All the world may or may not be a stage – we can debate that later – but the restaurant kitchen unquestionably is. And no chef understands that better than Zach Castillo. When Castillo was growing up in Bay View, there were two constants: good food and ballet practice.
Castillo started his dance training at 6 years old. “It just fit me,” he says. “It was love at first sight.” Through grade and high school, his after-school protocol consisted of three to four hours a day of dance practice and rehearsals at Milwaukee Ballet School & Academy.
At home, family meals were similarly fixed – always from scratch, often using ingredients from their garden. Castillo’s grandparents had a particular impact on his developing food ethos; memories of squeezing oranges with his grandfather to make fresh juice still resonate. The family’s Bay View neighbor, local chef Dave Swanson, hired a teenage Castillo to work at his farm-to-table restaurant, Braise, in Walker’s Point. There, he spent his summer breaks learning about local sourcing and restaurant culture. Brigade, the system in restaurant kitchens that gives every person a clearly defined job, reminded him of the structured hierarchy of dancers in a ballet company. That knowledge would prove useful years later after, at age 22, a serious knee injury ended his plans to dance professionally.
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His future unclear for the first time, Castillo returned to what was becoming more and more comfortable for him – working in a restaurant kitchen. He hopped back and forth between jobs in MKE and Chicago for a while until he landed his first sous chef position, at the former Wolf Peach, in 2015. That period, he says, “kickstarted Milwaukee cooking for me.” His next move was to work with chefs Dan Jacobs and Dan Van Rite, who eventually put him in charge of their restaurant EsterEv.
Then came Birch. Castillo turned down owner Kyle Knall the first time he was approached, thinking that the timing wasn’t right. A year later and still working at EsterEv, he was approached again: Birch’s then chef de cuisine was leaving. This time, Castillo felt differently.
The move to running a kitchen with a much bigger staff tapped into his ballet corps training. “I’d never really captained a team before,” he says. “And I think that was a huge step in growing that I really thought I was ready for, and I wasn’t.”
His cooking gigs up to that point were comparable, he says, to the prima position in a ballet company, where you’re “very focused on yourself and your technique, and you’re completely in control of that.” Managing a kitchen like Birch’s, by contrast, is more like an artistic director overseeing a ballet company’s ensemble dancers: “The sum of the parts is greater than the individual parts. Approaching that as a manager was incredibly hard, and I definitely learned a lot. I’m still learning.”
More than anything else, the ballet “bleed-over” manifests as mental fortitude, he says.
In August, Castillo took a “leave of absence” from Birch to “take a little time for myself,” he said recently. That time is divided between a “passion project” – an internship at Blakesville Creamery in Port Washington – and preparing for an undisclosed restaurant project in Milwaukee planned for 2026.
“[Cheese] is just such a big part of Wisconsin culture that in this little bit of interim time I have, I’m going to learn as much of it as I can,” he said, and use it – as he’s done with dance – to flavor his fluid culinary career.
