a s Chef Carney grew, he broadened his palette, challenging himself to try as many different ingredients as he could. He claims that, from the age of seven, he never encountered a type of food that he didn’t enjoy. Based on this fact alone, it seems inevitable that he would one day become a renowned chef. Yet one more aspect of his childhood secured his career trajectory. His grandfather had Latin American friends whose cooking caused him to fall in love with spicy dishes. “I was the only kid my age… the only white guy really that could eat these spicy foods. And that just changed in some fashion the way I looked at food and appreciated food as well.” Chef Carney’s progression from appreciating food to cooking food came at the age of fourteen. “The one thing that really kind of got me into the kitchen was I was playing in a basketball tournament, and we were out of town, and my friend’s mother was chaperoning me and the other guys on the team. So she took us out to dinner, and I had a steak that was [made with] some kind of Jack Daniel’s barbecue sauce or something like that. And I thought it was really cool; it was really delicious, and so I went home, and I told my mom about it, and convinced her to buy some Jack Daniel’s whiskey so that I could try to make it, and then I did make essentially several different versions with steaks we had at home, and that was when it was like, ‘Holy cow, this is a really interesting world.’” From that point on, Chef Carney was so set on pursuing a career in the culinary arts that he resorted to bargaining with his parents to abandon high school in favor of cooking. “I was just extremely bored, and so I told my parents, ‘Hey, I’d love to start cooking. If I drop out and get my GED, will you be ok with that?’ And they said, after deliberation, if I could do it in one month, sure, and if not, I had to go back to school.” Chef Carney earned his GED between two and a half to three weeks after that conversation. Soon, he learned the many challenges of becoming a teenage chef His first employer in the field was Pizza Hut. Chef Carney credits his initial job as a useful experience in his subsequent career, both in terms of discipline and in learning what he wanted to avoid in the future. In particular, he cites realizing just how unhealthy chain restaurant food is as an awakening that has stuck with him ever since. Subsequently, he worked at a number of other restaurants, putting his all into cooking. “Once I made it into the kitchen, I was eager and hungry and devoted to it. Honestly, looking back right now, I can’t believe that I was that convinced that, that was something I wanted to do. I never thought that this kid would have grown up to work at one of the best restaurants in the world.” After two years of learning the ropes, Chef Carney realized that he needed to broaden his horizons. When the opportunity to move to San Antonio, Texas, arose, he made his way over, not realizing that it was the home of the Culinary Institute of America. Demand for chefs in this city was so high that he was able to secure a position at Sustenio, a restaurant founded by Stephan Pyles, a chef that Bon Appetite magazine has credited with revolutionizing Texas’s cooking scene. A little later, Chef Carney enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, becoming the only student that he was aware of balancing full-time education and a forty-hour work week. During this period, the
Some chefs were not making the healthiest choices in the world, and it affected their mental clarity, mood, and so on and so forth. And then there would be some sous chefs that just make a competition out of seeing whose day they can make more hellacious. And it was just like the hazing and bullshit you see as a freshman in college. ”
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