Big Arms, Huge Heart. Celebrity Chef Andre Back in Billings 9/30

If you missed him last year, good news.

Chef Andre Rush is coming back to the Magic City on September 30th, 2023. Over 400 guests attended the gala last year at the Northern Hotel, raising over $75,000 for Dog Tag Buddies.

Chef Andre Rush is a retired Master Sergeant combat veteran and served as a White House Executive Chef for four administrations. He can bench press 700 pounds and performs an astonishing 2,222 push-ups every day. He does this every weekday, waking up at 3 am and meditating beforehand. It takes him an hour and fifteen minutes to perform the feat. He does it to help raise awareness about the estimated 22 veterans per day who commit suicide.

Cavna/Dog Tag Buddies, used with permission

It's a benefit for Dog Tag Buddies.

The gala is a fundraiser for Dog Tag Buddies, a 501(c)(3) based in Billings that was founded by DeeDe Baker, the proud wife of a veteran who suffered injuries during an IED blast in 2005. Baker stopped by our studios last week and shared how her Montana National Guardsman husband returned home from the Middle East and was diagnosed with PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury). His wife noticed the positive effect their dogs had on her husband, which led them to launch Dog Tag Buddies.

Photo courtesy Dog Tag Buddies.

Many veteran injuries are invisible.

Dog Tag Buddies provides a number of services, but their primary focus is pairing veterans living with hidden injuries (PTSD, TBI, MST) with rescue dogs. They wrote,

Following the match, we place the team into community-oriented training sessions. Based on the veteran’s needs, the dog receives training to become a well-behaved companion animal or a fully-trained service dog. All services are at NO cost to the veteran.

They now have a network of six locations across the state and have helped over 100 Montana veterans receive service dogs. Each dog costs around $23,000 to train, and the process can take up to 18 months. Dog Tag Buddies emphasizes the relationship between service dogs and their new owners, who are quite involved in the training process. It's a pretty awesome organization.

Kitchen Commando

In February 2023, Chef Andre debuted as the host of the Gordon Ramsey-produced reality series Kitchen Commando. The show follows a Bar Rescue style format, with Rush helping struggling restaurants around the US revamp their menus and decor and basically get their act together. Our contributor Aaron Flint from KBUL NewsTalk interviewed Chef Andre last fall. Link below.

The dog tag-style tickets for R.E.D. Tie 2023 are $150 each or purchase a table of 8 for $1,100. Get them HERE, before it sells out. Sponsorship opportunities are also available if you'd like to get your business involved.

LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.