How did gabrielle hamilton prepare for her time on the Iron Chef America?
After nearly 20 years of working in restaurants, she’d sworn off professional kitchens. Then she met Misty Callies. Here, Gabrielle Hamilton explains how one woman made her the chef she is today. When I met Misty Callies, my reluctant mentor, who inadvertently shaped me into the chef I am now, I’d left New York City, paradoxically, to escape from cooking. After soldiering through nearly 20 years in second-rate kitchens, starting as a 12-year-old dishwasher at a tourist restaurant in my Pennsylvania hometown, I had somehow gotten a spot in the master’s program in fiction writing at the University of Michigan. So, in 1995, I packed a U-Haul and rolled into Ann Arbor to start a new, clean-fingernailed life. I unpacked the U-Haul, registered for classes and immediately took a part-time job cooking to help pay the rent. When Misty hired me, she was grilling boneless chicken breasts for a U of M tailgate party, wearing a stained V-neck T-shirt. Not more than 10 years my senior, she was the t
