The Dough
Our Mission
Our mission is simple: to elevate what we expect from our meals and our communities by emphasizing flavor over supply chains and serving as an incubator for collaboration and conversation, in our dining room and yours.
If you find a new friend around us, we’re doing something right.
We are our ingredients. And community is an ingredient. That’s why BBQ tastes better in a backyard and why no chef can beat nostalgia or the flavor of a memory. Like sourdough, flavor is shaped by the environment and the hands that make it.
That said, we’re chefs. And all we really want to do is cook.
“Just let us cook.”
Our Story
Sourdough Social Club isn’t its founder, but every child has a mom, and this one’s called Jacob.
Tired of being told what to think or reading about what someone else thought Jacob took the money he’d made flipping burgers in a ski chalet and serving under a locally known chef, and on one particularly hazy night, he bought a one-way ticket to Australia.
That was sixteen years ago.
In between, he loved, lost, and failed brilliantly while growing up. He experienced “other” ways of living cultures, people, and all our idiosyncrasies in their full, messy beauty. As a foreign speaker, he learned quickly that food is a language, and communication is everything.
So he set out to learn it fluently.
Across four continents, he earned his education wherever anyone would take him growing grapes and cooking on vineyards in Australia, learning nasi goreng from a grandmother who scolded him in Indonesia, even working in a taquería in Germany.
He says he didn’t learn to be a chef in culinary school, but in the heat and rhythm of Michelin-starred kitchens in San Francisco, and in the quiet focus of pastry work in Minnesota. But even that wasn’t “it.”
Because food isn’t meant to be pretentious.
It’s not a wine glass held with a pinky up it’s a shared belly laugh, boozy rosy cheeks, and a warm room filled with good people.
Food should never be elitist. Around the world, he saw everyday people eating fresh, flavorful food that was both honest and affordable.
So, in 2016, Jacob and a chef partner opened Salami Social Club in Berlin a place for the community, born from a simple frustration: there was nowhere in his neighborhood to get good food after ten.
They were right to build it. Because everyone deserves to belong. And delicious is delicious.
But all good art should have an end.
For Salami Social Club, that end came with the pandemic. First, locked down in Germany, Jacob watched a city pull together. Then, back in the States, he watched a city pull apart and it didn’t sit right.
Years later, when he found himself hungry in a town that reminded him of that Berlin neighborhood, he couldn’t resist the pull.
He took a job as Executive Chef at Doc’s Marina Grill on Bainbridge Island. What started as a temporary fix a kind of culinary crisis acting became a second wind. There, Jacob rebuilt his footing, re-learned the rhythms of the States, and reconnected with his purpose.
Over the next three years, he was won over by the people, the proximity to agriculture, and the quality of those doing the work. It pulled him in.
Sourdough Social Club was born from that pull.
Because creating dope product is good.
But feeding someone’s soul?
That’s better.