Learning by Necessity

Mom’s cooking has inspired many chefs, but Robert Serafin, director of dining for Restaurant Associates at Random House in New York, didn’t have that experience. Instead, he threw himself headfirst into a culinary career and never looked back.

“My mom was a terrible cook. That’s actually why I learned how to cook because I wanted to survive. Every night I’d have to hear my father saying, ‘oh, you messed up dinner again!’ I first started cooking out of necessity. Then it just turned into something I loved.

I really started when I was 13 just working in a pizzeria washing dishes. Then in high school they had an option where instead of staying in school and doing all academics, you could spend half your day in high school and then get on a bus and go to another school, which was more focused on trades. They had stuff like hairdressing and welding, and I did culinary training. The first year I mainly did tableside service. Then the second year I did more culinary stuff, which gave me a great start. I liked that it has strict guidelines, but it also doesn’t. You can put your own twist on anything. You can experiment. It’s not like math where it’s very rigid.

I had this old Betty Crocker cookbook that taught me how to make fortune cookies. In high school over summer break I would sleep late, watch Graham Kerr on TV and make fortune cookies for breakfast.

Right out of high school I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. I really didn’t even take a summer break. The whole time I was doing that I was also working restaurant jobs. I worked at an Irish pub, as a dishwasher and a grill cook. From there, my teacher recommended me to a catering company so I started cooking for weddings and a golf course.

I totally immersed myself for my first five or six years of cooking. It was school then straight to work all night, then back to school again. It was a lot of fun. There was no dipping in to it a little here and there. I embraced it totally.”