Two Lexington women forge their own path in the food industry

If restaurant kitchens were a bastion for respectful culture, we might never have gotten to know the late chef-turned-TV personality Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain’s best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, published in 2000, is a collection of gripping, humorous, unfiltered and NSFW stories from his journey to becoming executive chef at the French Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. Drug abuse and bro culture are so pervasive in Bourdain’s stories that readers are left to wonder whether that is the status quo across the industry. In an unexpected twist, Kitchen Confidential’s success, with over one million copies sold, shone a spotlight on the restaurant industry and, in tandem with the “Me Too” movement a few years later, became an important catalyst for change within the industry.

Two individuals championing this movement for change are Lexington residents Eva Badra and Lisa Farrell. While their stories are different, themes from their journey into food entrepreneurship overlap. Although the Boston food scene is relatively small, and Lexington’s is even smaller, Eva and Lisa’s paths have not intersected. At best, they can be described as coplanar, with both women choosing to live in and raise their families in Lexington and both women seeing only one path for themselves in the culinary world: small business ownership. Eva and Lisa share passion and determination as well as a fundamental belief in what is possible and what should be normal. I interviewed Eva and Lisa separately and spliced their stories together below to share the journey of two of our hardworking neighbors, pioneering their way to a better future for women in the food industry.

“We can do better” 

In the early 2010s, Lisa Farrell was working long hours in New York as a director at a multinational corporation, rarely seeing her family. As she and her husband Patrick Farrell began to think about their future, Lisa realized she wanted to change her career trajectory. In 2015, Lisa and her family moved to Lexington, where she founded Red Apple Lunch, a scratch-made school lunch delivery service. Lunch production took place at a shared kitchen incubator. Most of the other businesses sharing the space had decades of professional cooking experience and minimal exposure to workplace cultures outside of the kitchen. Lisa, on the other hand, had decades of experience working in formal corporate environments and no kitchen experience. 

As she describes it today, “the kitchen was full of tough-guy attitude. It was all rough and tumble. The idea that we could do better burned in my mind–deeply.” After a particularly grueling stretch in the harsh kitchen environment, Lisa recalls reflecting on it while decompressing at a yoga class: “I don’t understand why kitchens can’t have a more pleasant atmosphere,” she remembers thinking at the time. “We can all treat each other nicer. We can do better.”

Lisa began to seek out a new home for her school lunch delivery business, and as one thing led to another, she ended up purchasing a nascent business, the shared culinary space Food Revolution (Food Rev for short) in Stoneham. A 2017 article in the Boston Globe described the vision for Food Rev as “an incubator to help grow health-conscious businesses… with hopes [the founder can] provide guidance to help business owners avoid some of the roadblocks [she] faced at the start.” 

Since late 2018, Lisa has been leading Food Rev in its evolution to become the better professional kitchen she first manifested at that yoga class, while also expanding the roster of services it offers to tenant businesses. While some business owners opt to change the name of a business after buying it, Lisa changed only the capitalization of the business’ formal name to Food rEvolution. “That’s my personal approach, I’m not revolting against something, even if things change completely at the end.”

Eva’s Little Kitchen chef and owner Eva Badra was born and raised in Lexington. She studied biochemistry at Northeastern and says she assumed she would go to medical school “like my parents and everyone else in Lexington.” Eva’s passion for food and cooking could not be relegated to a supporting role, however, and in 2016 she formalized her culinary education at the French Culinary Institute and began to work in professional kitchens. 

Eva soon realized that restaurants were not where she was going to thrive and that she would need to strike out on her own. She became a private chef, launched a weekly meal delivery service, and three years later opened Eva’s Little Kitchen, a from-scratch bakery, cafe, and catering company at 200 Great Road in Bedford. Unlike Lisa, Eva had experience working in higher functioning kitchens while she was in New York, but she also had experiences similar to Lisa’s, so she knew it was her positive experiences that were the outliers. Eva said, “it’s hard to create that culture, but once you have people that are becoming pioneers, it starts to take shape. It’s the little things like having a consistent schedule and the same days off…” and then, affirming Lisa’s experience, adds, “and knowing you’re not going to get verbally harassed.” 

“Small companies are nimble”

When Eva first set out to find a space for her growing business in early 2020, she was primarily looking for a commissary kitchen to support her weekly meal delivery service. She added in a cafe and bakery to provide extra revenue, but these were meant to be ancillary. After Eva’s Little Kitchen opened in 2021, customers spoke with their dollars and, over time, the bakery became the core of Eva’s Little Kitchen. Last fall, Eva shut down the meal delivery service that had grown from a menu of six items to 18. She said, “It was too hard to continuously shift gears and creatively churn out different things.” With the shift, Eva was able to open the bakery seven days a week with expanded offerings “doing what I think we are meant to be doing — a from-scratch bakery and lots of catering.” The only thing lacking today is enough seating; because the space was designed with the cafe at the periphery, Eva’s Little Kitchen is limited to just a few counter stools year-round, and a few small outdoor cafe tables during patio season.

Food Rev began as a shared kitchen space to monetize the underused capacity of its owner’s nut milk company. As a result, the kitchen itself was barely built out; the walk-in refrigerator did not work and there was no way to cook hot food. After Lisa bought Food Rev, she dove immediately into the deferred maintenance on the kitchen infrastructure while continuing to run Red Apple Lunch, host and attract other business tenants (full disclosure: for several months in 2019 this included the now-closed business of this author). 

When Covid hit, Lisa closed Red Apple Lunch and began to focus full time on Food Rev. Overnight — by necessity — Food Rev’s tenants changed their varied business models into meal delivery and pickup services. After a career of working at various large organizations, Lisa knowingly credits Food Rev and its tenants as “small companies [that] are nimble and able to pivot quickly.” Given that Food Rev’s tenant businesses are largely predicated on churning out a consistent product made up of inputs that are inherently variable — depending on when produce is harvested, taste and sugar content vary and changing weather conditions like humidity require bakers to recalculate their recipes for a consistent result — being able to pivot quickly might just be a prerequisite to survival. 

When it comes to running Food Rev, a business that houses startups full of risk and instability, Lisa’s next project is to de-risk her biggest expense — rent — and to that end just successfully closed a crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with a Massachusetts Growth Capital Co. 1:1 match grant to help fund $20,000 of the down payment to purchase the building.

“It’s all pretty personal”

“If the way that I run Food Rev takes some of the stress [of starting a new business] away, then I feel successful — and I’m not always successful in that area. But if that’s not happening, that’s a very big litmus test for me; how can I shift things, are there other things that can be happening in this space?” 

Lisa uses her recollection of the challenges of starting Red Apple Lunch to inform how she develops new services for Food Rev tenants. After completing the first round of infrastructure investments in the kitchen, Lisa turned her attention to her tenants’ challenge of new customer acquisition. She worked to create opportunities for her tenants to sell their products together, believing that each business’ customer list would have a subset of people excited to learn about other locally-made foods, often like-minded in mission. Past collaborations include plant-based holiday menus for pickup featuring items from up to six tenant businesses, a “Handmade in 02180” holiday gift box showcasing products from five tenants, and starter space at area farmer’s markets. 

As Lisa worked at Food rEvolution, people began to knock on the door, curious about what was happening inside the almost 100-year old building. Older residents remember it as Marianne’s corner store with candy and sandwiches; more recently, the space had been used by a caterer. What is it now, and why are there always different people going in and out of the front door, the neighbors wondered. 

Lisa realized that as curious as the neighborhood was about Food Rev, she too wanted to meet the community, and in early 2023, she resolved to transform Food Rev into a cafe open to the public on Saturday mornings. 

On a Saturday morning in February 2023 when an arctic blast brought temperatures to -6℉, Lisa made a batch of fresh apple cider doughnuts and hosted three locals for the first Saturday Café, which has since become a beloved Food Rev tradition. “We’re very humble. Our awning is torn. We move the workbenches around. Everyone who comes in just wants to chat. We talk about Lola’s ube cheese pandesal.” When asked who attends the cafes, Lisa explains, “When we ran holiday popups, 80% of the business came from loyal followers of the participating businesses; we were not meeting the neighborhood. Today, 80% of people who come to Saturday Café are from the neighborhood and surrounding towns. We’re all happy to be with each other.”

Take one step inside Eva’s Little Kitchen and the level of care for each detail is immediately evident: from the rainbow display of cookbooks on the back wall to the bakery counter stacked high with well-risen, multi-layered laminated pastries and thick chewy cookies to the pristine refrigerated case holding French macarons and pastry chef Nicole Paladino’s latest creations.  Eva describes success as something that “she can’t describe, but I strive to work towards it every day. I’m the type of person that’s constantly trying to be better every day, always looking for the next thing to chase.” Eva’s appetite for improvement is insatiable; customers and coworkers alike stand to benefit from her drive.

The breakfast and lunch menus at Eva’s Little Kitchen show a fluency with international cuisines and a reticence to repeat featured ingredients. How then, does Eva decide what makes it onto the menu — or perhaps more fittingly, what comes off of it? “It’s all pretty personal — almost every sandwich has a story.” Eva’s breakfast sandwich was inspired by her time working at Joanne Chang’s Flour Bakery in Boston. The smoked turkey sandwich is a conduit for Eva to share her obsession with red pepper jelly. “The rule is I have to be able to eat it to sell it.” When Eva tired of the wildly popular monkey bread — balls of brioche dipped in butter, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a cream cheese frosting — she took it off the menu, but faced pushback. In response, the recipe was changed but Eva was still not happy. “Finally, we settled on a cinnamon roll with cream cheese glaze.” Over the course of over two hours of conversation, this was the only time Eva used the word “settle.”

Three quick questions

Where do you most enjoy food shopping?

EVA BADRA: Market Basket: the produce is generally very fresh because they go through so much of it; you can’t beat the price of other items; and they carry such a wide variety of products. I also love HMart. I know the cheffy thing to say is the farmer’s market…

LISA FARRELL: I enjoy shopping at Market Basket as much as I enjoy shopping at Wright Locke’s Farm-To-Go and wandering around farmer’s markets. I love shopping for food when I’m not in a hurry; I get so much enjoyment from seeing the variety. I cannot walk past the reduced price section at Market Basket without stopping for bananas for banana bread or tomatoes for tomato sauce. I’m a democratic food shopper; I believe good food comes from a lot of different places.

Besides water, what do you drink the most of (volume)?

EVA BADRA: Our chai tea – it’s brewed with some sugar to bring out the spices. Instead of adding milk, I add half and half so it retains its super spicy qualities with just a little creaminess.

LISA FARRELL: A tie between coffee and kombucha. At home, I make French press coffee and mix it with an equal amount of Oatly milk that I steam on the stove with cardamom and cinnamon. It’s a routine from Covid that I’ve not looked back on and might be the best part of my day. I like Pigeon Cove’s kombucha–Hibiscus Ginger is my favorite–or GT’s gingerade.

If I were to offer you a free meal anywhere in Lexington, where would you go?

EVA BADRA: Akame Nigiri and Sushi – I’m going in a few weeks for my birthday!

LISA FARRELL: Akame Nigiri and Sushi.