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I tried to shake my head clear to think. Six months earlier, I’d been a twenty-three-year-old rock star, executive chef at Piccolo Mondo, the hottest restaurant in town. What had happened? How had I ended up here?

A year and a half earlier, I had interviewed with a man named Carl Quagliata, Cleveland’s legendary restaurateur. He had been preparing to open a new spot in the heart of the city and, after numerous interviews, he had hired me as sous chef. I’d been out of school two years and had worked only at Players, a thirty-eight-seat restaurant run by a self-trained chef-owner, where I’d quickly moved up to sous chef. Sous chef at Piccolo Mondo, a bigger, new restaurant, had looked like a good step up for me.

Shortly before we had opened, the executive chef had quit. I’d never been chef before and I had told Carl this. Carl had said I could do it. Now, Carl had a fire that drove him. He worked harder than any human I had ever met and demanded you do the same. He would yell at you, hug you, and kiss you all in the same breath. It was Carl who instilled in me that if you never let anyone outwork you, you will eventually succeed.

So we had opened and Piccolo Mondo, casual Italian food in a chic bistro setting, had quickly become one of the busiest, most successful restaurants the city had ever seen. We had been doing five hundred to six hundred covers a day and getting all kinds of media attention. I had been working a hundred hours a week—it was crazy. The line had been so busy that I once had sent out an osso bucco with no meat, just an empty bone on saffron risotto, to the corporate chef of Stouffer’s, a big Cleveland food company. The guy had walked his plate into the kitchen and asked if it was some kind of joke. Not good.

But we had hired more staff, and Carl had brought in Doug Petkovic, a Chicago general manager who would become one of my friends and eventually a business partner, and we got things under control.

I’d been receiving so much praise from customers and the press, and the restaurant had been doing so well, that Carl had asked me if I would take over the kitchen of his flagship restaurant, Giovanni’s, a high-end Italian place that had earned all kinds of awards from Distinguished Restaurants of North America (DiRoNA) and four diamonds from AAA and was one of the fanciest restaurants in the city, a culinary landmark. But Carl had felt it was stagnating. The clientele was an older generation, and he’d wanted to bring in a younger, hipper crowd. He’d wanted me to update some of the classics. With Piccolo Mondo the toast of the town and rocking on its own, I’d said, “No problem, Carl. Let me show you how it’s done.”

Problem was, no one had wanted to update the classics except me—not the kitchen, not the front-of-the-house staff, and not the customers. But that was too bad. I’d been brought in to do a job and I intended to do it. I’d been a rock star. I would simply work harder than anyone else. Here I had learned an important lesson about the power of staff. It’s your family, and if they aren’t with you, you aren’t going anywhere. I had fought to change things, and they had fought back until it had gotten so hard that I didn’t enjoy cooking anymore. I’d taken the Dover sole off the menu—an old-fashioned French dish that had had no place in a high-end Italian restaurant. Even though I’d taken it off the menu, the maître d’ had continued to offer it as a special. As soon as we would run out of the sole, I’d figure that was it, but the maître d’ had ordered and received it himself and would continue to offer it to his customers, cooking and serving it tableside!

I loved Carl, but I had had to get out of there. It was time to open a place of my own, and I had begun working on a restaurant deal. As soon as I had thought it was a sure thing, I had quit Giovanni’s.

Only it wasn’t a sure thing, and pretty soon I was digging up consulting work, pretty much always a low point in a chef’s career—even when you’re only twenty-three years old. You’re brought into a failing