Perhaps, it came as no surprise when Chef Joey joined the UCLA family after over 20 years in corporate dining.
“I’ve been a lifelong UCLA fan, so it felt just like a natural pairing,” said Senior Executive Chef of UCLA Dining Joey Martin, better known by students as Chef Joey.
Chef Joey started his culinary career in fine dining as a line cook for the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company in Naples, Florida in 1996. After working at various Ritz Carlton establishments across the country, the Los Angeles native came home to become the Executive Sous Chef at the Crypto.com Arena and Peacock Theater, then known as Staples Center and the Nokia Theater respectively. Chef Joey went on to work as the executive chef for Dodgers Stadium for a little under four years. He then returned to the Crypto.com Arena and Peacock Theater, known as the Microsoft Theater at the time, as the executive chef.
Finally, Chef Joey came to UCLA.
“I came here not even looking for a job,” said Chef Joey. “The opportunity just presented itself because I never thought that I would leave the job I was before.”
When Chef Joey first arrived at UCLA in 2017, Rendezvous had just begun servicing on weekends a little over a year before, and Bruin Plate had been certified as a green restaurant just two years prior. Furthermore, UCLA’s dining halls had earned the top spot on Niche’s “Best College Food in America” ranking for the second year in a row with Business Insider describing Bruin Plate as “a five-star dining experience.” Thus, Chef Joey faced the challenge to not only maintain those standards but improve on them as well.
From fine dining to the dining halls, Chef Joey found similarities, drawing on his diverse culinary background and adaptability. “I think being in this profession for 30 plus years, I have a lot of experience with different scenarios coming up, so I’m able to adjust a lot more,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re cooking food. We’re trying to make people happy.”
The differences, he found, lay in the mission of UCLA Dining. “When you work for the private sector, a lot of it is about the corporate office and how much money you can make,” Chef Joey said. “Anything we save here — everything we do — gets reinvested in experience.”
Chef Joey emphasized that everything he and his team do is for the UCLA students. Today, UCLA Dining constantly encourages student feedback, whether it would be by replying to a story on Chef Joey’s Instagram page, texting the UCLA Dining team member Charles or even talking to a team member in-person directly.
From such responses, the team will then try to implement these changes. For instance, themed dinners, such as the Honey Bee themed dinner at Bruin Plate on April 22, are a result of student feedback. Chef Joey recalled that when he first started working at UCLA, the dining halls would change up their menu on special occasions like Cinco de Mayo, Mardi Gras or St. Patrick’s Day to break up the monotony of the day-to-day experience. However, the incorporation of themed dinners every now and then arose from student engagement. Chef Joey said, “The thought process was I really want to engage with the students, ask the students what they want to see and really figure out what can make an impact.”
Another notable change that arose from student feedback was Feast’s shift from a to-go boutique to an all-you-care-to-eat, or AYCE, restaurant, similar to Bruin Plate or Epicuria at Covel. Chef Joey said, “[The change] was a lot of student feedback saying that they liked ‘Old Feast,’” referring to “Old Feast” as the restaurant that had operated with an AYCE-format a few years prior. One of the main challenges preventing Feast from opening as AYCE initially was the lack of staff, as the shift would require more manpower for planning, serving and even chores like dishwashing. Even when UCLA Dining found the appropriate people, Chef Joey expressed concerns about losing momentum from opening for both lunch and dinner services to only dinner. “We’re constantly trying to expand. We just want to make sure when we do expand, the student experience is good. We don’t want to do it halfway through and incorrectly,” he said.
Obviously, these changes did not happen overnight. In fact, talks for next year’s themed dinners have already begun. According to Chef Joey, the discussion usually consists of proposing many ideas, narrowing down the options and then figuring out how to make the concept a reality with the available ingredients, music and decor. Similarly, planning the daily and weekly menus for each of the dining halls also requires constant communication and preparation. Each dining hall has an executive chef who is responsible for overseeing their respective teams. Meetings for menu curation are a constant process of planning and reviewing: first a week-by-week look, then a whole quarter overview. “We go over: ‘Why are we serving this certain meal?’, ‘How do we pair them?’ [and] ‘How do we make the whole day make sense — the whole week make sense?’” Chef Joey said. In addition, the teams meet weekly with the On-Campus Housing Council and biweekly with the research and development team.
With over 4000 recipes in their database, the UCLA Dining team is in no shortage of dishes, although some are more popular than others. In the continuous operation of improvement and innovation, the chefs and teams are constantly looking at the “take-rates” of dishes with particular attention to newer items and “specials.” For example, the Bruin Plate team knows that the ahi poke bowl is especially popular and will prepare accordingly when serving it. On the other hand, if a recipe is not as well-received, the team will take it off the menu and replace it.
“Sometimes you hear athletes say, ‘I just had a bad day.’ if they don’t score enough points,” Chef Joey said. “We don’t have that. We can’t have that excuse.”
Comparing UCLA Dining to a sports team, Chef Joey sees himself as the coach. He said, “I’m kind of just like the head coach, just trying to make sure the offense and defense are staying together, are talking [and] are working together to win the game.” This includes everything from ordering food, labor and food costs, allergen and nutrition labels, equipment purchases to the overall balance of the menus not just in the dining halls but also for hotel restaurants and catering service.
However, unlike a football team, the season never ends. Chef Joey mentioned that when the dining hall rankings come out each year and UCLA finds itself at the top of the leaderboard, the accolade is appreciated, but the celebration is brief. There is one hurrah, and then the team continues its planning and preparation. The coordination of dishes, or “menu mix” as Chef Joey referred to it, is discussed in three- to four-week cycles. The big changes, though, come between quarters, which are usually planned around two months in advance.
For Fall 2026, Chef Joey talked about goals to expand the capacity of Bruin Bowl as well as increase the options for the Extended Dinner period. In addition, Chef Joey and the team have been researching the five blue zones, or places in the world with noticeably greater life spans. These include Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece and Loma Linda, California. Chef Joey noted that these diets often consist of plant-based foods and fermented vegetables. The team has goals to feature menus from those cities while trying to tell a story about nutrition and culture.
“What I like to do is have world-class food to match up with those world-class students,” Chef Joey said. “We’re trying to make people happy. It is definitely, you hear all the time, not rocket science. We’re not curing cancer. But we are in the sense that we provide good and nutritious food.”
Ultimately, it all boils down to his love for the students and the school. Ever since he was a little kid, Chef Joey had a fondness for UCLA. Before his father passed away when he was young, Chef Joey remembered always wearing UCLA merchandise in pictures of the two of them. He said, “I think that’s what makes it so special to me. Just that connection to my father is something that I just carry through my whole life.”
And to this day, that feeling hasn’t changed. “One of the cool things is when fall quarter comes around… I touch all the different restaurants,” he said. “The band is playing the ‘Fight Song,’ practicing on the field, and I’m walking down. And I think that’s special. I think everything about being here is.”
