Bobby Flay is opening up about the difficulties he had in school and how it led to a career in the kitchen.
“There’s no question that I have a learning disability,” he told Carson Daly in a segment that aired on TODAY on Oct. 29.
A native of New York City who dropped out of high school, Flay also says there were specific problems he had in the classroom.
“Retention, reading, studying. I basically did no homework my entire scholastic career,” he tells TODAY.com.
Flay is not formally diagnosed with any condition, but he had trouble as a student and got a job as a teenager as a busboy at New York City’s famed Joe Allen restaurant, which proved to be a turning point for him. He went to culinary school while he was working there, embarking on his career.
“I needed to work with my hands, so when I started cooking, I didn’t know it, it was sort of magically inspired me to be interested in things,” he said.
Flay would go on to open more than a dozen restaurants and appear in over 20 Food Network shows. Heck, he’s even made a movie. The chef, whose new cookbook-slash-memoir, “Bobby Flay: Chapter One,” is out now, says he came from a time where it was easy to gloss over the types of issues he had.
“We weren’t testing kids in my generation for these kinds of things,” he said. “I would always get, ‘He needs to apply himself more. He’s a smart kid, but he needs to apply himself more.’”
Cooking presented a way for him to tap into a different side of himself.
“It was a vocational education. I was working with my hands and all of a sudden the creativity was exciting to me,” he said.
Flay also said kids who may feel the same way he did as a student should keep hope alive because there’s definitely a field for them.
“Now you can really find vocational education in lots of places. We still need much more of it, in my opinion. That’s another story. It doesn’t have to obviously be cooking. I mean, obviously (it was) cooking to me because it hit my creative sweet spot,” he said.
“But it could be anything from being an artist or a creative person, could be an engineer, anything along those lines that where you’re using your hands, as opposed to just your head.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
