Natasha Pickowicz

But I feel very lucky that my culinary journey officially began in Montreal, where there is a huge passion and love for the hospitality industry and culinary tradition. When I started cooking at Lawrence Restaurant, it was like a crash course in everything to know about working BOH in a restaurant: how to work a busy Friday night service, run a fry station during brunch, manage my own ticket rail, receive and put away large orders, organize my station. You didn’t take anything for granted because you had to do it all yourself: every single Sunday, after brunch service we’d scrub the vents, spray down the mats, deep clean every reach in, every low boy, every oven, every range, every walkin. We would do this as a team of four or five people. We would do this in complete silence, usually with Nirvana or Kendrick Lamar or Frank Ocean blasting. When I moved to NYC I was blown away that I no longer had to do those tasks, that there were people hired specifically to receive and put away deliveries or to clean; I genuinely thought that was the cook's responsibility. And Lawrence was my first taste of so many techniques and ideas I later explored in my career: making naturally leavened breads with freshly milled whole grain, complex viennoiserie, yeasted pastries, fresh cheeses, ice cream from scratch, candying and preserving, cake building—everything. I was terrified every single day for about the first three or four months on the job, but it was exhilarating, too. Not since I was in college did I absorb so many new ideas and concepts. I loved going home exhausted. I loved seeing how happy the desserts made our guests. I loved our tiny kitchen staff, we were all best friends and spent every second on our day off together, too. That sense of scale was really lost when I moved to NYC, but I kept a lot of those values very close to my chest.

In those dark moments it feels like all is lost; it’s very hard to imagine doing anything other than what you are deep in at that moment. But those situations actually reveal incredible opportunities for change and growth. I’m so thankful for those destabilizing, uncertain moments—they challenged me to chase down what I really wanted to do.

At all of those moments you can talk yourself out of making that scary plunge into the unknown. I pushed myself to tolerate the uncertainty while trying to embody the qualities that I wanted to see in myself. In this way your fantasies and biggest dreams can become real.

If you’re smart and paying attention, you can learn from those moments and you can even come to appreciate them, because they might lead to a moment of revelation or a paradigm shift in how you thought you understood something. Ashley Whitmore, who was the pastry chef at Marlow & Sons and Diner when I was cooking there, told me to “make every mistake once.” She allowed for us to make mistakes because she saw them as learning opportunities. I thought that was really gracious and profound and have since shared those words with many, many cooks.

I’m more interested in what your disposition is like and if you’re suited to the work. Are you on time? Do you listen and ask questions? Do you take notes? Can you receive feedback with grace? Can you keep a neat and organized station? Do you work with urgency and poise and focus? Are you curious and interested in your work? These aren’t qualities that are limited to people with “the right kind” of experience; often someone who thinks they’ve “done it all” don’t think they have anything left to learn. Those are the people I avoid, because they’re rooted in complacency and are afraid to have their egos and values challenged. I didn’t go to culinary school and had an unconventional path to becoming a chef, so I’m compassionate towards and drawn to people who have also had that epiphany and arrived at food later in life. What matters is if you’re prepared to learn and push yourself.

Sometimes a single line of a poem will spark an idea for a recipe or a headnote or a new dish. I love going to museums and will wander for hours, taking notes and photos of beautiful pieces. Reading books keeps my brain buzzing; so does live music. I love gardens, parks, and being outside. I take cues from nature—how the wind blows grass apart, branches dipping into a pool of water, a cluster of wildflowers tangled together—on how to present food in an organic, effortless, and lovely way.

So much media these days feels homogenized and recycled; we’re shown the same trends over and over, it’s exhausting and boring. It’s easy to internalize them and replicate dishes we think of as “safe” instead of challenging ourselves to find our own, unique, singular voices.

It’s run by my best friend Alison Leiby and her co-host Halle Keifer, and I can’t get enough. They’re so funny and smart.

Helen Rosner, Hannah Goldfield, Ella Quittner, Tammie Teclemariam, Priya Krishna, Eric Kim, Tejal Rao, Tanya Bush.

Of course you can’t make anyone do anything on their day off, but to my surprise these outings became really popular with my pastry team. We’d go to far-flung areas of New York to learn more about diasporic foodways, like deep Brooklyn to try Syrian pastries at Mansoura Bakery. We’d go behind the scenes at Lincoln Center and get private tours of the Met Opera, to see how a giant, iconic operation like the Met worked together to have great shows every night. We’d go for a hike upstate to breathe in the fresh air and swap our “pastry new year resolutions” (one of my favorite traditions). They became so popular we would sometimes team up with other pastry departments at other restaurants—a great way to mix and socialize and get to know each other off the clock.

we had a sizable cookbook library, we brought in guest chefs, makers, farmers and more to speak about their work. Because I didn’t go to culinary school, I’ve always seen restaurant kitchens as a place for further learning and growth. It’s not just about optimizing labor and sucking the most work out of your team—it just can’t be. The moment you think you’ve learned it all is the moment you die intellectually.