It was a hot sunny day in June where I was a student at The Culinary Institute of America and I was in my last kitchen class at American Bounty where Chef Kaywork was my instructor. We had just made a crab dip special and I was already somewhat behind where I normally would have been for prep and he came up to me and said, “Hey Sam, I have a special for you to do today and we’ll see how it goes and we’ll continue with it if it does well.” I just said yes chef to him and then asked him what the special was. He then continued to tell me that it was a crab dip with crackers. He then told me we only had about 15 portions of it (he saw I was stressed). Service came and I went through the 15 servings and he kept calling it and he went, “Sam there’s actually 25 servings.” I laughed and went with it. At this point in service I was surprisingly less stressed so I jokingly said to him, “if you had told me that before I would’ve walked out the door.” He laughed and said, “that’s why I didn’t tell you before.”
Chef, thank you for all the knowledge I was able to soak in from you. Thank you for your wisdom. Most of all thank you for your support when I doubted myself the most. You will never be forgotten