I’m sure many chefs get asked the question all the time of how they found their way into the kitchen. There are a few of the usual stories that get shared but it’s not always the cookie-cutter story of helping mom or grandma.

For me, it’s half typical and half not. At a pretty young age, I was helping my mom make bread- I think I was six years old. It was the Betty Crocker Cookbook and I recall using a standard white bread. A side story is that this bread got an unlikely nickname as “the bread with the hole in the top.” To explain, my mom was apparently in a hurry one time she made it and didn’t form the dough firmly enough when placing it into the loaf pan, leaving a pocket of air where the dough was folded. This resulted in a hole in each slice of bread, and thus the name. Despite its technical shortfall, it was very tasty bread. In addition to that recipe, we also made a recipe from the book for a potato dough called “Refrigerator Roll Dough.” I still use this recipe from time to time, as I find it very easy to work with and it’s very forgiving with its overnight proof in the refrigerator. After a couple of years of helping her, by the time I was nine or ten, I made the bread myself for Thanksgiving. The following year, I was probably too ambitious for my own good and failed at attempting to make croissants. There were tears and some butter angrily thrown into the trash can when I couldn’t get it to cooperate, but making bread with Mom is otherwise one of my fonder childhood memories. I also helped Mom with making pies, which were sometimes simple with store-bought pie shells, but not always- Mom got pretty serious about pie sometimes. She also made a yearly batch of what she referred to as “killer chili,” which is based around a more traditional “Chile con Carne” and not this ground beef and beans nonsense that gets sold in a can. Mom made chili that took a couple of days and $100, and that’s when $100 was actually worth something.

I had a highly enviable childhood with my grandparents being in the house next door. As such, I spent as much time with them, particularly my grandfather. Every kid looks up to their grandfather, but this was different. Not to make less of anyone else’s grandfather- it’s always a really special relationship for any child- but my grandfather was a true American hero, surviving four tours in Vietnam as a Captain of Marines leading artillery units. He also endured a truly horrific car accident at eight years old that killed his father and was supposed to cripple him after he suffered multiple compound breaks in both of his legs. He was never supposed to walk again, much less go to Vietnam four times. Grandpa was a badass and he was always my hero- still is despite passing almost eight years ago. At any rate, Grandpa cooked because that was his role in the house as a child. He had like seven or eight siblings, his mom was alone, and Grandpa was the oldest so cooking was his responsibility, and one he still enjoyed as an adult.

Besides doing the daily cooking, Grandpa gardened and picked walnuts from the woods of his property in West Virginia. I particularly remember the walnut fudge he made around the holidays. At some point, he stopped making it. I don’t know if it was time, or simply the fact that his legs hurt too much after that childhood car accident and sixteen years in the Marines to trudge through the hills of West Virginia picking walnuts. I always helped him in the kitchen when I was with him, as it was as good an excuse as any to get to be with Grandpa. I asked him why and how he did certain things and eventually, I took over cooking dinner so he didn’t have to stand on those legs that had already endured too much. Let’s be honest, Grandpa trusting you with cooking dinner at eight or nine years old is a big deal!

Cooking continued through my adolescence, which came in handy when mom or dad was working late. All along, I never knew much about Chefs or had any concept of what a Chef was or really did. I was cooking largely out of wanting to help my grandfather, enjoying being self-sufficient, and thinking bread was fun to make. To this point in my life, being a Chef had never actually entered my mind. I wanted to be an Architect because that’s the kind of thing kids are supposed to want to grow up to be.

I think deep down I always knew I wouldn’t actually like an engineering-related job. If for no other reason, I mostly hated math classes. Calculus was absolute torture but I’m the only person I’ve ever met that actually enjoyed trigonometry. My wife is an industrial engineer, took far more calculus than I would ever care to, and insists I must be psychotic to find trig fun. Shrug. All the heavy algebraic equations never seemed to have any purpose, but trig taught me how to crunch numbers, and that comes in really handy as a Chef.

I began college as a pre-engineering major with the intent of becoming an architecture major once I transferred to a school that offered that program. This came off the rails in my first semester of college. Besides hating calculus, I had to take a drafting class. Not difficult, at least not the basic version of it in this class. I got a 97 but absolutely did not want to spend my days looking over blueprints. I’d been working in a restaurant while balancing classes and I had this crazy idea about wanting to open a restaurant someday. I laugh at that now, but that was my idea. I knew that while I was waiting tables and learning the guest-facing side of the business, I would need to learn how a kitchen works to be an effective restaurant owner.

I fell into the kitchen purely by happenstance, really. I was waiting tables at an IHOP and it became a Friday night ritual, waiting around late night to help make eggs. I had a pretty good relationship with the guys in the kitchen and found myself as the lone spare person around late on a Friday night, with one guy working alone in the kitchen. I was supposed to be off the clock, leisurely folding my silverware at the lucrative rate of $2.13 an hour, but when the dining room began to fill up I stumbled back into the kitchen and asked what I could do to help. “Eggs.” It took me a minute to figure out where everything was and how to get into a flow, but I stumbled through getting some egg orders out. Not half bad for a waiter. This happened again for the next few weekends and I decided I didn’t really want to wait tables anymore.

I told one of the managers I wanted to transfer to the kitchen. She laughed at me. If you can believe it, she thought I was too much of a pretty boy to be in the kitchen. Funny how things work out.

[I just love this kid to pieces! -CK]