CHAPTER ONE

 

Let's Talk

 

Sooner or later, somebody asks how I got my start as a chef.

 

It happens at parties, over the rail at a bar, in the first ten minutes of a job interview. There is a good answer to that question, and I have used it for thirty years. It involves a country club outside Columbus, a certified master chef, and a lesson about the difference between honing a knife and sharpening one that I have carried since 1999.

 

That answer is true. It is also the fourth or fifth thing that happened.

 

The real answer is that my mother yelled at me for eating all the food in the house.

 

I was fifteen. We had moved to Florida, and I had grown five inches in a year. I was eating like something that had been let off a chain. My father was out of town on a railroad job. My mother was standing in the kitchen doing arithmetic she did not want to do, and she looked at me and told me to get a damn job.

 

So I did. A pizza place near the house. Grease, nerves, and responsibility I had no business being handed.

 

That is the origin story. There is no ambition in it anywhere.

 

I am not a famous chef. I never went to culinary school. I am a man who spent a lifetime in professional kitchens learning by doing, and who was good at it, and who was also fired, laid off, escorted out, or asked to resign from more of them than I can put in order without a piece of paper in front of me.

 

Both of those are on my resume. Only one of them was ever on the version I handed to anybody.

 

Which brings me to what this book is and how I have tried to build it.

 

I have a good memory for kitchens. I can tell you the layout of a basement receiving dock in New Albany, Ohio, in 1999 and what was stacked on the metro shelves. I can tell you what the exhaust hood at a fried chicken buffet in Heath smelled like from a half mile away.

 

My memory for the rest of it is significantly poorer. Some nights are completely forgotten, and there are years when the sequence of events becomes hazy. Usually, this haziness indicates I was drinking heavily during that period. When my memory and the record didn't match, I have acknowledged the discrepancy openly in the text rather than choosing the version that made me look better.

 

I have also tried to hold to one rule throughout, and it costs me a chapter later on. Other people's wrongs are not mine to tell. A few of the people in these pages behaved badly. Some of them behaved badly toward me. I have left most of that alone, because I am the only person in this story who agreed to be in it.

 

What I can give you is the inside of it.

 

It's not the wreckage that stands out—anyone can see that. It's the thought process. The particular way someone makes decisions, completely sincerely at nine in the morning, believing this will be the last effort, only to be back at it by noon. How a plan to improve your life can end up with you financing a truck you can't legally drive. And why the geographical solution remains attractive for thirty years, despite its history of failure.

 

That mental process is common to most of us. If you have it, you'll see your own version somewhere here. If you love someone who does, this is the closest I can get to the other side of a conversation you've probably had hundreds of times and never won.

 

I do not have a moral to hand you. I have a sequence, and it runs from a liquor cabinet in Licking County, Ohio, in 1985 to a laptop in a mother-in-law suite in Sweetwater, Tennessee, on the first morning of 2022, and almost everything in between is instruction in how not to do it.

 

That is the whole offer.

 

Let's talk.