Food is medicine and it is also dinner.
We hold both. We do not medicalize the pleasure of a meal and we do not pretend a meal is a prescription.
About
Built by a chef who used food to find steadiness.
Simmerstate exists because the most important hour of your mental health is often the one nobody is watching: the one before dinner.
The story
Cooking for people before knowing what I was treating.
Before I was trained, I was cooking for people with anxiety, insomnia, and grief. I watched the right meal at the right hour do more than I thought food was allowed to do. I watched the wrong one undo a week of therapy by 9 p.m.
I trained at the Culinary Institute of America, then kept going — into the nutrition science, the clinical literature, and the kitchens of some of the most careful cooks in the country. Simmerstate is what I wish I had when I started, and what I think a lot of people working on their minds deserve to have now.
— Robbie Rensel, founder
What we believe
Three beliefs we will not trade.
Adjunct, never replacement.
Therapy, psychiatry, and primary care do things we cannot. We work alongside them, with consent and with humility.
The craft earns the trust.
Every recipe, every plan, every coaching moment is built by a chef who has cooked it, eaten it, and served it.
Advisory
A clinical advisory board guides what Beckie will and will not do.
Psychiatrists, therapists, registered dietitians, and a primary care physician review the boundaries between nutritional coaching and clinical care, and sign off on the crisis-handling behavior of our assistant.
Read the clinical model