Feb. 13—In the late 1990s and the early aughts, it was almost a cliché: Leave your respectable job as a stockbroker/teacher/attorney/fill-in-the-blank to follow your passion to cooking school and then into the professional restaurant kitchen. Cheffing, thanks in large part to the then adolescent Food Network, was suddenly seductive and glamorous. Bam!
Today, with the restaurant industry in turmoil locally and nationally, with restaurants in Greater Portland closing at a fast clip and with the aftershocks of the pandemic still being felt, we’ve been thinking about chefs and cooks who’ve gone the opposite direction, who’ve left the food world behind for second careers. We talked with four former Maine chefs to ask them about their transitions.
Is there life after the long hours, high stress, weekend schedules, low pay (granted, it’s improved in recent years) — but also the camaraderie, energy, fun and real passion — of the professional kitchen?
RICHARD BURBANK
Richard Burbank loved cooking from an early age. His grandmother ran The Muffin Shop bakery in South Penobscot, and from age 6 on, he’d help her make muffins, pies and raised doughnuts. “So that really started it,” he says today. “And sitting with her watching Julia Child (on TV). That’s what got me the bug.”
In his 20s, a young man “with wanderlust,” he was thrilled to discover he could work his way around the world on boats, “and if you really want to get paid, you be the cook.” He showed up for a job interview to cook on the historic schooner Timberwind with two homemade blueberry pies and two loaves of Anadama bread. “And needless to say I got the job.”
For some five years, Burbank spent summers cooking on boats along the Maine coast, and winters on private yachts sailing around Bermuda, Florida and the Caribbean. (In 1997, a travel writer’s admiration for his cooking practically hijacked her Washington Post story about a Windjammer cruise: “Richard Burbank, the Timberwind’s cook, does not believe in mixes, additives, appliances or shortcuts. He made everything from scratch, by hand, the old-fashioned way,” she wrote in very small part.)
In 1998, he enrolled in cooking school at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. “Having that on the resume gives a nice garnish on the plate, if you will, for job interviews,” said Burbank, who, though he left the professional kitchen in 2006, still peppers his conversation with food metaphors. After school, he returned to Maine, married, started a family and buckled down to a “responsible” job as corporate chef for MBNA, the credit card lender that at the time dominated the Midcoast. “As sailors put it, you swallow the anchor and you go ashore,” he said.
As corporate chef in several different positions, he was responsible for the food at management conferences, catering events and the staff commissary, variously baking 100 apple pies at a time, degristling 20 pounds of chicken for a lunch special, making a croquembouche for the wedding of an employee. During those years, he bought a 125-year-old house in Rockland so near work he could walk there. And then one day, along with several thousand other Mainers employed by MBNA, he was laid off. That life was abruptly over.
Burbank found jobs at a few restaurants. He seriously considered buying a schooner, then buying a restaurant or perhaps starting a French-style boulangerie/patisserie. He came close several times, scouting potential locations, talking to banks about loans, tossing around restaurant concepts and menus. But the more he ran the numbers, the more gun-shy he became. In the end, “I exhausted the alternatives,” he said.
Meanwhile, what to do about his drafty, uninsulated house? With time on his hands, and unhappy with the quotes he’d received from contractors to insulate, he took on the task himself, searching for instructions on Google (he got certified later). “I was raised as a do-it-yourselfer,” he said. He bought equipment to do the job, and “one thing led to another.”
Today, Burbank is founder and CEO of Evergreen Home Performance, a well-regarded, environmentally minded, 18-year-old company that employs 36 people to do insulation, energy audits and basement waterproofing. “I was not methodical,” Burbank says about his career change. “It’s just kind of how the path opened up in front of me. There was nothing premeditated about it at all.”
Still, he sees parallels between his first career act and his second. He quips that he went from insulating people with the luscious fat of Alfredo sauce and buttery laminated pastries to insulating their homes, a favorite joke he recycles on the Evergreen website.
“You have to have an understanding of craft,” he said of both fields, “and the mise-en-place of professional cooking is perfect for being an entrepreneur. Essential to hitting quality or profitability in a restaurant is very well-organized systems, everything in its place just right. And this is very similar to improving homes using building science.”
He remembers a baker he worked for joking about another staff member who didn’t yet realize that “your hands have to fly.” That fellow, the baker said, “takes two hours to watch ’60 Minutes.'”
Sure, Burbank, who is 53 and now lives in Falmouth, daydreams about one day running that boulangerie/patisserie he envisioned as a younger man. But he is by no means pining away. He is the designated cook for all family occasions — birthdays, anniversary celebrations, weddings. If it’s obvious when he talks about it that he misses the food world, you can also hear his pride in his energy-efficiency work. “There’s important work here. I feel more gratified in that the highest level of what we do at Evergreen is making the world a better place.
“You can do something else that also engages your passions,” Burbank said about leaving the world of professional cooking. “For me, it’s fighting climate change. It’s helping people reduce their costs; have more comfortable, healthy homes; take advantage of opportunities with rebates with Efficiency Maine.
“And then I cook for my family.”
DONNY CARRASCO
When a piece of essential equipment broke on a busy day of prep at Big Tree Hospitality, chef Donny Carrasco was the go-to guy. If the Robot-Coupe food processor refused to turn on, if the cord on the blender dangerously frayed, it was “get Carrasco.” “I like tinkering with things,” he said. “I’ve always been a hands-on kind of guy.”
So it may not be altogether a surprise that when he left a successful career in the restaurant world after almost two decades, he studied to become an electrician. Today, Carrasco has finished the required two years of school and is accumulating hours to get his limited residential and journeyman licenses.
As with many other restaurant workers across the country, the pandemic prompted his career change. For Carrasco, the switch came with a side of reluctance and heartbreak.
In early March 2020, he and a friend and co-worker at Big Tree were well on their way to opening their own business, a food cart with a Mexican menu to be called Cultura Street Food. (Carrasco grew up in Texas and is Mexican American; his business partner was from Mexico.) The two had been saving money to pay for a custom-made cart and steadily holding pop-ups and working Maker’s Markets at Thompson’s Point to build up excitement among area diners.
“We had our cart in the cart and all I had to do was click ‘buy,'” Carrasco says wistfully, “and no kidding, a few days later everything happened. It put a major halt on that endeavor. I was very bummed out about the outcome of my potential future business.”
Carrasco had studied hospitality in high school, and gone on to get a culinary degree from Johnson & Wales in Denver. For about a decade, he stayed there, working at nice restaurants, and meeting the woman who would become his wife; she was a server — and a Mainer. In 2013, the couple moved to Maine, where Carrasco was hired by Big Tree. Over the years, he worked at Hugo’s, Eventide and The Honey Paw, eventually rising through the ranks to help run the restaurant group’s sizeable commissary kitchen.
Big Tree gave him lots of great opportunities, but by 2020, he was ready to strike out on his own. When the pandemic trampled on those plans, he returned to Big Tree, which itself was slowly figuring out how to navigate dining during a pandemic. Early on, a reduced number of staffers were working a lot of overtime, and Carrasco soon felt burned out. He wanted to stay in Maine — he was raising two boys in Westbrook — but he didn’t think any other restaurants here could take him to the next level as a cook; improvement had always driven him.
“That’s part of the motivation as a young cook,” he said. “You want to be around people that are trying to be the best. The early culinary years were like rock star years. It was just like a big party. Everyone’s having fun and everyone’s working hard toward the same goal.”
He’d heard that the trades were “where it’s at.” He figured he’d still be able to use his hands and his brains, and “if you think like culinary tools are cool, electrical tools are really cool,” he said, laughing. Late one evening, Carrasco had a serious talk with his wife. By the time she woke up the next morning, he’d signed up for school. He chose the Maine Electrical Institute because he could continue working at Big Tree while studying, “and slowly wean myself away from the hospitality world.”
Now, Carrasco works for the Brunswick-based Favreau Electric. At the time of this interview, he was putting up stadium lights and wiring a press box for tennis courts at the University of New England. He misses “the passion side of work. I like what I’m doing and it’s keeping me very busy and I’m using my my brain, but the passion part of it isn’t there.” He describes electrical work as his “grown-up job”; Carrasco will turn 43 this year. “I definitely went in it with more of a career choice (attitude), where in the culinary field I went into it with more a love for it.”
At the same time, he said he’s learned it’s OK to change course. “It’s not permanent. You can change it again. I joke sometimes that I was a chef and then I was an electrician and later on in life maybe I’m going to be a bus driver for the city. Who knows what I’m going to do?”
JUSTIN CROSS
In 2006, burnout from 70/80/90-hour work weeks in restaurant kitchens “for very, very poor pay” led chef Justin Cross to what he hoped would be a more reasonably paced, more remunerative job in the kitchens of Whole Foods.
He had a lengthy culinary resume that spanned a couple of decades and stints at Fore Street, Royal River Grill, Bintliff’s (since renamed Bayside American Cafe), the original iteration of Scales (in the Public Market), Dunstan School Restaurant, Pat’s Pizza and Gritty’s. He’d also worked kitchens in Seattle and was a graduate of the prestigious Culinary School of America in Hyde Park, New York. As a teen, Cross flipped burgers at Burger King. “Not that that’s haute cuisine in any way,” he said. “But you know, I started there.”
“I love cooking. I love food. I love kitchens,” he says to this day, almost 15 years after leaving the profession. “It’s my whole belief system. Everything I know about life is built around growing up in kitchens.”
Cross spent about three years at Whole Foods, but despite better pay, benefits and hours, the corporate atmosphere didn’t suit him. He was ultimately fired for violation of company policy. That’s bad, but it got him where he needed to go. A good friend who owned a tree service company hired him to drag bush, a junior-level job, to say the least.
“And I said, ‘Sure.’ I didn’t have anything else to do. I had never done anything else other than work in kitchens, and I was done. I was tired. It was a complete…” Cross paused. “You know, I can’t speak for everybody, but I guess for me making a complete severance was what I had to do to break orbit.”
As luck would have it, Cross loved spending his days outside. He loved the physicality of tree work. Beyond those, “the pay was really, really good, more than anything I had known.”
He stayed on at his friend’s company for two years, then switched to another tree company. After a year there, he thought to himself, “Hey, I can do this.” He studied for his arborist license, learning local pests and tree IDs and accumulating the required hours. In 2011, he launched Southern Maine Tree in Scarborough. At this point in his second career, Cross is working on selling the business to his longtime partner.
Cross still makes dinner most nights a week. “Last night, I did tomato risotto and garlicky spinach and marinated shrimp and I made homemade focaccia,” he said. He bakes bread regularly and taps trees to make maple syrup. He loves going out to eat and reels off his favorite restaurants: Fore Street, Primo, the late Garrison. He keeps in touch with old cooking pals and makes food for friends and neighbors “all the time.” When Lenny’s Pub opened on Route 302 in Westbrook, he helped the owner out, working brunches for half the year.
Still, “the hardest day I’ve ever had cutting trees, I feel like has been more rewarding than the best day I ever had in the restaurant industry,” he said. He traces that feeling to his financial success from the tree business, which enabled him, for starters, to send his daughters to the private Thornton Academy. “I am OK working a really hard day if I know if I’m getting paid for it,” Cross said.
He hasn’t had to work weekends in years, except in emergencies, in which case the crew makes double time. And if a personal emergency arises, he can give it his full attention. “That was NEVER the policy at any restaurant I ever worked at, (where he’d be told) ‘I want you in the grave if you are going to call out.'”
Better pay may have motivated Cross to leave restaurants, but he has contradictory advice for young cooks: Do not chase money, he said. “Chase a healthy environment where there is real talent. Taste everything. Stay at a good shop. Really expand your knowledge. And if you’re not ready to open your own place after 10 years as a line jockey, then you are never going to be ready. And that’s OK.”
Even now, Cross sometimes gets to thinking about opening a spot of his own, a place with good drinks, good food and good music. Southern Maine has too few of those, he said. “All the stars would really have to align for that to work. And I’m not there right now.”
LARRY MATTHEWS JR.
When he was just 22, Larry Matthews Jr. began working at Back Bay Grill — for many years the spot for celebratory dining in Portland. By 24, he was executive chef and a rising young star. Before he was 30, Back Bay Grill’s original proprietor was dead, and Matthews found himself unexpectedly owning a restaurant.
For the next 19 years, he ran the place, rarely missing a night, reliably earning four (and more)-star reviews, cooking at the James Beard Foundation, and occasionally flying around the country for charity events and food festivals. “I felt like I was king of the world,” he recalls today.
By the time the pandemic started, though, the luster had faded. The day-to-day work of the restaurant had come to feel like a grind. “I knew it was time for me to be done,” Matthews said.
COVID delayed his exit; he felt responsible for his staff in uncertain times. “I did it until it was it was OK for me to not do it anymore,” he said. As the pandemic wore on, Matthews closed Back Bay Grill in fits and starts, shuttering it for good in 2022.
These days, don’t look for him in crisp whites whisking a velouté, dabbing a plate or taking inventory of the walk-in. Matthews is working as a carpenter. (To conduct this telephone interview, he asked me to wait while he climbed down a ladder.)
As part of the team at Kimball Carpentry in Kennebunkport, he’s repaired barns, renovated homes and reframed, “the whole gamut of stuff,” he said (although he hasn’t installed kitchens. “I’m not ready to install kitchen cabinetry at the level at which we would do it”).
Matthews grew up in Kennebunk with a handy father and, later on, a handy father-in-law. Thirty years ago, he and his wife bought a 200-year-old house in town, “a bit of a wreck,” Matthews said. To some extent, he has learned by doing. “You had your own tools before you even realized that you ever bought any,” he said of growing up in Maine. “I knew enough to get myself in trouble.”
In his mid-40s when he closed Back Bay Grill for good, Matthews thought about how to reinvent himself. With only an associate degree in the culinary arts, he considered going to college. “But my two kids were either in, or just about to be in college. I don’t think we need three of us in college. I don’t think that’s quite exactly feasible. Then I was thinking, what would I study? I don’t even know what I want to do right now.”
Remaining in the restaurant industry was also an option. Matthews got some “really nice, interesting opportunities, very gracious offers,” he said. “But I just couldn’t see myself in that world anymore. I needed to be free of it.”
Swinging a hammer, he said, was his only other skill, then immediately he took pains to avoid overstating his carpentry skills. “Oh man, everybody else here knows what they’re doing and I don’t, and that’s a new feeling for me. What’s kind of cool that has helped me a little bit is that when I get frustrated because I don’t know how to do something or I’m not getting a concept, I can relate it to — I know there’s a way to be very good at this. I have been good at something else before, so I just have to push through.”
Matthews misses his Back Bay Grill team, and he misses some of his regulars. He doesn’t miss much else. Not the fame.
“Nobody cares what I’m doing with strawberries this season,” he said referring to journalists who used to call regularly for interviews. “It’s so far removed from my daily reality now that it seems silly to me that somebody ever cared.”
He doesn’t miss the cooking, either. These days his workmates tease him, the famous chef, about his sack lunch. Egg salad five days in a row, ham and cheese for five days the next week, then a week of BLTs. And while Matthews and his wife are committed to eating home-cooked dinners, he isn’t interested in doing any “chef magic party trick thing (‘OK, we have 1 avocado, 3 eggs, pasta and a raw banana. What am I going to do?’). It’s like anybody who works,” Matthews said. “I want to get done with cooking dinner as soon as possible so that I can go sit in my chair and be done for the day.”
He doesn’t regret his decades at Back Bay Grill. “That worked out great for me,” he said. Still, if he could advise his younger self, he’d tell the hotshot young chef to plan an exit strategy.
“I jumped on that treadmill of running that restaurant and didn’t ever plan for what the end would look like. I just had a goal of being this great chef and running this great restaurant and that’s all I ever wanted to do. How the movie ends — I never thought about that.
“Plan your stop before you start. That’s an old restaurant saying,” Matthews. continued. “Don’t take a hot pan out of the oven without knowing where you’re going to put it down.”
Meanwhile, he’s enjoying construction work with “the guys” — several are old high school buddies — and he doesn’t miss Back Bay Grill “at all.”
“I was trying to explain to somebody else recently,” he said. “I had a really cool, interesting facet of my life. It’s like a good athlete in high school had this varsity jacket with pins all over it, and they still have it in the closet, but they don’t wear it out anymore.
“It’s there. But that part of my life is done.”
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