09/24/2026
Chef Chris never went to culinary school.
He started at sixteen, washing dishes at Red Lobster. Got promoted to fry cook the day a fry cook didn't show up — which is how most cooks get promoted, if we're honest. By '98 or '99 he had the grill at Logan's when it first opened here in town, and somewhere in the middle of all that heat he figured out he actually loved the work.
So he went looking. San Francisco first — Squat & Gobble, kitchens around the Lower Haight and the Fillmore. Then Washington State. Then Colorado. Those three are where the real chops came from. At twenty-two he moved to Belize, and that's where the Caribbean cooking came from — the jerk, the Latin technique, the things you can't pick up from a book because nobody wrote them down that way.
The chefs who taught him weren't Michelin names. Sean Gafner. Jason Seibert. Martin Wood. Now James. Just good cooks, one at a time, each one handing over a piece of it.
"I've basically been paid to learn what I've learned," he says.
That's the whole apprenticeship, and it's older than any school.
