They Followed Me In...
On the night every version of me showed up at once
Heirloom tomatoes...reds with sunset orange melting from the top, beautiful greens striped by the sun, and Cherokee purples so plump that one too-tight squeeze would burst them all over. Colors of the rainbow piled high on the corner of the table by the other mise en place, all set up and ready for the first ticket to come through.
Fresh Pullman sourdough loaves, baked that morning in the friendly ovens of Cafe Mutsi, outside rims crisped and hardened by the flames, insides soft with craggy pockets burst open by air. The most adorable bun duos, puffed up by kabocha and yeast and heat, waiting to be piled high with barbecue jackfruit drunk on Cheerwine barbecue.
Friday night, the Catskills sun slowly sinking below the cliffs behind us...one tent, one grill, folding tables with tablecloths holding much more than I actually needed, everything I’d been prepping and preparing for the past week arranged on top.
The Starlite Motel landscaped in front of us, lights on strings and vases of wildflowers spread across picnic tables. Brendan and Lisa, quite possibly the kindest people I’ve ever met, were putting on the final touches to the bar of the Catskills Cocktail Club. Massie and Yas, my two incredible helpers, shifted and prepped and asked me what else I needed.
Cars pulled into the gravel lot beginning at 5pm, and orders slowly came in. My anxiety and by equal measure, my excitement had been cluttering my mind and fluttering around in my stomach for days, but as Yas handed me the first paper ticket, a wave of calm crashed over me. That familiar feeling, that beautiful swirling concoction of anticipation and assuredness and energy and excitement...the same feeling I had working in restaurant kitchens...rolled over me, and I felt at home.
Somewhere around 7:15, the tickets poured in fast, piling up, and our little tent kitchen was moving together in a dance, a pace I had long forgotten. I missed that feeling...the stacking and the calling, the rhythm of service finding its stride, a line forming at the register and a crowd truly excited, some even coming back for seconds and thirds. That feeling in my chest, the tight one that had been quietly grieving the absence of this for years, just...exhaled.
The Catskills Cocktail crew invited me for my first ever pop-up, and I was nervous like the first day of school and also so content and confident like I’d been here before, the way I always am when I’m walking into something that really matters. The night had its own momentum. Yas was at the front taking orders in his sweet, nervous, systematic way...methodical and precise where most people with no service experience would’ve crumbled. My friend Massie beside me, working the line, his hands moving with a certainty that comes from someone whose brain processes things in sequence, completely, before moving on to the next. One grill and a hundred moving parts...and somehow, beautifully, it all came together in such perfect harmony.
As we drove down the mountain the next day, through the trees and the rolling hills of the Catskills, my mind raced, relieved from a job well done and reveling in the knowing that I NEED to do this again. As we made our way back into the city, back into our lives, I thought about the why...that and how I can keep chasing that feeling.
I stood there, on the line, waiting for service to begin, a few weeks after stepping foot in a restaurant kitchen for the very first time years ago...and I felt something I had never felt before. My bones settled for the first time in almost 40 years. After years of feeling like a foreigner in my own skin and never feeling quite at home in this body...this moment on the line, in the height of a busy service, ironically quieted my racing mind and settled my anxious heart in all the ways. I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be. All the jobs I had worked, all the experiences I had lived through in my previous roles and workplaces...they had all equipped me, preparing me for this very moment with the skills I needed. I was the happiest I had ever been. I felt most like MYSELF in that place. I knew…in my bones…that this was what I had been searching for all along.
And yet…I had somehow lost that feeling for the past couple of years. Life’s circumstances had pulled me out of the restaurant, out of that kitchen and out of that certainty. On one hand, I do love being a private chef...the autonomy, the flexible schedule, being available for my daughter and my family...yes to all of that. But that feeling…the one of feeling wholly me…I don’t have that when I’m working alone in a kitchen by myself, no rush, no beautiful chaos, no one to push through the service beside me.
Friday’s pop-up was more than just a night of food and friends and birthday celebrations. It was a night that brought together both of my loves...the autonomy of a private chef, creating menus and experiences with food...and the rush of service with customers and orders and beautiful chaos. The best of both worlds, under one tent in the Catskills.
And, I wasn’t alone…I had Yas and Massie with me. Yas, who had never worked a day in food service in his life but carries years of experience in marketing and user experience...and Massie, technically in accounting but with years of banked time in bartending and the service industry. A collection of skills that helped me loosen my grip of control on all the things, trust their instincts, and to lean into the parts that were solely mine. And it went so smoothly…it was really lovely.
A conversation earlier in the week turned out to be prophetic…exactly about moments like these. My friend May came to New York to interview me in my living room on Monday. Over bowls of cereal (IYKYK) we talked about multi-hyphenateness...how the accumulation of skills through our life’s work and experiences can be applied across industries, in ways that aren’t always obvious until you need them. So many skills I used in that tent on Friday night came from places far beyond the kitchen.
The plates I composed? That’s my graphic designer’s eye. Fifteen years of visual communications, of thinking about balance and weight and where the eye travels first. I don’t plate by feeling alone...I plate by composition, thinking about negative space and height and how color reads from across a table. The discipline that makes a plate look intentional rather than just full is the same discipline that made a layout work, that made a brand identity cohesive, that made a client’s design feel considered instead of cluttered.
The menu I built for that pop-up, the names I gave the dishes …Thirst Trap, The Main Squeeze, Slow Jam Soda Pop…the way I wrote the descriptions and designed the poster and social posts? That’s my marketing brain at work. Years of writing copy, building narratives, understanding how language shapes what people expect before they’ve tasted a thing.
The stations I set up, the mise en place, the flow I mapped from the cooler to the grill to the pass...even prior to my years on the line, that was my professional organizer training in action. Every system I ever implemented in a client’s closet or kitchen space, every time I had to think through the logic of where does this live so the next step is easy, was practice for this. A kitchen is just an organizer’s problem with more heat and more at stake.
And the people management? The way you have to hold a service together, read the room, keep your energy steady when the tickets are stacking and someone’s in the weeds...that’s a classroom. I spent years managing middle schoolers and coaching a track team, and I will tell you without hesitation that line cooks and eighth graders require almost identical handling...calm authority…clear communication…a bit of irreverence and sass…and a genuine investment and care for the people looking to you for what comes next.
Motherhood is in there, too, somewhere in the depths of it all...the superhuman patience required to teach rather than criticize, the instinct to make sure everyone in your orbit has what they need to do their job well, the awareness that the people working beside you are whole people having whole days, not just hands doing tasks. And the people ordering the food want to be seen, taken care of, and to feel that connection that only food can bring.
I didn’t know or plan for any of those skills would prepare me for a successful career in food...but once I took the step toward the kitchen, they followed me in and made all the difference in the world.
Our conversation on Monday talked about this and more…what it looks like to change into a completely different industry the way I did...to walk away from 15+ years in one field and start cooking professionally without a culinary degree, without industry connections, without any of the credentials that typically open those doors.
You don’t really start over when you pivot, despite how it feels. Everything you’ve built comes with you, whether you realize it or not, and the beauty is in the recognition of how all those pieces of you have given you exactly the tools you need to move forward. You only have to have the flexibility and the creativity to see where they apply.
The people who struggle hardest in career changes are usually the ones trying to shed everything they were before, as if the new field requires a clean slate. But it doesnt…it simply requires translation. Looking at what you already know and asking where it applies, what it can become in a new context.
My design background didn’t disappear when I walked into my first professional kitchen...it reorganized into plating and menu design and the visual logic needed in a service. My marketing brain didn’t go quiet...it found new problems to solve, new language to shape, new stories to build around food and the experience we were trying to create with each dinner service. The years I spent teaching weren’t experience from a different life...they were leadership and communication skills needed to command and care for a line.
The non-obvious skills are almost always the most transferable ones…the lives we lived before aren’t detours…they’re preparation for what’s to come.
Friday night, in that tent in Kerhonksen, NY, with people lined up, tickets coming in one-by-one and that small grill doing everything I asked of it...every version of myself showed up at once. The designer…the marketer…the organizer…the teacher…the mother and the chef, all in the same space, in the same moment. And that familiar feeling returned...the one where my bones settled in and I felt most like myself…and this body that had spent so long feeling like the wrong fit…she finally felt like home.
I’ve spent so many years apologizing for being too many things. Slipping a “but” into sentences when someone asks what I do, as if the breadth of what I’ve done needs explaining or justifying...as if my multi-hyphenateness was something to apologize for rather than the very thing that makes me me.
And Friday night under the string lights, wrapped by the cool summer air and the last of the piled-high tomato sandwiches going out...this was all the argument I needed against those apologies.
You don’t have to be just one thing to be excellent. Most of the time, all the other things…the lives lived, the experiences had…good or bad…they are exactly what excellence is made of. The sooner you stop treating your previous lives and paths as irrelevant, the sooner you realize that everything you’ve carried, everything you’ve built, everything you are...it’s what makes YOU the only one who can do that very thing, the way you do.
And when you finally let all of it show up at once...something in your chest that’s been quietly holding its breath for years just...exhales.