When Robert Iannaccone, 40 Under 40 honoree and Executive Chef of Shelter Harbor Golf Club (Charlestown, R.I.), couldn’t find the app he wanted to use, he decided to create it himself.
“I came up in kitchens like most of us who entered the business 20-plus years ago, where recipes lived in binders or index cards, usually coffee-stained, edited in Sharpie, and sometimes jammed into plastic sleeves that were barely holding on,” he says. “Once tech got to the point where everyone had a smartphone, I noticed cooks started snapping photos of those pages and propping their phones up at their station to follow along, rather than grab the card or binder page and have to worry about returning it. It worked, kind of, but it was clunky.”
That’s where the idea for his app, Chef en Place, originated.
“I began building it for my own team, just to simplify things: recipes, plate-up standards, and the ability to send a quick message to the whole team, specific shifts, or individual crew members. I knew it needed to be something easy to keep on every cook’s phone but also work on my desktop, so it was easy to copy/paste recipe input. You can organize recipes into folders that match how your kitchen runs. … I wanted it to feel like their existing system, just in the pocket of every team member.”
Chefs can scan handwritten recipes using AI to convert ingredients into text. Iannaccone is also working on AI-powered recipe scaling and photo-to-text conversion for method input.
Iannaccone says the app doesn’t have ads or data tracking, and there’s no email required for team members to log in; they request access with a first name and last initial.
“I just want to give the culinary teams everywhere access to Chef’s brain through theirs,” he says.
Club + Resort Chef (C+RC): When did you officially launch the app? What was that process like?
Robert Iannaccone (RI): I had been thinking about it and talking about it my own kitchens for the last year or two, and then I moved up to Shelter Harbor this spring, and I started doing it a little more earnest. Nothing like this exists, and I feel like I need this, especially with a seasonal environment, to be able to hand over recipes and plate standards. I officially launched a couple of weeks ago. I originally did start building it for myself, but as I was going through, I thought, ‘If I wanted something like this for so long, maybe some other other people do, too.’
C+RC: How did you actually go about building it? Did you work with someone?
RI: I just kind of learned as I went and built a very clunky prototype to prove concept, just to see it with my own eyes, which wasn’t a super easy lift with no tech background and a busy season, but I did it on the fringes of my day and then partnered with a great development team to polish it and get it over the finish line.
C+RC: Did you have an interest in technology, or was this totally for this use case?
RI: I need to know enough technology to function in my in my roles, as far as being digitally competent. But that was about it. … I definitely learned as I go, and I’m still learning every day.
C+RC: Do you use other apps in your day to day for work?
RI: I’ve been demoed them before, but I started this strictly with a club focus; we’re a niche industry. There are some of those programs that they have inventory, recipes, food cost, maybe scheduling. Not that we don’t care about food costs and things like that in private clubs, but my number one concern is consistency and clarity for the culinary team. And I didn’t really see anything in the market speaking to that.
C+RC: You said you didn’t have it done in time for the 2025 season. What’s your plan for rolling it out?
RI: I have a few close industry friends vetting it out for me a little bit, giving me some feedback, and my myself, my exec sous and sous chef, it’s a big part of our plan for 2026 to have our opening menus uploaded, photos uploaded so you know, when our H2B crew hits in May, it’s, ‘Here you go. This is everything you need to be successful on your station.’
C+RC: Can you tell us a little bit about the the food and beverage operation at Shelter Harbor?
RI: We are hyper seasonal, so we’re Mother’s Day through the end of October. There’s one main dining room with a with a lot of outdoor seating, and then we have a beautiful lawn that overlooks the course where we put on special events as well as weddings. It was a huge learning experience. Our members are coming from all over the place, and a lot of them are spending a lot of time in the city on business, being so close to New York and Boston here. They’re definitely looking for a high-end, curated dining experience. This is their home for the summer, whereas other clubs I’ve worked out have been more year-round.
We have a lot of great restaurants in this area, and they’re definitely looking for an experience that’s commiserate with elevated dining ion the New England coast. It’s been amazing to be able to start building relationships with some local purveyors, getting scallops that just came out of the water yesterday, and, fish that come from a few miles from the club. As we start to shape the culinary identity of the club here, on the heels of my first season, local, curated, special experiences is what we’re really leaning into.
C+RC: How often do you update the menus?
RI: We did four throughout the summer. And I think as we and we always have, you know, specials as well as specialty dining events, we do several Wine, wine, wine dinners during the summertime. And as we move forward through for the 26 season. I think we’ll probably update the menus a little more on a rolling, rotational basis, rather than, like a hard cut of, you know, here’s brand new everything in one day, just from a execution standpoint, just, you know, respond to member feedback, not wanting to see favorites disappear, you know, and things like that. Sure.
C+RC: You’re also working on a front of house extension for the app. Can you talk a little bit about that?
RI: As I start to kind of launch and gain practice, I want to be able to take the concept of that clarity and communication and be able to offer it in a for the front of house team as well, but still be able to have kind of a fingerprint on it. So there’s a section on the app currently for the culinary team of plate-up photos.
My plan, and we’re very early stages of starting to develop it, is to be able to almost make a separate portal for the front of house where they would be able to get messages out to members of the team without group text, and they would have access to actually be able to see what the dish has looked like and fill in allergen information, just to try and bring that same idea of clarity and communication across the whole operation.
We’re starting to work on it. I’m learning every day. I would anticipate, hopefully by the end of the winter to be able to at least have it testing.
