3 minute read
On the Big Stage
On the Big Stage
Chef Katie Coss Makes Sustainable Southern Food
by Cary Wong
With as much grace and control as Chef Katie Coss exudes in her kitchen, one could see that she is used to the spotlight and the pressure. The fact that she used to train in ballet may have something to do with it.
“I was three or four (when I) started training. They really drive into you about discipline and memorization, and the enjoyment of long hours and of preparing for moments of enjoyment. So, it just really transferred over to all this hard work that I put in ahead of time and then watch someone else enjoy everything that you work so hard for. It’s such a similar feeling from ballet to culinary,” she says.
Let us start, however, from the beginning.
Originally from Oklahoma, Chef Coss grew up in the countryside. Aside from dancing, her other passion since a tender young age was food. During her ballet classes, she would dream about what she was going to eat afterward to the point where she would “lose track of the place just because I was thinking about it.”
So, she started cooking out of the Betty Crocker cookbook obsessively. And since her grandma was an amazing cook and canner, she got an early start in culinary education. From there, she attended culinary school in New York and staged at different restaurants around the country. Soon though, she started to have doubts about that process.
“I kept asking myself why that was the path that people keep choosing. The first (answer I thought of was) they want to gain more experience. And that is true in most regard, but… a lot of times when they leave, it’s… the environment, the work culture or their chef is not sustainable,” she says.
“There’s that old school mindset of ‘This is how I was treated, so this is how I’m going to treat this other person.’ And so those actions and emotions just keep getting passed on to one person after the other. We had to get to a point where—every time that would happen (to me)—I would say, ‘I’m never going to do that to someone else’,” she says.
Chef Coss thinks that improvements in key areas are gradually changing the industry. The first was the natural changing of the guard where “younger chefs like me are being put into places where we understand what we’re worth and we’re not going to be taken advantage of.”
Second is looking at the pay for cooks and food- and beverage workers. “Getting out of culinary school, you don’t make any money whatsoever. As you grow and develop, you should be gaining more, not only with your experience, but with your pay and what is it that you’re worth,” she says.
Last but not least, the improvement of work-life balance was another factor. It was rather common for kitchen staff to work more than 55 hours per week. As one can imagine, burn-outs came fast and furiously. “You can’t grind people into the ground. I worked out in the Florida Keys (for) one hundred and nine hours a week and I did that for my entire internship. That was not a good experience… that wasn’t how I was going to be treated ever again,” she says.
Eventually, Chef Coss started working with then-owner Chef Sean Brock at Husk Charleston. There, she knew she landed at a great spot. It was a learning environment that allowed her to study everything from gardening to butchery and from charcuterie to fermentation. It was a splendid opportunity that provided access to these different areas along with the necessary equipment and expertise. On her off days, she would go back to the restaurant without pay and soak up all the knowledge.
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