Kevin Maxey

I had tons of fluff on my resume that I thought would help me get my foot in the door for the #1 Zagat rated (the only rating that mattered in 1994!) restaurant. A conversation we had one day still stays with me. He said to me, "Do you know why I hired you?" I was still so naive and thought, though I did not dare say out loud, "because of all of the awesome 'relevant' experiences I had on my resume?" He said I hired you because: "you were dressed nice for the interview and that showed me you cared about getting the job, you had a college degree and that showed me you cared about doing something with your life, and most importantly, I hired you because you had absolutely zero experience and I knew that I could teach you to do everything the right way from the beginning." To this day I use that conversation to guide my hiring decisions.

If a cook does understand that but fails to deliver, then shame on them." – Simple and to the point!

However, you don't learn how to butcher a salmon by watching an instructor do it on stage, you don't learn how to do it in a classroom "lab" with three other students all sharing the same fish and getting to make some knife strokes, you don't learn how to butcher a salmon by working the fish station at the local 2 star restaurant butchering 2-3 fish a week; you learn how to butcher a salmon by moving to Seattle, getting a job at the busiest seafood restaurant in town & butchering 2-3 cases of salmon every day for 6 months! Complete submersion in the craft is the key. Cooking is all muscle memory. Filleting a wild King Salmon in 5 knife strokes and its as fluid as casting an 8 weight on South Andros.