ACF CHEF JEFF HENDERSON

// By John Bartimole

Drugs. Prison. Cinnamon rolls.

These are hardly the ingredients anyone would choose to conjure up a life resulting in irrefutable success — but those are the exact ingredients that catapulted the career of one of the country’s most inspirational chefs: ACF Chef Jeff Henderson.

“I was practically a millionaire at 19, but I got there by being a drug dealer on the streets of San Diego,” Chef Henderson says. “I never did drugs or got involved in any violence, but I was a dealer, and I made lots of money doing it. It was one of the first things I was ever good at other than selling newspapers.”

Chef Henderson’s childhood was, at best, difficult. “I was always hungry, so I started stealing to have money for extra food,” he says. “And then, as I got older, I started my drug business with a $150 investment.”

Eventually, though, in 1988, the federal government caught up with Chef Henderson, and he was sentenced to federal prison — which he now says was a blessing in disguise.

“At first, it was called ‘Club Fed,’ because we had a lot of amenities there,” he says. “We used to get T-bone steak once a week — some prisons even had swimming pools and tennis courts.”

But in 1991, CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran an expose on those tax dollar-paid luxuries, and that eventually led to the end of “Club Fed.” Ironically, had that not occured, Chef Henderson’s route to culinary stardom may never have happened.

“I had never looked to be in the kitchen,” he says. “But then I ended up in the dish pit there. As time went on, I started helping the head inmate cook.” That’s where Chef Henderson’s love affair with cooking and baking began.

“I found the power of food,” he says. “It’s very gratifying to create food and get praise for the food I cooked — which was, at first, fried chicken and cinnamon rolls. Being told I had potential, that I had a gift, that I was very smart — that took a toll on me, but in a good way.”

Chef Henderson’s time in prison not only introduced him to the culinary world but also gave him a direction to follow after his sentence had been served.

“Near the end of my sentence, there was an article in USA Today about the nation’s top Black chefs,” he says. That included Chef Robert Gadsby, then the owner of a restaurant in Los Angeles, who hired Chef Henderson as a dishwasher. Working his way up through the ranks, Chef Henderson made it to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where in 2001 he became the first Black chef to be named chef de cuisine at the hotel and casino. Shortly after that, Chef Henderson took over as head chef at another Las Vegas landmark, Cafe Bellagio, where he stayed until 2006. Since then, Chef Henderson has gone on to publish a series of books, including “Cooked: My Journey from the Streets to the Stove,” “Chef Jeff Cooks,” “America I Am” and “If You Can See it, You Can Be It.” In addition to being named Las Vegas Chef of the Year in 2001 and being inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame in 2012, he has appeared on a variety of shows, including his own Food Network show (“The Chef Jeff Project”), “Good Morning America,” ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “Today” show.

“I had to convince someone to give me a second chance,” Chef Henderson says. “So I had to diffuse the culture of prison from my personality and my body; I had to build a brand. I had to straighten up the way I walk, I had to clean up my vocabulary, I used makeup to cover my earring hole. I had to sell any future employer on my potential. I wanted to make my son, parents and grandparents proud of me. Food gave me a sense of worth, a sense of pride.”

Chef Henderson says that when he “earned the right” to have his name on his first chef’s coat, “I wore that chef’s coat everywhere — even to the supermarket on my off days; it made me feel I was somebody,” he says with a laugh.

“My mother was shocked when I became a chef,” he continues. "‘A chef?’ she said, ‘Where did that come from? The only thing you ever cooked was fried baloney and government cheese sandwiches.’ But the reality is that culinary arts became the legitimate vehicle for me to make a good living and recognition. Culinary arts became my new hustle.”

Hustle is exactly what Chef Henderson brought to his new life, along with some tried-and-true recipes from his kitchen prison days.

“I still use some recipe names from my old prison days,” he says. “Correctional cinnamon rolls. Correctional fried chicken. Correctional sheet cake.”

He often uses those same recipes when working with underprivileged or foster kids who have gotten into trouble with the law.

“We work with young people who have gotten kicked out of school and other high-risk kids from underserved communities,” Chef Henderson says. “I’m like a lot of those kids in terms of background. I didn’t grow up with a cookie jar or three-layer chocolate cakes. So my real passion is baking. There’s something about mixing the ingredients — flour, yeast, sugar — and watching it grow. Pulling it out of the oven, brushing those cinnamon rolls with clarified butter and drizzling them with powdered sugar icing.”

While Chef Henderson says not everyone in his workforce development programs goes on to be a chef, there’s something more important that happens. His culinary, hospitality and life skills training program, Chef Jeff Project, founded in 2020 and located in Las Vegas, seeks to lead disadvantaged kids in the area to better futures, too. That effort has helped those who participate in the program get jobs in grocery stores and casual dining spots, among other places.

“I get my kids in very raw form,” he says. “Transforming them is a very long process. We can’t put a time limit on it — we have to decriminalize them. Once we overcome those obstacles, we can get them on a career path.

“And I’ll tell you, when you speak life and hope and future to them, you get a very different child. You get a real child who’s hungry to be better. To the best of my knowledge, we’ve never lost one of those kids back to the criminal justice system. And I tell them, ‘You’re always a part of the Chef Jeff family. If you’re hungry and need a meal, you can always come back.’”