Continued from yesterday’s post. I made a trip down to Massachusetts to see my girl during her spring break and my car broke down while I was there, so I had to stay there a week. Her parents were very impressed. We went to Blockbuster and I insisted we rent The Commitments, a movie I…

Read Part Two here. I ended up meeting a girl. K was a blonde with short hair and big brown eyes. One of those eyes, the left one, had a mind of its own. Behind my back, my friends called her “Tangle Eye,” but I thought the quirk was beautiful. She also had a birthmark…

Read Part One here. Word spread like wildfire after the pastry class incident. Nope, I wasn’t a “real chef” just some hired schlub. Within one day, the students stopped calling me chef, and also stopped asking permission to “borrow” items from my station, the pizza oven. This was a gas powered job, not as nice…

When I returned from Florida, I moved in with my father and stepmother. Back in my old childhood room, my childhood bed. The first night sleeping there, I gazed up at the ceiling and felt the dual twinge of depression and comfort. Opposing emotions battling for dominance over my psyche. On the one hand, it…

Read Part Two here. After a couple of months, I started training with the kitchen manager, Jennifer, to work lunches. Blonde, burley, intense. A bright and capable, strong woman, just like Chef Mef. Not afraid to rip into someone and tell them how much they sucked. My training with her was instantly controversial, as the…

Read Part One here. The kitchen was tiny. A square space with a low ceiling. Like any small kitchen, every available area to put something, had something. The dish machine, they said, was from a submarine. A silver tube with a circular sort of revolving door that allowed one wash cycle at a time. Every…

The only remaining photo on the interwebs of the Five Spice Cafe, or “Five Spice”, as we all called it, is this crummy one you see above, snapped on a rainy winter morning. The restaurant was located at the ass end of Burlington, Vermont’s semi famous Church Street Marketplace. If you’ve never visited, Burlington is…

Continued from Part 7. Upon starting at The Grand Central Cafe, I was given an actual cotton chef’s coat. That made me feel a little better. The job itself however, was a far cry from my upbringing at Sweet Tomatoes, my first real kitchen. The entire concept of Grand Central revolved around a giant conveyer…

Continued from Part Six. My time at B. Merrel’s was limited, temporary. I knew that walking in. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15 an hour. After a month or so, I began looking for better opportunities. After scanning the local newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, I found something a little closer to my wheelhouse, a…

Continued from Part Five. The wing shack, B. Merrel’s, was run by this guy named Marv, a short, jacked older white guy with a crazy jagged scar across his forehead and a lazy eye. Maybe the two were related, maybe not. After the interview we shook hands and he took me through the kitchen to…

Finale! That day’s service carved itself into my brain like drunken teenage lovers etching their initials with a pen knife in tree bark, illustrated like the perfect how to manual on self discovery. All of a sudden, I meant something. I had purpose. I could be taken seriously. A possible career on the horizon. Forget…

Still going… I started training with Kevin on the pizza oven after he found a dishwasher. From the get go it was evident he had no idea what he was doing. I got there early, at six, and he had to miss a meeting in order to train me, so right away a huge piece…