I'm still here

Just a note to say hey

If you had asked me why I wanted to be a chef when I was in my twenties I probably would have given you a bunch of different reasons. I need an actual career, I like working with food, I like to eat, I’m fascinated by cooking and learning to cook, etc.

Then in my thirties I would have said; I like working with. my hands, I like learning new techniques, i”m endlessly curious about the restaurant business, I want to experience the world through food, something along those lines.

In my forties, I would have said, I don’t really know how to do anything else, I still enjoy working in kitchens and want to open my own restaurant, I love making people happy with my food, stuff like that.

But in my fifties, I would answer I just want to feed people and maybe teach others what I know. It’s funny how a lot of things I felt were important don’t seem all that important now. I don’t care about being famous, or putting out a cookbook, or having a restaurant empire, or having my own cooking show. Those things are great. I just don’t see them as motivation anymore. I’d rather use my experience and skills to help people in some small way. Part of the reason I started this newsletter was merely to share some of my experiences as someone who has spent their entire adult life working in kitchens. Maybe sharing my experiences would benefit someone somehow. I haven’t talked about what it was like to own a restaurant yet. Parts of that experience were traumatic and still feel raw when I think about it. Just like when I shared what working at Spiaggia was like in the early nineties, parts might have seemed funny, at least to me, but I assure you at the time they were not. Suffice it to say when I entered this profession my thoughts were on me, what can I do, what can I get, where can I work, what can I learn? And now I care much less about that and more about what I have that I can share that might help or benefit others. How can my experiences of working in professional kitchens my entire adult life benefit others in some way shape or form?

I started this newsletter in the hopes of letting people get an inside peek into kitchen life in the 90s and early 2000s. The business has changed greatly since then, mostly for the better. Even though I tend to paint the past with a rosy hue, things were not all sunshine and rainbows. There were things I didn’t talk about, like being broke, really broke, working two jobs for a while, or ignoring my health through most of it. Kitchens back then weren’t exactly enlightened and there were times that going to work gave me great anxiety and there were places I worked where we felt we were walking on eggshells, waiting to be verbally assaulted. Sad to say, you get used to it over time.

I learned how to survive those kitchens. I learned to put my head down and work. But there were so many things I didn’t learn. And when it came time to open my own restaurant I learned how truly brutal this business can be. I can be a slow learner I guess, or maybe I turn a blind eye to certain things that I’d rather not know. But next week I’ll talk about Vera, some of the highs, but probably a lot of the lows. I just wanted to drop everyone a note saying I’m still here. Still writing, still thinking, still grinding.