Q. How did you become interested in food?
A. I did a lot of cooking when I was younger. My mother was a single parent, working for IBM, and she didn’t have a lot of time to prepare meals. But she wouldn’t take us to McDonald’s or fast food places, we’d go to a crab house or we’d go to a Polynesian restaurant or we’d go to a French restaurant. My mother actually helped develop my palette at a really young age – I was eating escargot at the age of 6.
Q. When did you realize you wanted to work in a kitchen?
A. After working as a waiter, I could tell that was something that wasn’t going to be a career move. I always liked to cook – I would cook for friends all the time -- but I didn’t realize I wanted to cook for a living until my wife suggested I go to cooking school. I found this school called the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt., where I got real life experience of what it would be like working in the restaurant business.
Q. What do you enjoy about cooking?
A. I’ve always had a passion for it and I'm always learning something new – you’re never going to know everything about cooking. The best part about being a chef is the sense of accomplishment I get from coming up with new ideas or preparing something that a group of people really enjoy. I might have people come in who had a bad day at work, but if I feed them a really nice meal, their whole day changes.
Q. Why did you decide to open Chefs’ Haven?
A. I had been in the restaurant business in chef capacity for about 28 years and I was working all kinds of crazy hours – sometimes 120 hours a week. We moved down here (from New York state) to get away from that, so I could find a job that would let me spend more time with my family. I wanted to do something on my own where I could teach people how to cook.
Q. What advice would you give someone who wants to learn how to cook?
A. Cooking is so popular with all the cooking channels on TV, but people who watch those aren’t always learning the best way. Start with the basics. Once you learn the basics, you can grow on your own and establish your own style of cooking. Remember that a recipe is just a guide, unless you’re baking. If you have another ingredient that is fresher or you think might go well in the dish, go ahead and substitute it.
