Chef Mental Rollercoaster

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I used to be Chef Mental Rollercoaster.  I left the boozy world of restaurants years ago, but I spent 10 years training, cooking, scrubbing pots, owning, going bankrupt, catering and working ridiculously long hours.

The way my culinary career ended left a dark shadow on my memory of the years in the biz, but when I carefully remember some of the highlights, I have to admit that I had some fun.  I was featured in the newspaper as the youngest owner in the city, I did a few segments on a local morning news show, and a restaurant I worked in received a rave review stemming from a night I lead.

Those were a few of the hits, but the ongoing enjoyment came from designing seasonal and special event menus.  Researching trends, playing with new ingredients, and developing dishes was part of the day-to-day fun.  I haven’t owned a restaurant in 7 years, but I’m still evolving the menu that lives in the back of my mind.

Despite the fond memories and the ongoing mental menu moulding, I will likely never return to that world.  It’s a chapter in my life story that has a very clean ending that doesn’t lend itself to a sequel.

My exit followed a fight with my boss accusing me of being on drugs.  I wasn’t, but I was incredibly hungover and was not functioning well.  The argument ended with him calling my husband telling him that if I tried to drive home, he’d call the police.  Ugh, I’m embarrassed all over again at the memory.  I quit that day and never returned.  Had I been honest and just said that I was hungover, the situation probably wouldn’t have escalated the way it did.  I didn’t though, I just kept telling him I wasn’t on anything.  Of course he didn’t believe me and I later heard that he not-so-casually spread a rumour that I was using crack.  No joke.  He described our argument to a doctor friend of his who told him that the “only possible explanation” was that I was on crack.  Obviously this is a doctor with impeccable intuition and ethics.

It was a very unfortunate way to end a short career that I truly loved while I lived it, despite the constant rollercoaster of highs and lows that is inherent to the restaurant biz.  That said, I needed to get out of that environment to have any chance at sobriety.  In the end, it’s probably how that story needed to end: quick and clean.

Daily Prompt: A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma