Chef Rock Harper told a roomful of aspiring chefs - no doubt a few of them aspiring celebrity chefs - not to expect instant success.
The winner of TV's Hell's Kitchen, who addressed students at the National Academy Foundation High School in Federal Hill yesterday, seems to have achieved just that. As the last chef standing in the Fox reality TV show, he landed a $250,000 one-year contract as head chef at Las Vegas' Terra Verde.
But years of training and hard work came before that big break, Harper told the students, two of them wearing toques.
After graduating from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., Harper thought he'd start out as somebody's sous chef. "I got my reality handed to me" - in the form of a more menial kitchen job that paid $7 an hour.
He worked his way up in a variety of restaurants, which helped prepare him for the pressures of the TV competition.
In town to participate in a March of Dimes fundraiser last night, Harper stopped by the school in the morning to talk with kids in its hospitality and tourism program.
Was it hard, one student wanted to know, putting up with Gordon Ramsay, the show's foul-mouthed and insulting star?
Harper explained that he'd grown up in a poor neighborhood in Northern Virginia. He described a situation years ago, when a cop put a gun to his head. He mentioned a cousin who'd gone away for murder.
"I've been robbed, shot at before," he said. "When I can go through something like that, [Ramsay's] nothing."
At least the role's not a kitchen wench
Baltimore City Councilman Bill Henry appears on stage at the Mobtown Theater through Tuesday. Not that he wants you to know.
The councilman has kept the acting gig under his hat. The staffer answering the phone at Henry's City Hall office knew nothing about it, though it all made sense when I mentioned the show was The Best Man by Gore Vidal.
"I've been seeing that on his calendar," he said. "I didn't know if he's going to a wedding rehearsal or what."
Not a lot of shrinking violets in politics. Why has Henry kept it quiet?
Henry was a member of the Hopkins theater club as an undergrad, as was his future wife. After they graduated and married, both did some community theater. But that was before kids. Henry hadn't been on stage for six years. And even in his prime, Henry said, he was no Laurence Olivier.
"I don't really act," he said. "I perform. I go on stage, and I'm funny."
