LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Chef De Cuisine on his career journey
My name is Zia Shaikh. I am 35 years old. I am chef to cuisine at Pawalo Restaurant, and I make $75,000 a year. My main responsibilities at Sheffield Cuisine are to oversee any type of kitchen operation, from menu development to dishwashing, to working alongside the cooks, to food labor costs.
I sit down with Chef Floyd for about 10 to 15 minutes a day. We talk about what's coming down the line as far as the menu. We are a very highly seasonal restaurant; we try to use the Union Square Green Market as much as possible, as well as local farms. If it's not in season, it's not on our menu.
I almost want to say that this career chose me. I dealt with a lot of racism in school when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time at home. That being said, I spent a lot of time to myself, and I realized that I had a love for the arts. I spent a lot of time with my mother at home in the kitchen, so she actually taught me how to start cooking when I was 10 years old.
The first thing that I made at home was her meatballs. She was cooking meatballs for the family, and I started mimicking her moves in a smaller pot for myself, right next to her. Ever since then, I've just fallen in love with cooking. It was so interesting to me.
Whereas a year or two later, I started accompanying her to supermarkets and buying my own produce. I taught myself how to hold a knife, how to cut vegetables. My favorite thing to make was vegetable stir-fry, just because it involved about 20 different vegetables in one dish.
My father passed away when I was 16. He was always pushing me to do something with science, almost to make him happy. After he passed away, I enrolled in engineering school, but then when I got to engineering school, I realized I just didn't have a passion for it.
That same semester, one of my close friends Mary wanted to do something nice for her boyfriend for Valentine's Day, so she invited me and about five other friends into the kitchen with her to cook for her boyfriend. Between me and these five other girls, they were all impressed that I knew my way around the kitchen. I almost kind of took over.
After that, it was just kind of staring at me in the face what I should be doing with my life, so I dropped out of college and went to culinary school. Now that you're in a restaurant setting, you realize that everything happens at a much faster pace. You're working alongside more experienced cooks that can cut faster, that can cook faster, that can think faster.
Basically, the point of the externship is for you to be immersed in a new type of world. My very first job, I was making $300 a week working in the kitchen. I was doing what I love to do, but I didn't have a lot of money to spare. So, my mother let me still live at home.
It's not ideal for a 23 or 24-year-old to be living at home, but at the time, it was what was necessary. Whatever money I had left over, whatever money I saved up was used to buy cookbooks, to keep reading, to immerse myself in this world, to take myself to the next level.
I dined out at a lot of restaurants and cooked for myself a lot at home, just testing out new recipes and whatnot. I did a lot of this at work. I almost bugged my chefs with questions about, you know, can you teach me this? Can you teach me this? Can you teach me this?
I started taking on more and more tasks to see what I could handle and what I enjoyed doing. Starting out, you will take any job you can, for any amount of money, to learn any part of it. I used to switch jobs for 50 cents more if they paid me.
At the time, I moved around a lot; I didn't keep a job for more than 10 months, and then I went on to another job after that. But it was all a learning experience.