A ballroom set for over seventeen hundred guests hums with a particular kind of pressure long before the first guest arrives. Trays have to be timed to the second. Lighting has to shift exactly when the orchestra swells. For nearly four decades, one man built his entire professional identity around commanding that exact kind of pressure, in event halls, concert venues, and Academy Awards greenrooms on two coasts.
That man is Dave Williams, and these days he commands a very different kind of room. There is no seating chart, no wine pairing, no maître d’. There is only a network of churches, nonprofits, and quietly struggling families, connected by a ministry called Love Train, and by a man who insists that none of the people who cross his path are there by accident.
A Kitchen Kid From Seattle
Dave grew up in Seattle, the youngest of three sons in a household of sharp contrasts. His mother, a homemaker from Durham, North Carolina, carried a soft Southern accent her whole life and a deep, unshaken Baptist faith. She called flowers and children the same thing: God’s miracles. His father, a civil engineer who spent thirty-five years running the City of Seattle’s bridge and arterial engineering department, was the opposite entirely, a World War II veteran of Patton’s army who never once softened his opinions on religion or politics for anyone in earshot.
Between those two poles, a boy grew up fast. By kindergarten, Dave was already cooking his own breakfast and inviting friends home for lunch. By fourth grade, he had discovered the drums, with Buddy Rich as his idol, and basketball, with Jerry West as the other. By sixteen, he was busing tables. None of it, on paper, pointed toward hospitality or ministry. But the discipline underneath both, showing up for the lesson whether you feel like it or not, smiling at the table that just complained, was already quietly shaping him.
He enrolled at the University of Washington as a music major, more interested in playing percussion than in sitting through music theory. He calls what followed “my mid-college life crisis.” The way out arrived through a restaurant owned by Gerry Kingen, the founder of Red Robin. Kingen and his vice president, Peter Beck, saw something in the twenty-year-old host. Too young, technically, to legally work behind his own bar, and one busy Friday night, with the dining room full and the wait list long, they offered him his first general manager job. He took it and never really looked back.
Building an Empire of Service
What followed was two and a half decades of increasingly rarefied hospitality work. In Seattle, Dave catered for some of the most recognizable names in American business: Bill Gates, Jeff Brotman of Costco, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, the Nordstrom family, the Boeing family, Paul Allen, and some of Amazon’s earliest investors. He negotiated the exclusive food and beverage contract for Benaroya Hall, the Seattle Symphony’s new concert home, ran the opening events for Nordstrom’s remodeled flagship store, and catered a PGA tournament along the way.
Twenty-eight years ago, Restaurant Associates, a large hospitality firm out of Manhattan, brought him to Los Angeles to oversee West Coast catering, a portfolio that included the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the LA Opera, the San Francisco Symphony, Ballet, and Opera, the LA Music Center, and the San Francisco War Memorial. It also meant two years catering the Academy Awards alongside Wolfgang Puck, the first year learning the operation and the second year running it. From there, he led some of Southern California’s most storied properties, among them the Parkway Grill and Arroyo Chop House in Pasadena, the Magic Castle and Yamashiro in Hollywood, Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen at Downtown Disney, and Orange Hill.
Dave frames his career in numbers: multi-outlet operations with full P&L ownership, annual revenues ranging from $7 million to more than $26 million, and teams of up to 500 employees spanning culinary, service, events, and facilities. He describes himself as a Senior Food and Beverage and Clubhouse Facilities Executive, a title that is accurate, and also somehow understates what it actually takes to get Oscars week catering in full operation without a single mishap.
The Fall Nobody Puts on a Résumé
Success at that altitude comes with a bill, and Dave does not pretend otherwise. The demands of running iconic restaurant concepts left little room for the quieter demands of a marriage and three young sons, Evan, Adrian, and Ryan. He describes himself, in that period, as an absentee father who tried to make up for it on his rare days off, a “Disneyland-type dad.” The unraveling that followed built slowly, through a strained marriage and a lifestyle he no longer defends, until it finally broke him. He was clinically diagnosed as bipolar with acute mania, and in the years after, he lost his marriage, his home, and for a stretch, any fixed address at all.
Two people pulled him back. His brother Paul, a retired orthopedic surgeon, drove down from Seattle and physically brought him home when there was nowhere else left for him to go. And his son Adrian, a young father himself at the time, offered his own father a couch and, a week later, a list: Get a job. Pay your bills. Get a doctor. Get on meds. Work out every day. Five short instructions, handed from a son to a father who had once run some of the most celebrated kitchens in America and now had nothing left. Dave still uses that same list today when he ministers to others in similar situations.
The Moment Everything Turned
The defining spiritual turning point came on December 23, 2022. Sitting at his desk, Dave says, God asked him to fully commit to his calling, and he said yes. His first instinct was to run into the backyard and announce it to the whole neighborhood. The instruction he says he received instead was the opposite: be still, and know that I am with you. That quiet, rather than a triumphant one, became the operating principle for everything that came next.
Love Train Ministries, which had already been founded earlier in 2022, took on deeper clarity and momentum after that experience. Based in Diamond Bar, California, it describes itself as an organic community-building foundation centered on ministry, discipleship, and peacemaking. Rather than building one program, Dave built something closer to a switchboard. “It’s all about following the Holy Spirit,” he says. “People cross my path. I’ve learned to engage those people. They are crossing my path and entering my life for a reason. God is very intentional. There is no such thing as coincidence.”
That conviction is not left to memory alone. As the Founder and Principal Visionary of Love Train Ministries, Dave describes keeping “copious notes and an accurate database,” tracking the individuals, families, and organizations that move through Love Train’s orbit so that no connection goes to waste. The ministry functions as a central connector and data hub, designing referral pathways that link people to appropriate support services and, according to Dave, increasing successful placements and follow-through across multiple regions. It develops and mentors community leaders, guiding churches, colleges, schools, and nonprofits toward more self-sustaining models of collaboration. It has also grown a base of donors and philanthropic partners to fund outreach and leadership development, and expanded its visibility through media appearances, including a live interview with Good Life TV through the Turner Foundation in Santa Barbara.
Where Hospitality Meets Ministry
Ask Dave how his two careers relate, and he does not treat them as separate chapters of a life. The same disciplined leadership that once drove record profitability in dining rooms and clubhouses, the accountability, the integrity, the insistence on service excellence, is, in his telling, the exact same operating system behind Love Train Ministries.
“It’s a passion, an unquenchable drive, an unshakable level of motivation,” he says. “It’s never giving up. It’s setting high standards for the team and organization while being the standard bearer. Leading by example twenty-four seven.”
That same standard-bearer instinct shows up in the milestones he points to with the most confidence. Love Train’s work has connected him with organizations including Covenant House, the Orchard Community, and Chef Gourmet, alongside discipleship training programs, fundraising initiatives, and hands-on community construction projects, both large and small, carried out with contractors.
“The opportunities keep coming,” he says. “One thing leads to another. It’s the theory of networking and word of mouth in action.”
Among the projects he names is a prototype model he consulted for large-scale drop-ship disaster feeding, a direct descendant of the same logistical instincts that once fed a symphony gala or an Oscars ballroom, now aimed instead at communities in crisis.
Faith as Instinct, Not Theory
Asked how he stays resilient, Dave does not describe resilience as a personality trait. He describes it as a relationship.
“It’s about a relationship with the Holy Spirit,” he says. “Letting Him be the leader in my life. It’s about feel. God gives us discernment, instinct, and a moral compass. If you trust God through your God-given instincts and not second-guess yourself, you’ll never make a bad decision.”
He is careful to add that this is not something one simply decides to believe. “This needs to be tested and tried through years of experience. One needs to experience it to understand it.”
That same conviction shapes how he views the years ahead. He believes modern culture has inverted its own moral compass, and that the fix is not a new strategy but an old one.
“It’s all about truth,” he says. “The Bible is God’s condensed wisdom. It’s all in the Bible: immorality, inhumanity, and sinfulness in many places. Today, wrong is right, and right is wrong. It’s a big lie. God’s truth is eternal. It never changes. This needs to be the Christian’s driving force.”
Live Love
Dave closes most conversations, and most chapters of his own story, in the same place: 1 Corinthians 16:14, two words distilled from a much longer letter. Live love. It is, on its face, the least complicated business philosophy imaginable from a man who once managed twenty-six-million-dollar budgets and Academy Awards logistics, and yet it is the one he returns to above all the others.
He describes himself now as the happiest and most grounded he has ever been. He does not dress up the parts that are still hard, particularly his relationships with his children, which remain a work in progress by his own account. But the man who once measured success in covers served and revenue per outlet now measures it differently: in connections made, in people helped, in neighbors loved.
“There are no limits,” he says to what lies ahead for Love Train Ministries and for anyone willing to do the same work. “Limits are self-imposed.”
He built restaurants that fed the powerful. Now he is building something quieter, and by his own account, considerably harder: a ministry that feeds whoever happens to cross its path, on the belief that nobody crosses it by accident.
What’s Next for Dave
Watch for Dave’s first book, Celebrate Your Life!, soon to be released by WestBow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan. An enjoyable read full of Dave’s motivation and inspiration, the book explores how to live happily, healthily, wealthily, and wisely.
To stay connected with his ministry and follow his journey, reach out to him through his LinkedIn page.
Quotes
“Tears are God’s medicine for your soul.”
“You have to go out on a limb to get the fruit” – John Maxwell
“Make today your masterpiece.” – John Wooden
