Alyssa Gangeri
Pastry Chef | The Butter Milk Ranch & Urban Grub | Nashville
May 2022
As a child, Alyssa Gangeri spent her summers on the shores of Cape Cod, learning to bake for her large Italian family. Her origin came full circle when her first job after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America was back on the cape at the Ocean Edge Resort & Golf Club. One year later, Gangeri moved to Miami, where she worked at the Ritz-Carlton, South Beach before taking an assistant pastry chef position with Rising Stars alum Maximo Santiago at Norman’s. After honing her Viennoiserie skills staging with Rising Stars alum Antonio Bachour, she returned to New York and became pastry sous chef at Cafè Gray, joined the opening team at Grayz, then spent two years at Tom Colicchio’s flagship restaurant, Craft.
In 2011, Gangeri and her husband opened an American sports bar, River Walk Bar & Grill, the only bar on Roosevelt Island. She helped run the business for ten years while consulting for high-end celebrity events with her mentor, certified Master Pastry Chef Frank Vollkommer, and publishing the first-ever series of children's storybook cookbooks, titled, Mimi’s Adventures in Baking. After being diagnosed with severe celiac disease in 2017, Gangeri thought it would be impossible to continue her career in baking. But she persevered, adjusting her baking methods in order to avoid close contact with gluten and relying on her teams’ hyper-specific feedback. Gangeri joined forces with management group UrbanGrub in 2018, who moved her down to Nashville to open and operate The Butter Milk Ranch and oversee all pastry development for their namesake sister restaurant, Urban Grub. Gangeri collaborates with Butter Milk’s savory chef, Daniel Scott Gorman, to produce pastries that blur the line between savory and sweet like “C’reuben” sandwiches and laminated “Breakfast Cubes.”
