DINING TASTE
Globally Inspired Catered Cuisine
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By Tom Worgo Photography by Stephen Buchanan
evin Devine debated for a while about whether he should start his own catering business. He’d spent 20 years catering for different companies, including a stint as a contractor for Google, where he won two catering-related awards. He got his perfect opportunity to venture out on his own when his mother, Susan Cordner, suggested he organize a party for about 100 people for the company Advance Air, where she worked in 2018.
The catering job was a big hit. And with about $2,000 in profits, he launched his own company—Crave Catering Co.—in Bowie in December of 2018. He plans to relocate to Edgewater in 2022. “I decided to go after it then and there,” Devine explains. Examples of food themes he offers on his menu include Americana, Rustic Tuscan, French Countryside, and Simply Done Well. “Being able to take different bits and pieces of various cultures and applying them to dishes here in America has given us a nice spin on offerings,” Devine says. Devine runs the company with his wife, Etoye. They both earned culinary degrees from Johnson and Whales University in Rhode Island. We talked to Kevin about what separates Crave Catering Co. from other similar businesses, his food themes, and some of the customer’s favorite foods. Tell me about your background as a chef. I went into the health care industry first. Cooking for hospitals and a retirement community. That was as a lead chef. After that, I realized I wanted to have a better outlet to express my creativity. So, I worked for a catering company for four years. After that, I went into corporate dining doing café service for various law firms in Washington, D.C., for 10 years. We did a lot of catering. Everywhere I have worked there has been a heavy presence of catering. Did working as a contractor for Google at their D.C. office give your career a boost? It did. Being able to put that name next to yours is a huge plus. It took what I was offering and helped me rise to another level. It made me top tier. The awards were for excellence in our events, food and service, and as best catering team in the Americas. That’s out of all the hundreds of offices in North and South America.
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CRAVE CATERING CO. cravecateringco.com Why did you decide to start your own business? We felt we had to move on with what was going to be best for us. My wife is my partner. It was time to move into something that was going to be ours. We had taken the 20-plus years in the catering and food service industry and wanted to use what we learned to make our own statement and put our own spin on it. I have always enjoyed working at weddings and providing great food is the cornerstone of what we love to do. So being able to do that on our own terms is what really propelled us forward. What type of events are you catering now? What event do you cater most often? Most of what we cater is weddings. People held off getting married and we are now having a resurgence. We had nine weddings in late summer. We also are doing a lot more social events—anything outside of a wedding. Anniversaries, bar mitzvahs. That’s because cor-
porate America has not quite returned to full capacities, like in Baltimore, Washington, and, even, Annapolis. Why did you decide to go with Americana as a theme? It’s really taking what we know as typical American Cuisine— great meats vegetables and things like that and elevating them by adding different nuances. My time cooking with Google gave me a tremendous international perspective on foods—being able to take different bits and pieces from different cultures and apply that to dishes we know well here in America. It has proven to give us a nice spin on our offerings. Did you develop the Tuscan and French themes because people were asking for them? I always found when I talked to clients—specifically wedding clients—a lot of them had themes in mind for their events or weddings. I thought it would be great to take some of the world’s
