Life-long chef builds on Bourdain’s legacy with bud AURORA RAE FOR MICHIGAN GREEN STATE One life-long chef is combining his love of marijuana with his passion of cooking as he tries to educate the world about the benefits of cannabis all while following in the footsteps of the late, great Anthony Bourdain – celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian. Rodney Lienhart has worked in restaurants for as long as he can remember. For him, food is a lifestyle, not a job. “As a chef, you’re searching for ingredients other people don’t know about,” he said. “You’re searching (for) ways to cook that other people haven’t even heard of, you’re looking to invent yourself. You want to find this one discovery out of like a wannabe Shakespearean theory where you throw 100 monkeys into a room with typewriters and one of them’s going to come up with something good. That’s the same ideology of a chef, per se.” Born in Lansing to his mom, Vickie, and dad, John, Lienhart moved around as a kid until settling in his mom’s hometown of Mackenzie, Tennessee. There, she owned a restaurant, called The Y, where a 5-year-old Lienhart learned to “buss… and wipe tables down.” He said his mother made an agreement with he and his brother to pay them the same amount
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as their babysitter, if they helped around the restaurant. Lienhart said he was manipulated into making money at a very young – illegal – age but still enjoyed the Pokemon cards his part-time job afforded him. Nonetheless, the restaurant replaced a life his friends grew up accustomed to. “I didn’t really get to go out and play a lot with friends,” he said. “Because I was always working.” Leinhart said the restaurant “eventually got broken into two or three times” by family members they knew. When he was 11, he and his family moved to Michigan so John could take care of Lienhart’s grandfather, who was sick at the time. “We got to Michigan there was no snow,” he said. “Literally, overnight, it was like eight inches.” Lienhart saw a whole new world in cooking upon moving north. He said he even noticed a different etiquette in Michigan that he took an interest in. “You couldn’t just slap it on a plate and sling it,” he said. “There was a finesse to cooking, there really was.” He said he started to take notice of that so much so it “kind of made me weird in a sense.” His infatuation with cooking grew quickly as he “wanted to learn more, wanted to learn more, wanted to learn more.” His culinary research led him to the man he is inspired by today.
“When you look up weird shit in the culinary industry, you always fall back to Bourdain.” He said he understands Bourdain’s message in a way he thinks others do not. “(They’re) looking at the man versus what he is trying to say,” he said. “That’s why ultimately sometimes when you watch some of his episodes or read his stuff, you just shake your head because you’re like “Dude, you’re gone now, and this is just so far from the truth it’s not even funny.” Lienhart said he wants to pick up where he left off, not replace him. He said he sees too many people who used to praise him in his life, now “talk shit” about him in his absence. “If you understood who he was, that’s not the end of this,” he said about Bourdain’s death in June of 2018. Lienhart attend a technical high school, where he spent half of his time learning culinary skills. He attended a university for a short time after before dropping out due to financial issues. He continued working in the restaurant industry, where drugs and alcohol were a part of the culture. But the fast-paced lifestyle was nothing new to Lienhart, having been in it since middle school age. Around the time his second daughter was born, “a cold splash of reality hit me.” “I had this massive panic attack so much so that I was an hour and a half late for work and I don’t
know what happened,” he said. “I blacked out.” He started to make changes in his life and work towards a healthier existence. “I figured out cutting out booze would not only save me money,” he said. “But make me feel better.” About five years ago, he obtained his own health insurance and went to a doctor for help. “I’d go back and forth with that doctor… for at least a good six months and it got to the point where I just couldn’t fucking sleep,” he said. “I would only really sleep four to five hours a night just because that’s the chef’s life.” He said he was on 10-15 medications throughout the six-month period he saw the doctor.
fall 2021| MIGreenState
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