Mandy Dixon
Chef/Owner, La Baleine Café Executive Chef, Within the Wild Adventure Company
Mandy Dixon is Within the Wild Adventure Company’s executive chef as well as the owner and chef of La Baleine Café in Homer, Alaska.
No stranger to the hospitality industry, Dixon grew up in Alaska’s backcountry at the lodges her family owns and operates. She left in 2002 to follow in her mother’s footsteps and attend culinary school where she trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, California.
After working in restaurants for the next four years, Dixon realized her interest in creating desserts and enrolled in an intensive pastry program at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California in 2006. During school and following her graduation, she worked as a pastry chef for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group in Yountville, California before returning to the family business in Alaska in 2010.
Over the past 12 years, Dixon has represented Alaska and Within the Wild Adventure Company at various culinary events including the State of Alaska for the Flavored Nation event in Columbus, Ohio in 2018. Additionally, she has been a guest chef aboard both Silversea Cruises and Holland America Line cruise ships and a featured chef at the James Beard House in New York in 2009 and 2019.
Dixon also served as a Culinary Ambassador of the U.S. State Department American Chef Corps, participating in U.S. Morocco Food Week 2016. She was a featured chef at the James Beard American Restaurant in the U.S.A Pavilion at the Expo Milano in Italy in 2015. Chosen by Alaska Governor Sean Parnell and the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, Dixon represented Alaska in the Great American Seafood Cook-Off in New Orleans in August 2014 and placed second in Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute’s Great Alaska Seafood Cook-Off in 2013.
Dixon co-authored the IACP-award-winning cookbook, “The Tutka Bay Lodge Cookbook — Coastal Cuisine from the Wilds of Alaska,” with her mother chef Kirsten Dixon. She was also the food stylist for the second edition of the award-winning “The Winterlake Lodge Cookbook,” published in October 2012. Dixon co-authored the Gourmand International Awards finalist “Living Within the Wild” in April 2021 and is working on a new cookbook featuring entertaining recipes.
Within The Wild Adventure Company is a partnership, in existence since 1983, between Carl and Kirsten Dixon and their daughters, Carly Dixon and Mandy Dixon. The family owns and operates Winterlake Lodge; Tutka Bay Lodge; the Cooking School at Tutka Bay; and La Baleine Café all in Southcentral Alaska.
