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- Dogue is a dog-food model that provides pastries and five- to seven-course meals at its ‘pawtisserie’ in San Francisco.
- Co-founder and proprietor Rahmi Massarweh is a chef classically skilled in French delicacies.
- Menu gadgets like its ‘dogguccino’ and its ‘petit gateaus’ value wherever from $2.50 to $95.
How a lot do you like your dog? More folks have Googled “Is my dog happy?” than “Is my kid happy?,” according to Psychology Today. And in San Francisco, research have discovered that there are extra canine than kids. So naturally, it’d make sense to start out having correct eating choices for canines, proper?
Rahmi Massarweh, a classically French skilled chef opened Dogue (pronounced like “rogu e”), a dog-food brand serving food and meals out of a cafe in San Francisco last month with his wife, Alejandra. Menu-item prices range from $2.50 to $95.
When Massarweh exited the demanding culinary world in 2015 — one of the toughest choices of his life — he left a successful career as an executive chef, and decided to rededicate his life to his wife and family.
“My in-laws have been gracious sufficient to permit us to remain of their small, tiny little basement and gave us a suggestion of providing dog strolling, simply to make a bit little bit of pocket change,” Massarweh told Insider.
During this time, Massarweh continued feeding fresh foods to his mastiff. Everywhere he went with Grizzly, he got compliments about his dog’s health and demeanor. Massarweh thought he had something here and opened a dog daycare with his wife.
“While working the daycare, we began to get extra inquiries about our dog meals,” Massarweh. “I’ll always remember the very first consumer who requested us to make meals for his or her dog.”
This dog was a 12-year-old golden retriever who was diagnosed with cancer and given only two months to live. Massarweh’s wife insisted he prepare meals for the terminally ill dog.
“At first, I wasn’t too thrilled about making meals as a result of I had simply left a profession in the restaurant business,” Massarweh said.
Massarweh said one week went by, then two weeks, and two years later, the golden retriever was still living. In 2015, couple started offering small batch, artisanal meals for their clients.
“The solely change was including recent meals to her weight loss plan,” Massarweh said. “That’s the place we absolutely began making the dedication to providing this.”
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Dogue, located at 988 Valencia Street, is right on the border of two culturally rich neighborhoods in San Francisco, Dolores Heights and the Mission District. The cafe offers the dog-food brand’s pastries and desserts, meat jerkies, a fine-dining tasting menu, and wearable dog merchandise.
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The cafe’s name comes from the French word for “mastiff,” a breed that looks like a very-large pug.
“Our very first dog was an English Mastiff,” Massarweh told Insider. “‘It’s an homage to my roots in classical French delicacies and our mastiff.”
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Massarweh said he was inspired by his trips around Europe when designing his cafe and menu.
“There’s numerous European inspiration,” Massarweh said. “One hundred % France. Italy, Spain, Madrid, Barcelona. All these locations have a novel and wealthy historical past which have been vastly inspirational from a culinary perspective and visible, aesthetic perspective.”
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Massarweh and his wife fed their mastiff a whole-protein and fat-based diet, supplemented with fruits and vegetables and some select dairy.
“We selected to not feed a carbohydrate-rich weight loss plan, and the advantages have been great,” Massarweh said. “Being in a position to have a mastiff that is 12 years outdated and nonetheless acts like a very younger dog is the largest profit I’ve ever seen out of all of it.”
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Massarweh’s personal mission is to bring fresh and non-artificial foods to as many dogs as the company can.
“I do not need the thought of presentation and plating to be the focus,” Massarweh said. “I need that to be the car that brings it to the world.”
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Dogue’s main house recipes that can be adjusted based on your dog’s breed, age, weight, activity level, body condition, allergies, or food sensitivities.
“All these little subtleties and nuances change from dog to dog, and you must deal with it as such,” Massarweh said.
Most recently the tasting menu offered seven courses, including a complimentary starter course for humans (a Prosecco mimosa with fresh-squeezed orange juice), and then for dogs: an organic pumpkin bite, organic chicken and chaga mushroom soup, charcoal flan and chicken skin waffle, Caprese salad, hand-cut and grass-fed steak tartare, and wild antelope heart bite.
The cafe’s take on Starbucks’s whip-creamed dessert for dogs, is an arguably fancier version which Massarweh calls the ‘dogguccino’ is made of activated coconut charcoal infused into grass-fed organic cream.
“We serve it in a bit espresso cup with a bit coconut shortbread cookie,” he said.
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Massarweh has been in the culinary scene far for a majority of his life: He became of age in a family restaurant, and his father was the assistant general manager at the Il Fornaio Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s Levi’s Plaza.
“My first job was working in household cafes and eating places as a child lengthy earlier than I turned a chef,” Massarweh said.
Dogue is open from 1:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. On Sundays, the Dogue’s ‘Bone Appetit’ event is from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Customers can see the whole Dogue package on Sundays, when the cafe goes all out with a tasting menu of up to eight courses.
“I feel significantly in San Francisco, we’re so extremely progressive when it comes to our well being and our consciousness on what we eat and put in our our bodies,” Massarweh said.
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For now – until Dogue begins hiring employees and another chef –Massarweh makes each of the pastries himself.
“I make all the pieces by hand,” Massarweh said. “Our pastries take two days for me to make and I make them one-by-one individually, I garnish them by hand.”
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The treats look great enough to eat for dogs, but what about for humans? Massarweh said he’s tasted all the treats himself, but some ingredients are raw, and most are not flavored to fit the human palette.
“We had a visitor are available yesterday who has some form of social media following and she purchased a pastry and ate it,” Massarweh said. “Now, I do not advocate that. Remember, we do not add salt. We do not add sugar.”
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The Red Rose pastry is made with wild antelope.
“It’s one in every of my favorites as a result of there’s numerous visible motion; there’s numerous circulate,” Massarweh said.
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The blue Spirulina Sphere is made with braised antelope shoulder. The pastry gets its blue color from spirulina, a blue-green algae that is known to be highly nutritious and a source of protein, vitamins and minerals.
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The Golden Paste Cake is Dogue’s take on moon tea and golden paste.
“I’ve a model of it which is extremely wholesome for canine,” Massarweh said. “We’ve taken medication and disguised it.”
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The Petit Gateau, French for “little cake” is made with shredded chicken from a family farm in California.
“It’s impressed by one in every of my favourite cooks in France, Cédric Grolet,” Massarweh said. “He’s simply phenomenal. This is my tribute to him.”
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For fluffy fans of meat and protein, Dogue offers jerky. Dogs can choose from a variety of meats such as wild antelope, wild venison, chicken, turkey, duck, and guinea hen.
“All these kinds of issues are primarily the core of Dogue: recent meals,” Massarweh said. “We supply a full line of treats in-house-made single ingredient treats.”
The ideal food pyramid for dogs should balance a variety of proteins, bones, fats, fruits, and vegetables.
“We’re making an attempt to carefully mimic, as a lot as attainable, a pure weight loss plan of a wild dog or a wild canine,” Massarweh said.
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While Dogue’s primary clientele lives around the San Francisco Bay Area region, he said that he’s toyed with the idea of expanding his reach.
“I’ve actually gotten tons of of emails from throughout the world of individuals saying how they’re,” Massarweh said.
And while Dogue has played host to many birthdays, there haven’t been any weddings just yet. For now, the company is preparing the holidays.
“We’re going to offer a Thanksgiving-inspired menu,” Massarweh said. “I really feel as if we should always have the ability to get pleasure from a vacation with our dog and allow them to expertise what we get to expertise.”
