Then God Created Houston

My dad was a chef.

My dad started working in kitchens at the age of 16, thanks to a helpful push from his best friend, my uncle, Andy, a student of Johnson & Wales.

There were many beatings along the way. Kitchens were not as welcoming as they are now, and chefs are quite the brutal bunch. “But,” my mother said, “he took it on the chin. He kept his head down.” Still to this day, that attitude toward adversity can get you very far in the food industry. When my grandfather told him, “You’ll never live up to anything,” my father took it as a sort of challenge.

At the age of 21, my father left New York for Los Angeles. He always loved the beach and, for much of my life, he refused to live any farther than a few miles from it. This is where my parents met, just two coworkers at a restaurant in LA. They fell in love, had my brother in 1989, and it seemed everything was daisies.

Then the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 changed everything for my family. So much so, they packed up and moved to New York, my mother pregnant with me at the time. I was born in New York in 1995.

My parents split one year later. The trauma of the Northridge Earthquake must have faded away by this time because we all moved back to Los Angeles, although not as a complete family. Nonetheless, my mom and dad were good co-parents.

It was at this point when my father’s career took off. He trained under Wolfgang Puck, cooked for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, held the Stanley Cup; what I mean is, he did it all. To say he had a successful career would be an understatement. He had the kind of career one can only imagine.

This is the man I grew up with. I cooked alongside him and, when I turned 15, I worked alongside him.

This also happened to be the same time period during which I became increasingly interested in books and writing. I would go to Barnes & Noble and pick out difficult classics like The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and The Republic by Plato, then go home and write simple tales, which, looking back, were not unlike children’s dreams, about the lives of fish. I enjoyed the idea of being like F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing my own stories.

Yet I found myself, naturally, stacking kitchen job after kitchen job on my young resume. I was still a teenager, but even then I knew being a writer would be a fruitless path. There was no money in it. Now cooking, that’s where the money was, or at least that is what I had perceived by watching my father demand six figures when speaking to future employers on the phone.

My dad passed away in 2019. With writing pushed to the side, cooking felt like my natural path in life. I had shoes to fill. What a trap that was.

A couple years passed.

At the time, I was working at the Disneyland Resort. I thought I had made it. I got promotions; I was proving my worth; my talent was showing; I was filling those shoes. This was big-time, my chance to become a chef in an easy kitchen environment.

Then I left.

Leaving was just the beginning of a pattern which has haunted me since. It was becoming increasingly difficult to work in a kitchen; increasingly difficult to hold a job. I credited this to my father passing. Maybe cooking reminded me too much of him.

At this point, I was convinced cooking was all I had, and I wasn’t even enjoying that. Talk about an existential crisis. I had read about these in the big books I would buy at Barnes & Noble. What comes after a crisis like this? I was lost. In fact, I still am.

I am turning 29 this year, and I don’t know who I am or where I am going. This is a scary thought. But there was also something oddly refreshing about it. Is this an opportunity to start from scratch? Why not pursue writing? I mean, I never gave it up; it had just taken a backseat these past years.

I went back to school for a fresh start, an opportunity to un-pigeonhole myself, to pick myself up from near disaster and place myself back on the road toward a destination I can clearly see. I want this journey.

Many people have told me I should attend culinary school. “I have enough life experience to make up for it,” I say to them. Besides, now I am a English major pursuing my Associate of the Arts for Transfer, which will later turn into a BA

My love for food and writing remain strong, even arrogant; and the combination of these two passions can make for some good content. Maybe one day I will be a food critic, a food journalist, or just your typical snob, writing content unrelated to food. Maybe one day I will buy my own overly complicated book at Barnes & Noble. Either way, I think I have found a road that works for the foreseeable future.