I’ve done my time working in a commercial kitchen, but I still have several friends who have made a career out of it. One of them in particular recently relocated to Philadelphia from Pittsburgh. He’s done time in the kitchen at Casbah, was one of the original cooks at Eleven, and ended up becoming the executive pastry chef at Café Frick before deciding that he wanted to learn a new cuisine and needed to move to another city to do so. He even took a temporary position as the exec pastry chef at Casbah while he was in the months-long process of appartment hunting and moving to Philly, because they had lost theirs and asked him nicely.

Now, fine dining in Pittsburgh can’t even hold a candle to most typical restaurants in a city like New York or Philadelphia, but that is the topic of another post that has been languishing in draft status for a month. It’s important to mention, though, because this friend was told that, despite having some of the best credentials Pittsburgh has to offer, he would never be able to land a job cooking in a major Philadelphia restaurant, let alone be able to hack it if he did get hired somewhere. Ignoring the naysayers, he shot for the moon and only interviewed at two places: Pod and Morimoto.

Not only did Morimoto offer him a job, but they offered him the executive pastry chef position. (His desserts are absolutely divine.) The only problem with that was he didn’t want to end up pigeonholed as a pastry chef for the rest of his career. The whole point of moving was to learn a new cuisine that he couldn’t pick up here. Morimoto had an open position for a line cook at half the salary of the position he was offered, and he asked if they would let him fill it instead. They did, and he’s as happy as can be.

Now that’s a man who loves to cook.