Local chef brings celebrity experience home with La Relance Cuisine

Chef Kelcie Miller has been all over the world but is ready to circle back to her hometown to open La Relance Cuisine.

French for "revival," La Relance opened in January in City Centre at 2502 Tanner Drive in Cape Girardeau. Miller said she "wanted to bring something new to Cape. It's been a labor of love."

For now, La Relance offers a trio of services: meal prep, catering and cooking classes, with an eye on expanding into prepared meals to pick up at the City Centre location, and mise en place boxes, which would include ingredients and instructions to make a meal at home, much like the popular meal kits on the market.

Originally from Cape Girardeau, Miller moved to Kansas City around age 7, came back to attend Southeast Missouri State University and studied to be a teacher, but soon realized she wanted to work in the food industry.

After graduating from culinary school at L'Ecole Culinaire in St. Louis, Miller boarded a European cruise line as an assistant pastry chef out of Monaco and toured more than 12 countries.

A plate of food offered by La Relance inside City Centre.Submitted

Once that came to a close, one of her culinary instructors connected her with a catering company, which led to touring with bands as an executive sous chef and pastry chef for performers such as Justin Bieber and Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Most recently, Miller worked for seven years as a private chef for a family in the oil industry, which she cannot name, in Fort Worth, Texas.

After all of the touring, traveling and experiences, Miller said she's ready to "put down roots" back in her hometown.

Around the world

Miller brings a wealth of knowledge and experiences through her numerous culinary adventures.

Traveling as an assistant pastry chef with Silversea Cruises allowed her to visit and experience the cultures and cuisine of New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Canada.

"I was only one of eight Americans that worked on the ship. A lot of the workers were of Indonesian or Malaysian descent, where women are subservient in those countries, and so having a female presence in the kitchen was difficult because your knowledge of certain things was overlooked or that you didn't know what you're talking about," Miller recalled.

Although Hong Kong was her favorite city, Miller said visiting the Great Wall of China had challenges.

"Something happened with our embassy during that time to where we were having issues with China, so they came on board and took our passports from us," she said.

Touring

As a pastry chef on the Justin Bieber's Believe World Tour in 2012 and 2013, she made different cupcake flavors every day, which became a challenge and something the guests anticipated.

"So it became, like, a thing — I was Ms. Cupcake Lady," she said.

Bieber was a fan of her pastries. "One night on tour, Justin Bieber ate an absurd amount of cupcakes before he went on stage," Miller said.

"Living on a tour bus with a bunch of boys was interesting," she said. Thankfully, singer Carly Rae Jepsen, an opening act for Bieber and one of the only other women on the tour, let Miller use her dressing room to shower.

One of the more challenging aspects of being a traveling chef was every venue is different when it comes to the kitchen setting.

Kelcie Miller poses for a photo with former basketball player Shaquille O'Neal while she was working as a pastry chef on Justin Bieber's 2012-2013 Believe World Tour.Submitted

"We would set up the kitchen in various places every day," Miller said. "Some days, it would be by the stage; some days outside; some days it would in a tiny little space that we would put the induction burner on top of your road case and that's what you're cooking off."

Each night after the performance, she would pack up the kitchen and head to the next town.

"You got to see places and meet people that you'd never in a million years would have thought," she said. "One day, (Shaquille O'Neal) was at the Justin Bieber show. Michael Jordan came once because he owns the Charlotte Bobcats and we were at their venue."

Texas

Miller said all the cruise ship and touring prepared her for the job in Texas.

"The family entertained constantly, and had quite a few residences all over Texas," she said.

Working with an enormous budget for a family as a private chef allowed Miller to learn how to work with various purveyors of ingredients she called a "once in a career" opportunity.

"I was flying fishing from Maine or Hawaii or getting caviar flown in from Petrossian out of New York," she said, "It was kind of like Toys R Us for chefs."

Back home

After having traveled the world and worked with many different clients, Miller said, "I want to come back and live in Cape. I needed to check those boxes for myself. I'm at a point where I want to be back home. I want a family. I want to plant roots. I love this area."

She added, "All the little stepping stones have made me who I am today, and it's kind of full circle coming back home."

Through a friend, Miller met with local restaurateurs John Eric and Vanessa Klein to discuss a new concept for the Cape area. Soon after, they became business partners and La Relance was born.

La Relance

Miller has already catered several events or dinners in the area and is busy planning menus for meal prep and upcoming cooking classes. The meal prep part of the business consists of individual and family meals, which change weekly. Examples of the individual meals range from grilled salmon with roasted cauliflower and quinoa to sliced turkey breast with corn succotash and mashed sweet potatoes.

"It's not super complicated," Miller said. "The ingredients will be on the higher end of things, but you know you can do good, simple food, but do it well; you don't have to have 50 different crazy ingredients going on."

Miller is most excited about the cooking classes, from a couples Valentine's Day class and a mommy-and-me baking class to making sauces and building a charcuterie board, classes will take place inside a large commercial kitchen.

"They'll be in there actually cooking the food on commercial equipment," Miller said.

She wants the environment to be upbeat: "We'll play music. We'll get into it."

"I'm very blessed that I've gotten to do a lot of cool things in my past and now I'm ready for this chapter, so I can teach my experience to somebody else and to get them to fall in love with cooking," she said.

To find out more, visit www.larelancecuisine.com.