I had already worked in a half dozen kitchens before I turned 21, even one where they let me cook the food. But there was one I still view as a huge benchmark, a place with an actual trained chef where everything was made from scratch. Of course, none of it was a walk in the park. I had been a cook previously, at a Howard Johnson’s down the street, but had burned that bridge after walking out one night after a disagreement with the despotic GM. Not the most responsible or proud moment in my life. Tough to even admit, even after so many years.

Like most, I was aimless in my younger years. More so than now. A college drop out. No real goals or direction at all. Of course, restaurants fit me perfectly. Back then (late nineties) restaurant kitchens were full of miscreants. This wasn’t New York, where most kitchens were populated by Central and South American immigrants. This was a different sort of thing in a different world. Cooks could actually (sort of) get by on what they made back then, as living in Burlington during that era, with roommates of course, was somewhat affordable.

Sweet Tomatoes was located in the basement of a building on Church Street in my home town of Burlington, VT. A former department store. You own a two tiered row of hollow metal steps and you were in the white washed brick dining room. The bar was straight ahead, right behind the host station. To the left, rows of tables, and taking up the entire back side, a magnificent open kitchen. A long red carpet separated the kitchen from the dining room as well as many brick pillars, also painted white. The floor was black and white tile. A pretty place. Noisy and always busy. The kitchen line was dominated on its far side by a massive wood fired oven made of brick. A large dome with a chimney extending into the ceiling. Sweet Tomatoes was the first restaurant in Burlington to have a wood fired oven and upon walking down the steps, it exerted its magical, inescapable ability to intoxicate you with its overpowering, invisible fog of wood smoke, as well as the ever present, baked in perfume of garlic and tomatoes. 

In those days you looked for a job in the newspaper. Went to the wanted ads section and scoured through them and then either called on the telephone and spoke to the originator or the ad gave instructions to ask for a certain person. In this case, it said to go down and ask for Chef Kevin. I had just been fired from a crappy dishwashing job a few blocks down from the place for skipping out on work one day. They were all crappy. Hours of wet, pruny hands, soggy pants and footwear. I had gone to the annual Vermont Reggae Fest with friends and eaten a big bag of mushrooms, the good kind. The next day I couldn’t imagine myself going back into the place. Almost as if the mushrooms had scrubbed my brain clean of the bullshit. I never returned to the job after not showing up for the shift, so I hadn’t really been fired, I just assumed I was. A few days later I had to slink back in there to ask for my last paycheck. When the reality of having no money hit me later and I realized I had no source of income, I began the hunt. Dishwashing was always an easy in. A terrible job but they hired anyone. 

So down I went. Into the catacombs of Sweet Tomatoes during lunch hours. I asked the attractive brunette host to see Chef Kevin. When I gave her my name she smiled and brought me over to the bar and told me to wait. The place was busy. Noisy. Silverware clanking on plates. An elevated general hum of people speaking and stuffing pasta and pizza into their faces. The bartender handed me a menu and asked me if I wanted a water. I told him I was waiting for Kevin. He arched an eyebrow and smiled and poured me a water anyway. I was 19 years old and didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. I looked back behind the bar at the bottles and in the mirror at myself. After less than a second I looked away. The person sitting there, in that mirror, that was a pale reflection of what I thought I was or wanted to be. I looked down into the water and took a long chug and then heard a voice behind me. 

I turned to see an older, taciturn man in his late thirties, greying a bit at his receding temples, the hair cut short Caesar style, his face freshly shaved, built like an iron furnace, his pristine white cotton chef coat fitting perfectly snug to show off his physique, his barrel body and bowling ball shoulders. I slid out of the stool to shake his hand and found myself more than a bit taller but his very presence and especially the sparkling uniform he wore, intimidated me. 

“Kevin,” he said, and extended his hand. I stuck mine out and he squeezed it with a meaty vice like grip. My eyes flashed to the custom embroidered stitching on the left lapel of his double breasted coat. Executive Chef Kevin O’Donnell in black and Sweet Tomatoes Trattoria in red. My eyes went back up and met his. We shared something. He peered straight into my soul.

“Follow me,” he said.

He walked with a brisk pace compared to my lazy saunter. I found it difficult to keep up with him as he led me down the blood red carpet in his black Dansko clogs as I followed the hypnotic bob of his pert buttocks in his ultra tight Bragard houndstooth chef pants. He opened a back door for me and I went through and then he guided us down a long hallway and into his office that also served as a dry storage room. He motioned for me to sit and I obliged. The chair was squeezed between the wall and his desk and he sat a little too close for comfort in his own chair, just a fold up job, with one leg over the other, exposing the front of a freshly shaved leg as the cuff rode up. Hundreds of #10 tomato cans on shelves behind him stacked like ammunition. 

“First things first,” he said. “I need to know what kind of life goals you have.”

“Uh, none really.”

“Well, you came here looking for a job, so you must have something in mind. Money for one?”

“Sure. Yes. Money.”

“Are you in school?”

“No.”

“No aspirations?”

“No. Not really.”

“There must be something. Think.”

I did. I reached down into the alcohol soaked cellar of my mind and thought. No one had ever asked me that question. It was something I never thought nor gave a shit about. I blurted the first thing that came to mind. 

“I want to be a chef.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever worked in kitchens before?”

“No.” I had to lie in case he ever checked my references, all of which had ended badly. 

“Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he said and rubbed his chin. He had a way of looking right into my eyes as if scanning my brain. I thought at that moment he would pass on giving me the job because he could tell I was full of shit. “I started out as a dishwasher. I ended up going to the CIA of course, but that was much later?”

“The CIA?”

“The Culinary Institute of America.”

“Oh.”

“This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to take a chance on you. Why don’t you come in tomorrow at let’s say, seven, and we’ll get you started.”

“Seven? Seven in the morning?”

“Yes.” He laughed. “Is that too early?”

“No. It’s great.”

“Ok then.” He stood up and I followed suit. He stuck his hand out and I shook it again, this time in an attempt to keep up with his squeeze. “I’ll see you tomorrow at seven sharp. You know the way out?”

“Yes.” He stayed in the office and I went back down the hallway, through the door, back into the clatter of the dining room. I nodded to the hostess, who smiled at me again, and then I was up the stairs and back out into the light. Happy about landing a job so easily but seven, seven lingered in my mind like a lie I knew I would get caught for. 

The other restaurants where I had worked had been little mom and pop places or commercial, corporate places. I couldn’t put my finger on the Sweet Tomatoes vibe. I guessed it was the fact there was a chef present. All the other ratholes where I’d been on the hose had kitchen managers and head cooks but no real chefs. At any rate, no guys that had gone to an actual school for the profession. No pristine gentlemen in starched white chef coats with spitshined black leather clogs. At the other places the cooks were a bunch of ragtag hooligans. The guys I spotted behind the line at Sweet Tomatoes all wore gleaming white coats, a certain air of respectability surrounding them. I wanted to be one. After stating to Kevin that I wanted to be a chef, well, I began to think I could actually do it. I mean, I had spent the last three years in kitchens, just dishwashing, but I had absorbed some of what went on. It seemed easy enough. I had heard somewhere that once you put a thought into the air, into the ears of others, that it meant it was stronger, that then you had to do it. Maybe this was my calling and when I had blurted my intentions to Kevin it had been a slip of sorts from the bottomless depths of my soul and into the ether. Yes, this was my future. I had subconsciously placed the banana peel down in front of my destiny.