About our
founder,
Chef Joey

About Chef
Daniel Swift

About Sous Chef
Menelio Griffith

About Infusion Culinary

Founded in 2005 by Chef Joey Nerenberg, Infusion Culinary of San Diego, Calif. provides professionally taught educational courses for the serious cooking enthusiast who is looking for a comprehensive grounding in the fundamentals of fine cooking.

Infusion Culinary’s course offerings fill the space between one-time classes ideal for cooking hobbyists and professional culinary institutes for aspiring career chefs. Infusion Culinary gives you professional level instruction in fun, hand-on classes with plenty of individual assistance from the chef instructors. Courses run over a matter of weeks, making it easy to become a knowledgeable cook in only a short amount of time.

Infusion Culinary uses a total immersion, "Hear it, See it, Do it" approach to teaching that is fun and very effective. Small class sizes with two professional chef instructors per class guarantee ample personal attention for each student. Instructors engage students with humor and encouragement. Through this unique teaching approach, essential cooking skills and knowledge become second nature to students.

About our founder, Chef Joey

Joey Nerenberg, founder, principal and executive chef of Infusion Culinary, Inc., has been cooking his entire life. A native Californian, Joey spent 11 years in Minnesota before returning to San Diego. He received his bachelor of arts in political science from the University of California, San Diego and his masters in Management Information Systems (MIS) at the University of Minnesota.

After college, Joey spent more than 10 years working at American Express Financial Services in Minneapolis, Minn. He first worked in technology support and management and then moved to product development, creating more than $500 million in new product sales. He then worked in professional development, converting a $2 billion field sales organization into a successful profit center. Leaving American Express as a director, Joey returned to California as a consultant in the financial services and web-based customer relations management areas.

After living a few more years back in San Diego, Joey discovered his culinary calling and moved to Honolulu, Hawai'i to study at the Culinary Institute of the Pacific. In addition to becoming a competent chef, Joey cultivated a love and appreciation for Hawai'ian and Pan Asian regional dishes. After completing his culinary arts education in 2003, Joey moved back to San Diego and became a chef-instructor at the Art Institute of California, San Diego, teaching there from 2003 - 2005.

Joey’s new career and continued passion for cooking, combined with his past corporate work experiences, led to his creation of Infusion Culinary, a unique cooking school, in 2005. While working in the corporate world, Joey found that he could achieve consistent project success by focusing on customer service and operating profitability, and by coordinating all parties involved in a project. Joey realized that these skills are directly applicable to teaching people to become competent cooks. In fact, Joey found the professional culinary process to be almost identical to that of a corporate project or campaign, but on an abbreviated timeline. Instead of occurring over a number of months, cooking transpires in a matter of hours! It was this realization that led Joey to create Infusion Culinary as an innovative way to learn essential cooking techniques and creative skills.

Chef Joey is currently President of Tasteful Learning Initiatives Inc., a management training and development firm, as well as the Culinary Director at Bloomingdale's, San Diego.

When not working or in the kitchen, Joey spends time with his wife and two children and takes frequent trips back to Hawai'i to visit friends.

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