Meet M. J. Star | Artist, Designer, and Storyteller

We had the good fortune of connecting with M. J. Star and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi M. J., why did you pursue a creative career?
Why I started my business
If you care about the economic vitality, environmental health, and culture vitality of our nation and the world, keep reading. Not only is this why I started my business, you’ll get to see cute girls holding beers.
I’m M. J. Star: artist, designer, and something of a food critic. I draw personification of dishes, cocktails, beers, and wines I recommend that people in Colorado try. My neo art nouveau consists of intricate details about my subjects’ history, origin, and ingredients. The goal of my artwork to chip away at corporate hegemony over American food culture by advertising local owned restaurants, bars, and caterers. To best appreciate my art, slow down. The longer you look at it the more you will see, and the better each piece gets.
The idea to draw my food recommendations didn’t come over night. It was a long multi decades’ process that climaxed with a lawsuit. I have been drawing before I can remember, and in 2007 I got accepted into Stanford University for my isometric dot art. While there, I mostly studied computer science but did my sophomore thesis on advertising in the food industry. I learned a lot about American food culture and how corporations foreign and domestic have been shaping it since prohibition. I’ll talk more about that later, but while on Stanford’s campus, I honed my digital drawing skills. I didn’t start drawing food until about 2017. At that time, My big tech salary left me with a lot of disposable income. I would go to Seattle bars and draw still life pictures of cocktails I ordered. It was while visiting some 200-300 eateries in the Puget Sound area and shopping Pike’s Place Market that I became quite the foodie. I moved to Colorado in 2019 and spent a lot of COVID drawing while on the run from an abusive ex. In early in 2021 I found myself in Longmont CO.
I was supposed to be modeling for the Firehouse Art Center, but the event got cancelled and I forgot to mark it as such on my calendar. Instead of driving straight home, I decided to get something eat. I walked down Main St found a place with gluten and dairy free options. I was recovering from multiple endometriosis-related surgeries and both wheat and milk would send me into multiple days of bedridden pain if ingested. I uneasily walked in the restaurant, not knowing that 18 months later, I’d be bringing the place to small-claims court.
In case you’re wondering, the place I sued no longer exists. Even if it did, I would not mention its name.
I drank the great cocktails, ate the overpriced food, and I met some interesting characters. The staff invited me to come the next day. I had all the intention of showing up, but my endometriosis pain had other plans. The stabbing, acidic, organ twisting pain would not allow me to walk to my front door, let alone drive from Boulder to Longmont. I decided to go to the restaurant on a different day. While there, I sat dissatisfied. With no expertly crafted alcohol to appease my palette, I could tell that something was off. Four years later, I know that the overpriced food was frozen and poorly so. It was little wonder why the place was struggling during COVID.
Normally this is where I would stop visiting such a place. However, at this vulnerable time, I was too disabled to work a standard 9-5. I lived away from my support system, and my saving were slowly depleting during a global pandemic. When the restaurant offered me a job building their website, I took the decent paying job with flexible hours.
The restaurant turned out to be the highest of high-maintenance clients. Less than a week before a major event, one of the investors demanded a logo ASAP. I ran the 11 concepts by the chef, waitstaff, regulars, general manager, and the wife owner of the restaurant. I pulled an all-nighter, fleshed out the final design, emailed it the next morning, and went to sleep that afternoon. I woke up to the owning-husband telling me to start all over. At this point I emailed him saying that we were a bad fit, and I would be seeking employment elsewhere. He begged me not to go. After more ridiculousness, I realized that creating a new logo was a disaster because the management was a disaster. Everyone and no one was in charge.
At the same time, the restaurant kept giving me more responsibilities. They more or less fired their talented bartender, thieving general manger, and incompetent social media manager. I took over their Facebook and Instagram, as it promised to be a steady paycheck. I did some market research and discovered why people were not coming to the restaurant. The place was caught between two demographics: the local who wanted good, approachable food that didn’t break the bank and the upscale Boulderites with their fatter wallets and picky preferences. I knew that the Boulder crowd would not come to eat frozen, haphazardly thawed food more than once. However, if I could make the menu more approachable, the locals might tolerate the food in exchange for great atmosphere. I recommended that the chef change about 15 words on his menu so that people could understand the food in an online context. He threw multiple tantrums about this. Unable to use common English words, barred from fixing the menus many grammatical mistakes, and frequently chewed out for having the audacity to post food pics to Instagram, I had to come up with another way to communicate what the food was without words or photographs. Insanity, I know, but I did find a way.
I drew deconstructions of the food. The idea was to do a series of 8 art pieces, but I stopped at 3 after the owner refused to pay me for my work. I went back to posting photos of the food like a normal restaurant would, but doing so only earned the chef’s ire. In spite of the 20-30% uptick in business during a 10-20% market wide downturn, the chef hated that people were coming to restaurant to order specific dishes off the menu. My attempts to get recommendations on what to push went unheard.
Despite these increased profits, my job would not last. In the two months I ran their social media, multiple employees discovered crime after crime committed by the chef. Fudging about diversity data to get special treatment, lying about food ingredients to allergic populations, sexual harassment so bad that five women left, egregious health code violations that made me ill, and evidence drug trafficking all came to the surface. However, the final nail in the coffin was all the wage theft. As the most technically savvy person, the owning husband asked me to investigate who was stealing wages. It took 30 minutes to find out that chef was going into the computer and illegal garnishing everyone’s hourly pay save the waitress with whom he was having sex. I presented this to owner and recommended that he fire the chef as another state-renowned chef was looking to take his place. The owner ignored my recommendations and within a month the chef stealing wages again. At this point, I quit.
However, there was one loose end, my final paycheck totaling over $4000 for two month’s work. At this point I found out why the chef had gotten away with all his crimes: the owning husband—despite calling for investigations—was in on the deal. It would take about a year and a court ruling to get most of that $4K. In the meantime, another longtime gig fell through, and I only had enough savings to last me another 6 months. During a lonely Valentine Day in 2022, I had the urge to eat some good food. I drove up to Fort Collins and by the end of the day was in Taste and Savor Wine Bar. The bar was decorated with Art Deco posters. I felt inspired and drew “Taste and Savor Brigit” and I didn’t stop.
Vinca French 75 came next, then Burn’s Pub Irish Coffee. I found myself traveling up and down the front range drawing food that I actually liked. After drawing these “food mandalas” I realized that my art needed something more. I went to Left Hand Brewery in Longmont and asked the staff for beers they thought would make for good art. Based on their recommendations, I drew Flamingo Dreams, Sawtooth Amber Ale, 145 Mexican Lager, and the destined for Times Square Peanut Butter Milk Stout.
This art style with its complicated designs, bold colors, well-researched ingredients, and cute girls took off. All that research I did for Stanford and the now closed restaurant paid off in a way I could never have imagined. To this day I choose to only advertise locally-owned restaurants because what I have discovered during my research back in my college days, through my endometriosis journey, and up until now. So now that we know how come I started my business, it’s time to answer that question in earnest: why did I start my business.
The answer is our culture is in peril, not just culture as in the customs and norms of American society, but the bioculture under our feet, swimming in our rivers, and flying in our skies. One major reason for this slow-motion disaster which depletes the soil, tortures our livestock, and robs our nation’s grossly underrated farmers, and in the end makes us fat, sick, and weak is how our food system is built.
Back to that Stanford thesis about food advertising. America’s food culture took a major beating in the 20th century. The trouble started with the industrial revolution but came to a head during prohibition. Restaurants serve food but often live or die from their liquor sales. When prohibition banned all forms of alcohol, thousands of small restaurants closed, and the great depression did them no favors. Worse yet bills like the Chinese Exclusion act curbed immigration and all the great food that comes with that mixing of bioculture. War World 2 brought food rationing. Then came the 1950s, a particularly dark age in American cuisine. With the evaporating of many a great depression provision came the infamous corn subsidy. Corn got so cheap that it could feed populations of people, cars, chickens, and cows. The stage for mass produced food was set. Food by 1970 was now a commodity that prided itself on convenience. This combined with other factors caused obesity rates to soar.
By 1970 the American consumer was caught between the corporatization of their food and their desire to eat as good if not better than their pre-depression ancestors. Quaker Oat read the room and advertise their oats as “Natural.” It took a while for there be a legal definition of what “Natural” was, but before that everyone that wanted to appeal to the health-conscience knew to label their food as natural. Corporations were now making millions off of natural oat, natural cereal, natural TANG. Yes, that last one really did happen. If you are wondering why it’s so hard to know what is healthy the above is it. What we are told is healthy often not the result of long-term epidemiology studies, but corporate ad spend.
16 years ago, when I finished my thesis I had no solutions to this problem. Now, after drawing some 50 dishes, beverages, and beyond, I came the conclusion that corporate food will not restore American bioculture, but local business might. Speaking as a former software engineer, the best way to get an efficient answer is to have universal standards and distributed power structures. This means that the cliché of eating local is not just how to keep your economy going but might be the key to keeping the food system vibrant and resistant to plagues, soil depletion, and ultimately famine. These smaller business are more nimble. They don’t have to be as consistent, so they have more room to experiment with eclectic ingredients that require less pesticides and water. Even if none of that were the case, I’d still advocate for the little guys because the future needs bio-culture-diversity and that cannot be accomplished in an economically totalitarian food system.
During these turbulent times it will become more important to get closer to your food not further away. You don’t have to tackle this all at once. If you are used to eating exclusively at big box restaurants, try your local pub. Try new locally sourced ingredients and wild game. Eat bison, elk, duck, rabbit, they are just as delicious as beef, chicken, and pork when cooked properly. Cook more often. It’s not as hard as it seems if you can master learn what rots fast and what doesn’t. Learn how to preserve your food in mason jar with modern techniques that avoid deadly illness. Grow herbs indoors. Partner with your community garden to grow fruits and vegetables. Frequently, home grown is way better than the store sold at the grocery store which is often 4 days old away.
I’m not saying that you don’t have to give up McDonald and throw away your Budlight. This is America after all. If you don’t know where to start, that’s were my art and business comes in. It’s here to provide a fun approachable way to make ever so small a dent in the corporate hegemony that threatens our beautiful way of life.
So drink up, look on, and remember fighting the powers that shouldn’t be, is sometimes colorful, fun, and sexy. Cheers!

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m effectively a food critic but instead of just writing articles about restaurants, I draw personification of dishes, cocktails, beers, wines I recommend. My neo art nouveau consists of intricate details about my subjects’ history, origin, and ingredients. The goal of my artwork to chip away at corporate hegemony over American food culture by advertising local owned restaurants, bars, and caterers. To best appreciate my art, slow down. The longer you look at it the more you will see, and the better each piece gets.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Places to hang out
Meow Wolf – For art
Pearl St, Boulder – For site seeing
Louisville Real Farmer’s Market – For knickknacks, hanging out
Old Town Fort Collins
Table Mesa in Bolder for Hiking/Nature
Hot springs in Glenwood Springs

Food and Drink Recommendations

Fine Dining – Mercantile in Denver, Farow in Niwot, Vinca in Broomfield
Bison Steak – 740 Front
Sushi – Japango

Fried Chicken – 300 Sun
Hard and Soft Soda – Old 121 Brewhouse
Beer and Conversation – Left Hand Brewery
Pub food and Business Opportunities – Oskar Blues Liquid and Solids Longmont.
Restaurant Atmosphere – Outworld Brewing
Wine – Taste and Savor
Cocktails – Dry Land Distillers
Hurry for Curry – Eco-friendly Indian

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Community Connections Project of Longmont
Coy Ink
D. J. Drake
B.N.I. 2 Y.E.S.

Website: https://mjstarart.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/m.j.star.art

Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/mannjasmine

Facebook: https://facebook.com/mjstarart