Meet the Chef Behind St. Margaret’s New Dining Experience 

A new era of Tartan dining is on the horizon, offering a fresh taste of campus life and bringing an exciting opportunity to gather and experience food in a whole new way. The St. Margaret’s Commons’ expanded program, Tartan Table, features a state-of-the-art kitchen and dining hall that will create a welcoming destination where thoughtfully prepared meals, innovative flavors, and exceptional hospitality come together. 

Leading this culinary experience is Executive Chef David Fuñe, who will guide CulinArt, the school’s dining services partner, in developing a dynamic menu that reflects the diverse tastes, nutritional needs, and exceptional standards of the entire St. Margaret’s community.

Centered on fresh ingredients, culinary creativity, and balanced choices, the new dining program will feature expertly prepared meals and snacks crafted in a modern re-imagined kitchen. From Early School students discovering new favorites to Upper School students, faculty, and professional community members seeking nourishing and varied options, the dining experience will offer something for everyone. 

In this Q&A, we explore Chef David’s vision, culinary philosophy, and what the Tartan community can anticipate as this exciting new chapter at St. Margaret’s dining begins.

What draws me here is that this community treats food as part of the same conversation as learning and well-being and does so with enough intention to build real infrastructure around it.

My career has moved through two deliberate phases. The first was large-scale scratch cooking at the highest operational level, resort and private club kitchens, yacht service, multi-outlet VIP dining programs, building from stock to plate every single day with no shortcuts and no compromise on craft. 

The second phase has been nutrition-forward and purpose-driven, validating hundreds of recipes for a CDC-guided wellness program, earning a Certified Culinary Medicine Professional credential, and building my own functional nutrition concept around what food actually does for the body. 

What I've learned across both is that food is never just food. It's an input into how people think, learn, recover, and perform–and that truth is never more consequential than it is with students. A community that names that connection on purpose, and commits the resources to honor it, is where I want to do my best work.

Scale teaches you things you can't learn any other way, and the most important one is this: systems built for thousands have to work for every single person in that room.

I've run kitchens with 21 outlets and 260 team members. I've managed resort dining programs feeding over 100,000 covers daily. I've designed meal programs for senior living communities where several residents had a different physician-prescribed dietary requirement. What that experience gives you isn't just operational muscle, it's the discipline of thinking simultaneously about the individual and the collective. You learn to build programs that are both consistent at scale and personal at the point of service.

That dual lens is exactly what a community like St. Margaret's requires. The student body spans Early School through Upper School, a span of developmental stages with genuinely different nutritional needs, flavor preferences, and relationships with food. Faculty and staff bring their own expectations. The professional community around the school, parents, event guests, visiting partners, brings another layer entirely. Serving all of them well from the same kitchen, on the same day, isn't a compromise. It's a design challenge. And it's one I've spent 20 years preparing for.

Your background includes functional nutrition and “food as fuel” concepts—how do you make that approachable for students and families?

The honest answer is that I never lead with science. I lead with the food. Functional nutrition works best when it's invisible–built into the foundation of a menu rather than just announced in the dish name. The fat I cook with, the protein I select, the grain that anchors the bowl, those decisions happen before a single element hits the plate, and they're informed by what I want that meal to actually do for the person eating it. Energy. Focus. Recovery. 

For students specifically, approachability is everything. Food that performs but doesn't feel like a health statement, that's the goal. Something craveable enough that it gets eaten, clean enough that it delivers, and honest enough in its ingredients that families feel good about it. When those three things align, the nutrition takes care of itself.

What role do you think the dining program at St. Margaret’s plays in exposing students to new foods, cultures, and flavors?

The dining program at St. Margaret's has an opportunity that most restaurants never get: a captive, curious, developing audience that shows up every single day.

Done well, a school dining program is one of the most powerful early food education tools a young person will ever encounter. The school kitchen is where many students first encounter a flavor profile outside their home culture, a grain they've never seen, a preparation technique that makes them ask a question. That first moment of genuine curiosity about food is something I take seriously as a chef and as a father.

I also believe strongly that cultural representation in a menu communicates respect. When students see their own food traditions reflected on the lunch line alongside everyone else's, it signals something about the values of the institution. And when students encounter a culture through its food before they encounter it anywhere else, that's the beginning of empathy.

A dining program at St. Margaret's, built with that kind of intention, becomes part of the education itself. That's a responsibility I find genuinely exciting.

When ingredients come directly from a neighboring farm, it activates the side of my cooking I care about most, the craft. There's a discipline to working with peak-season, locally harvested products that simply can't be replicated with conventional sourcing. 

The ingredient arrives with character: soil, season, and variety. My job is to honor that rather than obscure it. That's where artisanal technique becomes essential. 

I've built farm relationships throughout my career across Orange County, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Temecula, and even New Jersey! That proximity changes the culture of a kitchen as much as it changes the food. When a team understands where an ingredient came from and what it took to grow it, they handle it differently. 

For a school community, that connection carries additional weight. A student who learns that the produce on their plate came from a farm nearby is something that extends well beyond the meal as it leans towards stewardship, seasonality, and the relationship between land and table.

More than anything, I hope they take away a different relationship with food than the one they arrived with. Not necessarily a more sophisticated one, though that's a natural byproduct of exposure. What I mean is a more trusting one. A relationship where food isn't a source of anxiety or indifference but something students and families actually look forward to, feel good about, and over time, feel curious about.

For students, I hope the experience plants seeds that take years to fully grow. The first time they try a grain they've never heard of and find they actually like it. 

For families, I hope the culinary program builds trust. Trust that what's being served reflects real care, for ingredients, for preparation, for the specific developmental needs of their child. Parents who feel that trust tend to become advocates, not just observers. They talk about the program. They ask questions. They engage. That kind of community investment in a school's dining culture is something you can't manufacture, it has to be earned, one meal at a time.

And honestly, for both, I hope they walk away with a deeper sense that scratch-made food prepared with local, seasonal ingredients and genuine craft is simply better. Better tasting, better for the body, better for the world around us. If the culinary program at St. Margaret's can make that case not through a lecture but through the daily experience of eating well, that's a contribution to this community I'd be proud to have made.

The kitchen has always been the place where everything makes sense to me. From the earliest point in my career, walking into a pristine kitchen before sunrise, the sound of the first burner igniting, laying out my knives on a clean countertop while smelling coffee brewing, there has never been a moment where I questioned whether this was the right place for me. The kitchen is where I think most clearly, lead most naturally, and feel most alive. That hasn't changed in 20 years. If anything it's gotten stronger.

What I love most is that cooking sits at the intersection of science and instinct, discipline and creativity, tradition and innovation, and you have to be fluent in all of it simultaneously. A great dish requires technical precision and genuine feeling in equal measure. You can't fake either one. That honest demand is something I deeply respect about the craft.

But beyond the kitchen itself, what sustains my passion is the effect food has on people. I've watched a table of strangers become a conversation over a shared plate. I've seen a meal shift the energy of an entire room. I've cooked for families going through something difficult and watched food do what words couldn't. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

My work in functional nutrition added another dimension to that love- the understanding that food isn't just an experience, it's an input. That what I put on a plate can affect how someone thinks, recovers, performs, and feels the following day. That realization didn't make cooking feel more clinical. It made it feel more important.

I love what I do because it matters- it IS the moment, it’s instinctual to the people at the table, and that sense of gathering is something my mom always cherished.