MMM Hospitality, who owns and runs Kneads Bakery, a local cafe in Westport CT, needed lifestyle brand photography to capture the behind the scenes of their Dinner Series. Launching back in 2022, it’s a series of dinners throughout the year highlighting the seasons with farm to table creative menus, transforming Kneads Bakery into a stylish restaurant in the evening.

We started the photoshoot before dinnertime to capture the setup and prep work that all team members were doing beforehand. Being as unobtrusive as possible, I captured over 150+ photos over the course of the dinner serving. These brand photographs showcase the team members, the chefs, and the food in an approachable and friendly manner, highlighting the small team who works incredibly hard to make this even happen. Images were mainly intended to be used on social media (Instagram) but also for the website and promotional materials in the future.

The biggest challenge with this assignment was making sure the photography didn’t interfere with the actual dinner or the behind the scenes cooking/prep of the food. That means I didn’t use flash or any additional lighting and worked within the constraints of the natural environment and the lighting provided in the restaurant space. I believe that customer experience is always paramount and when photographing during an event, it’s important to make sure the people actually enjoying their dinner aren’t disrupted by the process. I also had to work very quickly and photograph candidly without posing direction or asking the chef or a customer to repeat a movement so that I could capture it.

The dinner series and the people behind MMM Hospitality are an incredible team and I look forward to working on more projects together in the future. Below are some of my favorite images from the set.