Chef Learns Love and Faith Are Life's Most Important Ingredients

By Tim Hammack, Richmond, California

As appeared in

It was past midnight when my shift ended and I walked outside into the warm California night.

The streets of Yountville, a small town in Napa Valley, were quiet. Lights were still on inside Bouchon, the gourmet French restaurant where I was an assistant chef. A few last customers lingered over dessert—crème caramel, tarte au citron, small cups of strong black coffee.

I took a deep breath. I’ve always loved the air in Napa Valley, full of California smells: dry grass, bay laurel, a hint of sea salt. I walked to my car thinking how happy I should be.

Here I was living my dream, working for one of the finest restaurants in one of the world’s food capitals. And yet I wasn’t happy. Something was eating at me—no pun intended. A conversation I’d had recently with a guy I knew from culinary school. I couldn’t put his words out of my mind.

Dave Perez and I had taken different paths after school. I’d apprenticed at a restaurant in Berkeley, epicenter of the American gourmet food revolution. From there I’d worked my way up to Bouchon, which was owned by Thomas Keller, a world-renowned chef.

Dave worked at a homeless shelter in one of northern California’s poorest cities, the Bay Area Rescue Mission in Richmond, about a 45-minute drive from Napa Valley. A few days earlier I’d sat down with Dave at a coffee shop.

“I’ve got a proposal for you, Tim,” Dave had said. “Your mom told me you might be just the person.” Dave happened to attend my parents’ church.

I listened as he sketched out his vision of a cooking school at the rescue mission, a hands-on kitchen where recovering addicts could cook food for homeless patrons while earning course credit in a local community college culinary program. “I want you to run the kitchen and teach these guys,” Dave concluded. “You’d be perfect. You’ve definitely got the cooking skills.”

Go from Bouchon to a homeless shelter? I didn’t say so to Dave, but that sounded like career suicide.

“Maybe I could volunteer sometime,” I said instead. “But I don’t think it’s the job for me.”

The job for me. The words echoed in my mind as I drove home along the highway, passing ghostly rows of grapevines receding into the dark. What was the job for me? Ever since I’d started at the American Culinary Institute straight out of high school I’d assumed I’d be cooking with the best of them.

I’d grown up on the outskirts of Napa Valley, and good food had been an integral part of my childhood. When I saw the test kitchens at the Culinary Institute, half a million dollars’ worth of equipment at each cooking station, I’d felt like a kid in a candy store. The best ingredients, the most careful preparation—I lived for all of that.

So why couldn’t I stop thinking about that conversation with Dave? A car whipped past—a BMW—and I had to laugh. Sometimes it seemed like every other car pulling up to Bouchon was a BMW or a Mercedes or a Porsche. Customers routinely spent hundreds of dollars on meals. The parade of luxury cars reminded me of my high school parking lot, where the sons and daughters of world-famous vintners had parked their own expensive wheels.

I sure didn’t drive one of those cars. My brother and I were raised in a trailer home on what passed for the wrong side of the tracks in Napa. I never minded because I knew exactly why my family lived as we did.