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Metromix
January 2011
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Whether it’s fast-food purgatory or a brainless post on the retail frontlines, your first job tends to be a not-so-glamorous introduction to the working world. While the source of your first paycheck probably isn’t occupying prime space on your resume, for some it’s an unlikely start on a winding career path, especially if it’s your passion. For many of the biggest chefs in the country, their first kitchen jobs got them hooked. Whether it was through entrepreneurial endeavors, such as Guy Fieri’s childhood pretzel stand (pictured), or by accident, here are the stories of how 11 culinary superstars entered the ring.
Paula Deen
The doyenne of Southern food is known for her satisfying home cooking, so it’s not shocking she discovered her calling serving up simple, straightforward meals to the public. Before she started her famous restaurant, The Lady and Sons in Savannah, Ga., Deen ran the Bag Lady delivery service in town with her two sons, Jamie and Bobby. She’d prepare brown-bag meals with dishes like chicken salad and include muffins and cookies. Her sons would then sell them all around downtown.
Tom Colicchio
The “Top Chef” judge and Craft owner recently impressed contestants during a Quickfire challenge on the cooking reality show, completing a full dish in under nine minutes. It was a none-too-subtle reminder of Colicchio’s well-honed skills, which he began to develop working around his hometown of Elizabeth, N.J. In addition to helping out his uncle, who sold fruits and vegetables, he also worked as a short-order snack-bar cook at the Gran Centurion swim club. According to the book “Super Chef,” he was getting paid $250 a week under the table to work the stove and whip up dishes like grilled cheese and grilled sausages. It’s a long way from the premium cuts of meat so artfully served at his high-end restaurants, which include Colicchio & Sons and the recently opened Riverpark.
Bobby Flay
The “Boy Meets Grill” Food Network celeb and owner of a restaurant empire including Mesa Grill and Bobby’s Burger Palace got his official big break in the culinary world at Joe Allen, a New York Theater District hotspot. But his first taste of food service work began in sixth grade, when he started delivering pizzas (“The owner let me open the cans of tomatoes and grate the mozzarella,” he told the NY Daily News) and scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. It’s a safe bet the Iron Chef could likely come back and win a Throwdown with his old bosses.
Eric Ripert
The genial Antibes-born chef (he co-owns Le Bernardin, one of Manhattan’s few four-star restaurants), author and host of “Avec Eric” was a bit of a troublemaker during his first big gig. He started out at La Tour D’Argent (“The Silver Tower”), a venerable Paris institution dating back to the 16th century that was an inspiration for Pixar’s “Ratatouille.” There, young chefs who were reprimanded were forced to assist a senior sous-chef in cooking for the owner late at night after evening service. Ripert was given this task quite often. As the story goes, the owner at the time preferred a poussin stuffed with black truffles but usually ate just half, so the kitchen sent out just half the dish but saved the other in the kitchen just in case. One night, the owner decided he wanted the rest of his bird, but Ripert had ignored the standing order and had already eaten the other half. When the owner discovered what the young chef had done, he was in total disbelief, and Ripert almost got fired.
Angelo Sosa
Although the half-Dominican, half-Italian, two-time “Top Chef” contestant harbored a desire to play professional baseball (“I’m Dominican and baseball is my blood”), Sosa started down the culinary path quite early. He enrolled in a culinary program at Manchester Community College before making the jump to the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, where he ended up as the head chef at the school restaurant. Before he went to school, however, he started out with a less-then-glamorous gig: a waiter at a retirement home. It was an inspiring experience, believe it or not. “I became so fascinated and intrigued that I was basically pestering the chef to let me in the kitchen,” he tells us. “After or before the shift, I’d help the cook—whatever I could do to get near the food. I think the biggest life lesson, and I really take this to heart today, is if you have desire, if you have a passion, ‘no’ is not the answer.” Quite the ephiphany to have while carting out early-bird specials.
Rick Bayless
A master of Mexican cuisine in all its complexity and variety, Bayless earned his expertise from years of travel and study in Mexico, accompanied by his wife, Deann. But before the James Beard Award winner founded his Frontera empire in Chicago in 1987, he learned the basics of the industry by working at his family’s barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma. In 1996, while chatting with the Chicago Tribune, he recounted picking peaches at his grandmother’s place to use for canning and peach butter. “Peach butter was my job,” Bayless said, “because that was what I loved. I would mix the peaches with brown sugar, cinnamon and clove. I still remember the proportions.”
Gordon Ramsay
Known for his aggressive and foul-mouthed behavior, the headstrong “Hell’s Kitchen” chef actually fell into the culinary world by chance. “It was an accident, a complete accident,” he writes in his autobiography “Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen.” Unsure if his football career would work out (he was considered by clubs as a teen before suffering a career-ending injury), Ramsay spent some time at school before his first few jobs, which included washing up at a curry house in Stratford and then working as a commis (apprentice) at the Roxburgh House Hotel, with its pink dining room. There, he cooked for a chef named Andy Rogers, a “300-pound shire horse” of a man, and served dishes like scallop of veal cordon bleu, which he said was just battered veal wrapped around a ball of Gruyere in ham. Never one to hold back an opinion, he stated, “I knew it was atrocious, even then.”
Guy Fieri
The gregarious, peroxide-blonde Food Network host has always been outgoing, even when he was a kid growing up in Southern California. When he was 10 years old, Fieri started his own business, a soft-pretzel cart called Awesome Pretzel, in Santa Rosa. He’d charge 50 cents per pretzel. Eventually he saved enough money from his carb-slinging to pay for a trip to Chantilly, France, where he learned about international cuisine and was inspired to pursue a career in the culinary and hospitality industry (he majored in hospitality management at UNLV).
Jamie Oliver
Part of the appeal of Britain’s Naked Chef is his honesty and heart. Not every new culinary star has managed to turn a crusade for better school lunches into a TV show, or started a restaurant/”social enterprise” (Fifteen) dedicated to training and employing underpriviledged youth. He got his start working at his parents’ pub in Essex, The Cricketers at Clavering, where his sister, Anna-Marie, worked as a waitress. The place now serves veggies from Oliver’s nearby organic garden. After school and some time spent in France, his first job in London, according to a 2003 New York Times story, was working as a pastry chef at Neal Street restaurant. ”All I knew was tiramisu, and it was a bad version of it,” he told the Times. ”I kind of read up on it, and Gennaro [Contaldo, the owner] would give me a slap every now and again if I was tarting it up too much.”
Wolfgang Puck
An early example of cook turned entrepreneur, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck didn’t waste any time starting his culinary career: He enrolled in a technical college in Villach, Austria, when he was 14. After winning a national cooking competition, he set out for France and found work at a variety of French restaurants, including L’Ostau de Baumaniere and Café Maxim. He moved to the United States in 1973 and worked as executive chef at La Tour in Indianapolis, eventually finding fame at Ma Maison in 1975 in Los Angeles, a restaurant he’d soon build into a hotspot for Hollywood’s A-list.
Duff Goldman
The Charm City Cake boss and “Ace of Cakes” star grew up in a house filled with family that cooked—he tells us his mom caught him watching “Chef Tell” on TV while swinging a meat cleaver into random vegetables from the refrigerator. His first job was mopping and washing dishes up at a Skolnicks Bagel after school in McLean, Va., when he was 14, a position he took so he could pay for the spray paint he used for graffiti (“I was already doing something illegal, so I didn’t need to be caught shoplifting”). When everyone was in the weeds, Goldman would step up and help make sandwiches. “I’d make these total Dagwood-size, massive sandwiches, and my boss would yell at me and say you can’t make them that big, we’re losing money!” he says. Goldman says his stint at chef Cindy Wolf’s Baltimore restaurant Charleston was what made him realize cooking was his life path, but his first gig introduced him to the people skills and personalities of the profession. “I like interacting with people, and that was one of the cool things, being up front, making sandwiches and meeting people,” he says.