If anyone were to tell you The Town Dish, the West Chester-based purveyors of nine hyper-local online culinary web sites focusing on “food, drink, travel, style and health” run by Mary Bigham and her co-founder Jason Tremblay, had its origin in Turkey, you would naturally wonder about the connection between West Chester and Turkey.

But it was during a 2005 trip to Turkey that Bigham discovered what she wrote in her online blog/journal not only drew readers but she could make money and finance her travels selling jewelry and clothing she found in Istanbul’s markets and bazaars to those readers.

VISTA Today recently asked Mary about growing up in Gettysburg, her passion for food, her circuitous path to West Chester, the origins of her budding online culinary empire and where she sees her online creation heading in the months and years ahead.

VISTA Today: Where did you grow up?

Mary Bigham: I grew up in Gettysburg and I am still super hometown proud. Gettysburg is a great place and anyone who hasn’t been to Gettysburg since their eighth-grade field trip should rediscover the town. Gettysburg has all these undiscovered nooks and crannies and fantastic restaurants, coffee roasters, cider makers and food artisans popping up.

VT: I’m sure you have lots of memories of growing up in Gettysburg.  Any work or business related memories that stand out?

MB: When I was little both of my parents worked, so before or after school I went to my dad’s law practice where I had my own little workstation in the back of the office. He would take me on little adventures, like going to the courthouse to look up properties (if I expressed an interest in a building and how it’d be cool if it was an after school hang out space). He would fully explore what that process would be like and I was able to observe that.

He would also allow me to walk in during certain meetings with clients. I was impressed with how his business interactions were personable, transparent and friendly.

I was involved with a lot of clubs in high school, like Interact (the High School Rotary organization), and actively helped raise funds for the local SPCA. The other thing I remember is discovering and falling in love with Rita’s Water Ice. I decided in high school, it’s noted in my yearbook in fact, that I would one day own a Rita’s.

VT: What was your first job?

MB: I was a babysitter for one family for several years. One of my first workplace jobs was becoming an ice scooper at, no surprise here, Rita’s Water Ice! I ran a summer camp for low-income housing communities over a few summers (my church allowed me to borrow their van to transport campers on adventures, learn how to swim, etc.).

I got my first bartender job at a biker bar outside of Gettysburg at age 20. I had no clue what I was doing. I was awful for the first year, maybe two or three years, actually. Over time, I learned how to make a variety of cocktails for folks coming to a nearby upscale theater as well as how to serve up shots and beers.

VT: By the time you were 22 you had a lot of experience under your belt.

MB: Yes, at East Stroudsburg University, where I went to college, I had as many jobs and experiences as I could shove in my day and still allow time to study. I got involved in as many different campus clubs as I could, but I was president of our college activity board, the only paid position in student government. I worked in HIV prevention, a job I found on a campus bulletin board. I was a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace Resort in the Poconos. I worked at the on-campus information desk and answered phones and set up conference rooms.

I don’t know if it was my attention span or just a desire to try different things, but I have always held multiple jobs, which gave me lots of different experiences to pull from.

VT: So what lessons did you take from all those experiences that have stayed with you today?

MB: I observed a lot of different bosses and management styles. My best managers always took the time to determine what the people on their teams were good at and not good at and then worked to help them succeed. Each job also had its own challenges and goals, which were great experiences.

VT: You could have gone anywhere for college. Why East Stroudsburg?

MB: Aside from being one of the few schools offering my major within a few hours of Gettysburg, I chose East Stroudsburg because of the dining hall. No joke! I figured if I was going to be eating at a place for four years, I better like it.

When I took the tour and found out the dining hall would make individual pizzas just for me, I couldn’t believe it. After the tour, my mother and I went into town and found a shop offering seasonal candy-corn ice cream. I told my mother this was the place for me!

VT: Describe your path from East Stroudsburg to launching Dish LLC.

MB: Even though I loved food, I chose not to go into hospitality and culinary arts because I didn’t want to give up my weekends and holidays to prepare food. Instead, when I graduated in 2002, I moved to Ireland and took a job as an event organizer and trip planner with a Dublin-based international tour company specializing in custom tours including whiskey and ancestry tours.

Although I worked for the tour company for less than a year, I gained invaluable insight on how a small business operates and what motivates people to visit new and exotic places.

I then moved back to Pennsylvania, this time to West Chester, because of a relationship. The relationship didn’t work out, but I found a part-time job at ACAC running their after-school program and I West Chester became my new hometown. Over the next eight years, I worked myself into a full-time event planning and sales position at ACAC where I won the Ready, Fire, Aim award for embracing an entrepreneurial spirit and bringing money into the company through sponsorships and events.

In 2005, I took a month of vacation and unpaid time off and traveled to Turkey (my co-worker and talented programmer, Ali, convinced me to visit his home country, which was incredible).

While there, Ali set up a blog for me to maintain as I traveled. Originally the blog was just to keep my mother informed about where I was and that I was still alive (this was pre-social media).

Over the course of my trip, however, the blog became a quasi-retail shop. I visited the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul with a tape measure, calculator, camera and a notepad, and negotiated wholesale pricing for items I wanted to resell. I put the pictures and a description of the items on the blog where co-workers, friends and family could visit and place orders.

I was surprised by how many people were reading the blog and buying the items that I posted there (Note: my talented lawyer later informed me that selling imported goods is NOT legal without an importer’s license, so don’t do that. I suppose that’s a good mistake to have made but I don’t want to endorse doing this.).

When I realized that there was decent traffic to the blog and that I was passionate about sharing my food and drink experiences, I decided to cover the West Chester-area food scene. When I returned home, I reached out to the Daily Local News to see if they would be interested in articles on local food.

Because I didn’t have an extensive writing or culinary background, they weren’t interested. I decided to start a fresh blog about the West Chester restaurant and bar scene, which I named WCDish.com.

Although I never intended to be a business owner, I thought it would be a fun hobby to maintain a food blog. I met with my (now) business partner Jason Tremblay, who was a programming whiz and coffee connoisseur.

With Jason’s skill set and my passion to write, we recognized that the more content we created (even if it was just a little paragraph or observation) the more readers and site traffic that we would get, which created value for advertisers.

We kept working at it until people found the site and came to see it as a resource and soon after our first advertiser came to us and said, “you’re sending us so much traffic, we’d love to advertise with you,” and we focused on growing it into a business.

VT: How did you turn the rejection by Daily Local News into a positive opportunity?

MB: That experience taught me to give a fair chance to anyone who wants to contribute for Dish LLC. We don’t want to say “no” to the next “me,” we want that passion and enthusiasm on our team.

It also was fortunate that they said “no” to me when they did because a few years later, in 2009, The Daily Local invited me to create the content for a bi-weekly restaurant and entertainment publication called Chester County Cuisine and Nightlife (which continued until 2012). This opportunity allowed me to leave my ACAC job and focus 100 percent full time on Dish.

Once I was full time, we quickly added two additional sites, Phoenixville Dish and Downingtown Dish and now we have nine hyper-local community sites.

VT: Tell us what WCDish.com looks like today.

MB: Our official company name is Dish LLC, and we have two divisions: our online publication, TheTownDish.com (which covers food, drink, travel, health and style), and our Dish Works division, which creates culinary content (blogs, photography, articles, videos) for a variety of clients like Southwest Airlines, Celebrity Cruises, Victory Brewing Company and Today Media.

VT: What do you see Dish becoming down the road?

MB: We love Pennsylvania! So we are looking to cover anything edible in the commonwealth as we grow. We are also excited about documenting the food and drink scene in Delaware and surrounding states as well. We are really passionate about supporting culinary tourism with agricultural and food and drink tie-ins. We hope to cover these areas, tell those stories and help create statewide and national content.

We have an exciting plan for our online publication, TheTownDish.com, which we’ll roll out this year and will expand our coverage area. We are also seeing some great growth with our Dish Works division to help companies keep up with their content demands as part of their marketing initiatives.

VT: What are the challenges in front of you in 2015?

MB: Continuing to tell the stories we do, making sure we have the resources to tell those stories and being smart about our growth.

VT: What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

MB: The best piece of advice came from my parents.  My mother taught me to work through misunderstanding and communicate. She told me there will always be misunderstandings, there will always be conflict. But if you are open and transparent you can work through any situations if all parties are open to communicating.

My Dad taught me to treat everyone with the same level of respect and not care so much what others think!

Then finally, be nice, work hard. I saw the phase on a poster somewhere and made it our motto at Dish.

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Top photo of Bigham with core team at Dish LLC’s office in downtown West Chester courtesy of WC Press.