About Savoir Faire Catering

When you engage Savoir Faire, you are getting the benefit of an experienced team that has created successful events in the Santa Barbara region since 1989. The owner, Chef Karen Warner-Smith, collaborates with you to refine your vision and select a location. Karen and Chef Michele Molony consult with you to create a sumptuous menu. Karen, Michele and staff, many of whom have been with the company since the beginning, then handle all the details, including rentals, while you just enjoy the day.

Karen and Michele have traveled, worked and studied internationally. Their teamwork began when they met cooking on charter boats. Planning and cooking three meals a day for up to 40 people in a narrow galley required the organizational skills and acute attention to detail that flows into every event they plan today. The experience they promise is the experience you will get.

Karen and Michele are committed to sustainable food production and to using flavorful, high quality ingredients and, locally grown, organic produce, often from farmers they know personally. To them, food nourishes the soul as well as the body. They then handcraft every aspect of your meal with love and respect. 

Savoir Faire has been featured in several issues of Santa Barbara Magazine, an upscale lifestyle magazine.

Founder and Owner Chef Karen Smith-Warner

Karen’s childhood love of food continued during extended travels and study in Europe. She was fascinated by the Italian passion for food, the freshness of Greek vegetables, the diversity of ethnic foods in England, and the culture around French cuisine.

Her philosophy is simple: she feeds others only foods she would serve her own family -- in season and organic whenever possible

Karen is a self-taught chef who has paid attention to her own work and that of other chefs, read extensively and dug deep to respond to the needs of her clients. (Renowned chef Julia Child told her “Learning on the job is a wonderful way of learning”). In addition, she has taken advanced classes in Florence, Italy, at The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, and extensive classes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

You benefit from Karen’s mastery of creating an elegant event while keeping things simple. Your event will reflect her love of beauty, sense of style and the intuitive understanding of people that enables her to visualize exactly what her clients want. The result? All elements are combined into a visually beautiful event with tasty offerings!

Chef Michele Molony

Chef Michele Molony is an Honors graduate of the world-renowned Le Cordon Bleu culinary arts school in Paris, France. She completed the full cycles of both pastry and cuisine training – a rare combination for a chef in the Santa Barbara area. At the same time that she was learning the basics of classic cooking, and for an additional two years after she graduated, she apprenticed to the school and worked side by side with their chefs.

After Le Cordon Bleu, Michele catered on large luxury yachts, traveling throughout Central America the West Indies. In these years, she learned to appreciate the wide range of distinct aromas and tastes that each area offered, from spicy pastes to succulent, tropical fruits to the simplest diets of fish, fish and more fish. 

As a child, Michele was fascinated by how well-prepared food is an art that feeds both the eye and the body and creates a sense of community. After years of cooking around the globe and living on yachts, her yearning for a community of her own eventually brought her back to her native Santa Barbara where she teamed up with Karen again, this time as Chef at Savoir Faire Catering.