About Chef Adam Sobel
& The Cinnamon Snail
Hey, I’m Adam! A chef living in Red Bank, NJ with my adorable little vegan family.
The food truck I launched in 2010 became popular beyond my wildest dreams, and evolved into a couple of restaurant locations, a catering company, and a really fun cookbook.
Here’s how I got started on this journey of vegan cooking, and how it changed my life forever.
I met Joey (the super cute girl who would eventually become my wife) when I was still in high school. She was the first vegan person I’d ever really gotten to know closely, and I really appreciated the ethics behind her decision not to eat animals. On the other hand, I always thought getting on the vegan bus would somehow limit my freedom, or some nonsense like that.
Anyway, this girl Joey, she was really something special, but pretty much all she ate was French fries and canned soup.
So I thought, why don’t I learn how to make this girl I loved really tasty vegan food instead? I would spend days copying down recipes from cookbooks and trying to veganize them, and eventually, I started working in restaurants to become a more skilled cook. I kept a super-open mind, and learned everything I could from everyone at the restaurant. Even the dish washers taught me helpful things I have kept with me all these years.
In 2016 I opened a brick and mortar location above Penn Station and right in front of Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. Another couple of years later, I also opened up a location near Wall Street. Our catering had blown up and there were weekends that I used to cater three weddings in the same weekend, while running our food trucks at events, having the restaurants open, and offering smaller catering and custom cakes on the side. It was a bit overwhelmingly stressful to be honest.
When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, I ended up closing everything down. There was no way we could survive with the massive overhead we had for who knows ho many months we would have had to have been closed. And beyond that, I was really ready for a change anyway. I learned so many things from running the Cinnamon Snail, not the least of which was that as much as I loved cooking, I didn’t love being a boss of a staff of 60+ with a 24/7 operation…
During the pandemic, I started offering online vegan cooking classes, and still offer them today. I always felt that culinary schools charged too much for the average person to be able to participate, and offering the classes online allowed me to make them much more affordable and accessible to people. Every month I teach different vegan culinary styles, techniques and methods, and I also offer a discounted subscription to my classes which allow me to connect more deeply and mentor my students who I have really come to love!
I also have been offering culinary consulting for other people’s food businesses, and have created vegan recipes for restaurants, catering companies, food trucks, and food manufacturers.
It’s great for me, because it’s the part of my job I love the most (creating recipes) with non of the stuff I don’t love as much (doing payroll, hiring and firing staff, operational teaches etc.)
What’s next for me?
I am continuing to teach and offer consulting, and am working on a new exciting cookbook. I do occasional Cinnamon Snail pop ups, which you can get in the know about on my mailing list.
I am also launching a super secret very small but hyper-creative vegan food business to operate on the weekends seasonally because I really miss cooking for people. I spent the better part of the pandemic planning out every wacky detail of this project. I can’t (don’t want to, I guess) tell you too much about it just yet, but I think it’s going to be a ton of fun, both for the customers and for me as the Chef behind it.
