted a month and a half. She climbed Mount Fuji. Hopped from country to country on the last of her dad’s airline perks. And by the time she landed back in California, she was broke, grounded, and ready to work.

“I was exhausted with traveling and ready to just, like, focus and get back to business and build my little restaurant world,” she says.

First came the humility check: she moved back in with her mom and started staging around L.A., still unsure where she fit into the U.S. restaurant landscape.

“A friend of mine gave me a list of the top ten restaurants in L.A.,” she says. “This was such a big moment for me because I didn’t understand the world of restaurants in the U.S. at all.”

She took the list and did what she’d learned to do in Mexico: show up. Between 2 and 4 p.m., she knocked on kitchen doors—Providence, AOC, Bäco Mercat, Mozza—offering to work for free. Within weeks, she was staging at two places: Providence under Michael Cimarusti, and Bäco Mercat under Josef Centeno.

“I ended up just working both restaurants,” she says. “Obviously one of them, it was like, the only thing I was allowed to touch was herbs. And then the other one, I was working the grill.”

She also took personal cheffing jobs to make ends meet, juggling multiple kitchens, long hours, and low pay. But after Mexico, the U.S. felt almost frictionless.

“It felt like someone had rolled out the red carpet,” she says. “I had a car now, and it was the U.S., and everything was so much less complicated... I was just running fucking circles around people.”

She was fast, scrappy, and relentless. And still—it wasn’t enough. Not yet.

Apron Girl on the Line

The idea came out of nowhere—but the frustration had been simmering for months. The gear in pro kitchens was trash. The aprons were stiff and ill-fitting, the chef coats boxy and lifeless. No one looked good in them, and no one cared to change it. Except Ellen.

“There was this cook, and we were talking about it, and we were like, our uniforms suck,” she recalls. “Could we make them better? What could they be?”

She started playing with ideas. Tossing around materials, fit, functionality—first in her head, then in quiet conversations behind the line at Bäco Mercat. She didn’t have a design background, but she knew what cooks needed. She lived in that world. And she knew how to deliver.

Then one day, in the middle of service, Josef Centeno mentioned a woman who was making aprons for restaurants. It wasn’t a question. It was a casual remark. But Bennett didn’t blink.

“I was like, I have an apron company. Didn’t I tell you this?” she says.

She didn’t. She had no such thing. But she would—because right there on the pass, Centeno gave her an order for forty aprons.

“He’s like, what are you talking about? You’re literally a line cook in my kitchen,” she says. “I was shocked and in awe that this guy would have the foresight and willingness to give it a shot.”

She took the order and built the company to match. She had no money, no infrastructure, no business plan. But she had a deposit—and a collaborator.

“I sat with him with swatches and was like, what do you love? What do you hate? What do you need? What do you want?” she says. “I didn’t pretend I knew what I was doing. I simply was like, I promise that I will deliver. You just need to tell me what we want.”

The first Hedley & Bennett apron wasn’t just a product. It was a collaboration between two cooks who understood that function and style weren’t mutually exclusive. And that cook in the kitchen? She was now a founder.

“I was building notches on my confidence belt," Bennett said.

Brand by Fire

That first order lit a fuse. Ellen Bennett had a product—and now she needed a pipeline. So she did what she’d always done: she showed up.

“After I got this first order, I was like, okay, well, I don’t have any other fucking order. So what do I do?” she says. “I’m gonna go where the chefs are.”

She tagged along to events. Worked for free. Positioned herself wherever decisions were happening. Pebble Beach Food & Wine became her unofficial office. On the line, she met Josiah Citrin, Daniel Boulud, Tyler Florence—chefs she’d once read about, now side by side at service stations.

“It was never from a place of like, I know what I’m doing,” she says. “It was always from a place of like, I’m so excited about what I’m doing, but I need help… What problems can I fix for you?”

That genuine approach worked. One chef turned into two, then five, then fifty. And always, she delivered.

“I always say, it was street by street, chef by chef,” she says. “This was not—this was just me, like, delivering. Every time I said I was going to do something, I would do it.”

She spoke their language. She moved like one of them. She wasn’t selling some outsider product—she was solving problems from inside the system.

“These hardcore chefs that were so intense… they trusted me,” she says. “I knew their language… I was one of them, but with a slightly different perspective.”

Over time, she started to think bigger. Aprons were just the beginning. She started listening more closely to what chefs actually needed—what tools they used, what gear frustrated them, what no one was fixing. That feedback loop shaped the next phase of Hedley & Bennett.

“It became, what’s the next thing? It’s a knife,” she says. “Okay, what comes out of your arm after you put an apron on? Fucking knife. You need a good knife. Okay, what about after that? Okay, a cutting board. And then it just sort of went from there.”

Then came 2020—and the ultimate stress test. As restaurants shuttered during the pandemic, Bennett didn’t wait to react. She overhauled her entire operation in 24 hours.

“We created that insane face mask thing where I shut down the factory in one day,” she says. “Just, like, became a face mask facility overnight.”

The pivot worked. Hedley & Bennett launched a buy-one-donate-one mask model and went viral. Practically overnight, the business shifted from chef-centric wholesale to a full-blown direct-to-consumer brand.

“It literally overnight—what would have taken a company years to do—we leapfrogged it because we were willing to leap off the cliff,” she says. “Because we had to leap off the cliff to stay alive.”

Today, roughly 80 percent of Hedley & Bennett’s business comes from home cooks. But its foundation—built in kitchens, forged in hustle—has never changed.

Stepping Back to Step Forward

After nearly a decade of nonstop growth, Ellen Bennett did something few founders are willing to do: she let go.

“I looked up in 2022 and I was like, hold on. What is this next stage?” she says. “Am I the person to take it to the next level now?… I’m not the right person for this next chapter.”

It wasn’t burnout. It was clarity. She had built Hedley & Bennett from nothing—street by street, chef by chef—but the company was changing. So was she. She had become a mother. Twice. And she knew instinctively, just as she had in every other pivot point of her life, that it was time to shift roles.

“It was a really hard, painful journey to not be in charge of everything while also having a child,” she says. “Even for me, and I love change.”

She moved into a chairman role, handed over day-to-day leadership, and started asking herself a different question: what can I do that no one else in the company can?

The answer wasn’t immediate. But it was obvious once it arrived. She had spent years walking into restaurant kitchens, helping chefs improve their space, their tools, their sense of confidence. What if she could do the same thing for home cooks?

“If you take brass tacks, what I did was like, I busted into restaurants and I fixed them,” she says. “I made them better. I gave people encouragement and vibe and style and a point of view.”

That became the seed of Kitchen Glow Up, her new show on Tastemade. It wasn’t some random influencer pivot—it was a continuation of the very thing that made Hedley & Bennett succeed. Encouragement, function, style. A little chaos. A lot of joy.

And the full-circle moment? Andrew Zimmern—the chef who’d told her at Aspen Food & Wine in 2013 that she belonged on TV—ended up executive producing the show.

“He said to me, ‘Ellen, I don’t know when or how, but you fucking belong on TV, and we’re gonna do something together one day,’” she remembers. “I was a baby. I was like 25.”

Now, she's on screen doing what she’s always done: getting in the weeds, solving problems, and making kitchens work better—for real people. Only this time, there’s a camera rolling.

Still Hustling, Just Louder

Ellen Bennett didn’t build Hedley & Bennett because she had a roadmap. She built it because she saw a gap, threw herself at it, and figured it out on the fly. From apron drops at Bäco to a viral pivot during COVID to outfitting home cooks across the country, her path has never followed conventional startup logic.

“We just kept doing it over and over again,” she says. “Do twice as much in half the time.”

She’s no longer the one threading every seam or overseeing every product drop. But make no mistake—she’s still in it. Whether she’s guiding brand direction, hosting Kitchen Glow Up, or collaborating on new tools, Bennett’s voice, energy, and taste remain the pulse of the company she built.

“What I did was amplify what we’ve done with restaurants for 11 years,” she says. “Busting into people’s homes and redesigning their kitchen… it started as this little idea that became something much bigger because we put in the time and we didn’t give up.”

There’s no illusion of ease in her story—just momentum, and guts, and the kind of self-belief that’s louder than doubt. Bennett may no longer be working the line. But she’s still building—and she’s still jumping first.

Paul Feinstein

16 Jul 2025

Gastronomic Explorer