My Food Journey part 2: The Chef Years
If Part One was about healing, the Chef years were about pressure.
About heat. Speed. Systems. And learning what it actually means to work inside a kitchen. Not just romantically, but mechanically and physically.
During cooking school, the summer between my two years, I landed an internship at Walt Disney World in Florida. I worked in food service there, and honestly, I feel like that’s where I earned my stripes. I was thrown straight into high-volume fast food in the blistering Florida heat. Standing over deep fryers at Casey’s Corner, pumping out hot dogs and fries, sweating through every layer of clothing. Moving fast because you had to. It was wild.
But what struck me most wasn’t just the pace. It was the system.
You clocked in, printed a ticket, and that ticket told you exactly where you were working that day: fry station, hot dogs, cash. No guesswork. Just flow. I had never seen anything like it. It was my first real glimpse into what deeply systematized food service could look like, and how much infrastructure it takes to feed people at scale.
After finishing cooking school, I moved back to Nova Scotia and got a job at The Italian Market, working the deli and doing large event catering. And then I saw a job posting that would change everything: The Wooden Monkey.
The Wooden Monkey was one of the pioneers of the local food movement in Halifax. Focused on pasture-raised meat, local vegetables, health-forward menus, and values-driven sourcing long before it was trendy. Here’s the thing: I didn’t actually have the experience they were looking for.
They wanted someone with two or more years of line experience. I had almost none. I’d done fast food. I’d worked prep. But I had never worked a fine-dining line. But what I did have was passion.
While I was in Kingston for cooking school, I had written an article for the Queen’s University newspaper about local food. I printed it out and brought it with me to the interview. They took a risk on me. They hired me on the spot. And that kitchen shaped me.
The Wooden Monkey was high quality AND high volume. A dining room that seated about 150 people, plus an event space that could hold another 100. On a busy summer night, you could have a full house with live music and a private event running a fixed menu at the same time.
That’s where I learned speed. Real speed. The kind where you’re moving fast but still paying attention.
I started as prep and dishwasher and worked my way onto the line. I learned how to move under pressure, how to communicate without words, how to keep cooking when your body is tired and the tickets keep coming.
After that, I bounced through a few more restaurants before landing at Blue Apples, a wellness-center café that I’ll talk about more in Part Four: Lessons from the Apothecary. That kitchen was different. Slower. More intentional. Rooted in health and herbal medicine. It offered a counterbalance to the intensity of restaurant life.
But eventually, I started to pivot. I went freelance. I worked under a few different business names. I cooked for retreats. I cooked for music festivals. I cooked off-grid, in the jungle, in the forest, under tarps, feeding hundreds of people at a time. I did personal chef work. Meal prep for families. Private dinners. I started teaching cooking classes.
I was experimenting. Learning. Feeling out the edges of what this life could look like outside of restaurants. And somewhere along the way, I realized something important. I wasn’t ready to be fully self-employed yet. But I also knew I didn’t want to go back to restaurants.
By 2018, after years of kitchens, freelance gigs, and long days on my feet, I felt a pull back toward school. Not away from food, but deeper into understanding it. Into systems, structure. and why all of this works the way it does. So I made another pivot.
I went back to school (a chapter I explore more in Part Five) carrying everything the chef years had taught me with me. Because once you’ve cooked at scale, under pressure, inside real systems, you never look at food the same way again.
This writing is always free to read.
If it nourished you in any way, you can buy me a coffee below and help fuel what comes next ☕️
