After leaving The Fearrington House in Pittsboro as a line cook, I was hardly ready to take the job as Sous Chef At Canoe Bay in Chetek, feeling that I had some how missed “The Basics”. After leaving Wisconsin, I decided to get back into a kitchen at an entry level in hopes of learning whatever it was I missed while up “In The Sticks.” At the end of a year and a half of working as the Sous Chef, I resigned and decided to go back and find what I felt I was missing. Once back in North Carolina, I sent a copy f my resume to every restaurant in the triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) in hopes of landing a job under a decent chef that would allow me to learn and grow. This proved to be a challenge, no one was hiring when I first got here. I found a night job working on the line in an very busy Italian Trattoria; that housed three hundred patrons on a slow weekend. I had to prove to myself that I could work on a fast paced line. Turns out that I could, I was soon working a pasta station on busy Saturdays getting beaten down by tickets and mad calls for plates. I felt unsatisfied, I was performing as I was asked to, but I never came into work before four p.m. I felt like I was being cheated, I was only ever finishing dishes, I never knew how they were started. Thus begun the great job hunt in the triangle, soon other establishments began calling about the resume that I had mass distributed months ago. I began meeting many Chefs in The Triangle that were dedicated to their craft, I was surprised to find the support that the culinary world had here.
This is the home, after all, to “The Foodiest Small Town In America.” - Bon Appetit Magazine
