Building Your Wave with Ferran Adria

I was 18 when I first started working at a restaurant. I was a dishwasher. I only got the job because I wanted to go to Ibiza for vacation, and washing dishes was the only job I could find.—Chef Ferran Adrià

When I was a young man I wanted to be a chef. Food always fascinated me. I loved to taste it, I loved to cook it, and I loved—well, before the rise of food porn, I loved to read about food, talk about food, and watch people prepare it. When other kids were watching The Price Is Right on days home sick from school, I watched The Frugal Gourmet, Yan Can Cook, and shows featuring Julia Child, TV’s cooking matriarch. Combine this passion with an over-encouraging mother and an Italian grandmother who made a mean Sunday gravy, and you have all the makings of a future chef.
I followed my passion diligently, even at a young age, constantly experimenting and honing my craft. Then, opportunity knocked: close friends of my mother were friendly with Wolfgang Puck (thank you, Ron and Nancy), and encouraged me to write to him to apply for a culinary stage my junior year of high school. I followed her advice, and a few months later, during summer break, I headed to Los Angeles to work in the kitchen at Wolfgang’s original restaurant, Spago, on the Sunset Strip. After a couple of bumps in the road (including not knowing that chefs brought their own knives to work), I hit my stride and began the daily grind that is working in a professional kitchen.

The backbone of modern kitchens is formed by immigrants (many illegal), who are highly skilled cooks but willing to work for the wages that give restaurants the possibility of making a profit, and young culinary students willing to work for next to nothing to learn their craft. I spent months chopping fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices, occasionally worked on meats or fish, and, when I was lucky, got to prepare a staff meal. The experience was magical. I still remember the smells, the tastes, and even the first time I ever got drunk—with the staff—and spent the next morning in the bathroom throwing up when I wasn’t chopping jalapeños while the staff cheered me on. I rubbed my bloodshot eyes with the same hands I used to chop the jalapeños—and let’s just say it was a painful mistake I never made again.

After a couple of months, just as I was getting the hang of it, I had to leave. School was starting, I had a girlfriend back in New York, and it was my senior year of high school. I remember returning and being really stoked about cooking, but I was also no longer in the kitchen. While Wolfgang wrote me a college recommendation and I got accepted to Cornell, I also got back into the regular life of a teenager. And the further I drifted from the energy of that kitchen, the more I convinced myself I would be wasting my talents as a chef. Why should I be a manual laborer when I could use my Ivy League degree to become a wealthy businessman? Most chefs made an hourly wage, and I would probably have to spend many years struggling. So I abandoned my dream and pursued the business side of hospitality. While the decision worked out well for me professionally, I can say without question that not pursuing a career in the kitchen is a decision I continue to regret.

While in general I don’t believe in regret, I keep it alive in my consciousness in this case as a reminder that I made a decision for the wrong reasons. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my short-term comfort to pursue the purest form of my purpose. I didn’t recognize or accept that I couldn’t start at the top; my ego got in the way, as it does for many of us. If Mark Zuckerberg can start Facebook and be the CEO, isn’t anything less a failure? After all, that’s what the media sells us. We’ve discussed the error in this kind of thinking, but at the time, I was blissfully unaware of it, and it cost me—maybe not financially, but in many other ways.