She went from Charlotte mom with no restaurant experience to a head chef job in NYC. How?
When Jess Masanotti threw all caution to the wind and moved with her husband and their young daughter to New York City in 2020 to pursue a career as a head chef at a restaurant, she didn’t know it at first — but it soon became clear: She’d picked just about the worst time in modern history to try to chase such a dream.
“I was sending cover letters and things in March 2020, when they were shutting down. They didn’t know if they were gonna exist,” Masanotti recalls, laughing.
The fact that she hadn’t worked a day in the kitchen of an actual restaurant in her entire life probably did her no favors, either.
“(These were) some of the most embarrassing cover letters,” says Masanotti, who to that point had been the marketing director and graphic designer for Trinity Episcopal School in uptown Charlotte since 2008; had been doing small catering jobs and private dinner parties on the side under the name The Freckled Fork since 2018; had taken a few cooking classes but was otherwise completely self-taught.
“It was just like, ‘I have no clue what I’m doing, but I swear I’ll be good at this. I just have this feeling. ... Give me a chance.’ To some of my favorite New York restaurants, too. I wasn’t hitting low. I was going for the big dogs that I love.
“And I got no responses. Like, zero.”
But after failing to persuade any restaurant in Manhattan for a year and a half, she finally caught a break in October, when she was hired to work as a line cook at North Miznon, a two-story Mediterranean sit-down restaurant on the Upper West Side owned by Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani.
Six months later, Masanotti was promoted to sous chef.
Just over a year after that — this past May 15 — North Miznon bequeathed upon Masanotti the title of head chef, getting the now-single mom of an 8-year-old to her pipe-dreamy goal many times faster than she imagined possible.
She still can’t quite believe it.
Masanotti, 39, spoke to us last week about her journey. About her triumph. About how persistence, confidence, talent, creativity, luck, attitude and even her separation from her husband figured into her transformation from someone who thought she’d be good at being an NYC restaurant head chef into someone who actually is.
She tells it here, in her own words.
The first trip to New York that I remember was my senior year of high school. From the moment I stepped off that bus in this city, I was like, Oh my God. This is where I want to be. So when my roommate and I graduated from South Carolina in 2005, she moved to New York immediately, and a big part of me wanted to go up with her right then. But instead, I got married right out of college — a very Southern thing — and moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina. And I didn’t know how to cook anything, other than scrambled eggs that weren’t very good. I knew scrambled eggs, and I knew how to zhuzh up a ramen packet. So when we first got married it was like, Alright, I want to cook. I want to learn. And before it was even a thing, I Julie & Julia’d myself: I picked some cookbooks that I had gotten from our wedding, and started cooking through those. I made a different recipe every day for six months, just went through all these different cookbooks. And so many of them were disasters. I mean, they were really bad. But I was learning, you know?
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Then I really started liking it. I really liked cooking. I really liked hosting. Doing dinner parties, or when I had friends who would have baby showers or birthdays, I would make a spread. I liked food for food, but I really liked the connecting piece, and the food-with-people piece. We moved into Charlotte in 2010, and I think I took my first cooking class with Chef Alyssa in 2014. I took a knife-skills class, and it just clicked for me. I took a few more of her cooking classes, and she actually hired me to help with their summer camps for kids in the kitchen. I caught the bug. This was something that I felt good about. In 2018, I started my food blog — started Freckled Fork — and got involved with the Charlotte food community. The foodie groups. We started going out to eat more and meeting all these chefs and farmers in Charlotte, and I was just like, These are my people. I love the foodies. Foodies have their place. But those weren’t the connections I needed. All the foodies were taking pictures of the food, and here I was on the side talking with the chef, like, “OK, but how did you make this? What went into this?” I was drawn more to the food process than the social-media part.
I realized: I do like food for food. I do like the food experience. But I wanted to be cooking the food, then serving it, seeing them have the experience and curating that food experience. So Kriska (Woods) from Charlotte Remedy, she and I connected — because we both graduated from South Carolina — and we decided to start doing these pop-up dinners, called Mortar & Pestle. We did a couple of them in Charlotte where we hosted these dinners. I would curate the menu, she and Manny (Carandang) would do the drink side of things and pair beverages with the different courses, and we’d host it at someone’s home in Charlotte. It brought together all kinds of random people. We purposely sat them with people they didn’t know. It was amazing. So many people left from that dinner party becoming friends. The more I did it, the more it just confirmed this feeling in my bones: I can follow a recipe, I can cook, I can be creative and throw stuff together, but for me it’s really about what food does with connection. With connecting people. This is what I was designed to do.
In December 2019, we broke the news to our family that we were moving to New York. The whole point of moving to New York was to work my way into a restaurant, get on a line somewhere. I was like, That probably will be easier in New York. It’s just a bigger city. And this was my chance to live in New York City. To kind of switch everything on its head. The dream was to work in a restaurant. Never did I think I would become a head chef anytime soon. I thought maybe I was gonna devote another 10 to 15 years to just developing this craft, of being in the restaurant and working on the line. This was gonna be my culinary school. A chance for me to dive in and really learn. I knew I was gonna make no money at all. It wasn’t for the money. It was really for the experience, and to see if my gut feeling was right. So we got our apartment in February 2020 ... but because of Covid, ended up staying in the South between March and May. In the meantime, I was putting out those feelers. And like I said, no responses from restaurants. All I got was an interview with a private-chef company, and they were like, “We have no clue what life is gonna look like in a month. Why don’t you just check in with us when you move up here, then we’ll see where we are?”
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We finally moved in May, and I started working for another company — Meal Prep Chef. At the beginning, I was cooking in my apartment, then just delivering the food to them, very contactless. After we got vaccines in March 2021, I would go into clients’ apartments and cook all their food. Then in September 2021, one of the other Meal Prep Chefs was hosting a catering event and needed some extra hands. At the time, she was sous chef at North Miznon. She’s like, “I really want another girl on the line. If you’re interested, I can get you an interview with Chef. And I was like, “Yeah! This is the point! This is what I’ve wanted to do!” I interviewed the very next week, with Victor (Gothelf), who was the head chef at the time. He was like, “Tell me about your restaurant experience.” I said, “Well, I have none. But I swear I am a quick learn, I really feel like I will be good at this, I promise I’ll work really hard, and I’ll be super-fun. I’m gonna be smiley all the time.” He laughed. He said my energy was convincing. He was like, “OK! Sounds good!” Also, he actually preferred to hire people like me, I found out, because he doesn’t have to un-teach things. With me, he saw a blank canvas. I started part-time — two to three days a week — the very next week, in October 2021.
I busted my ass. I picked up more shifts, as much as I could. Was still doing Meal Prep Chef during the day, and then worked in the restaurant at night. I became sous chef in April 2022; that was full-time, so I quit Meal Prep Chef. By the summer, my bosses told me they were interested in moving me up to head chef at some point. “Keep doing what you’re doing. We’re watching you.” Then I broke my leg — at the restaurant, on my birthday — in September 2022. I was walking down the stairs with my head chef. I had been working on this corn pasta dish that I’d been wanting to introduce, and as we were coming down, he was like, “I think we can try your corn.” I got so excited that I slipped on the step, and it shattered. I had surgery the first week in October, then was out until November 15th. But I went to the restaurant almost every day it was open, sat at the bar with my foot up, and made kebab mix, or whatever they would let me do from the bar. I was like, I have worked way too hard for this. I can’t not do anything. In February, they told me: We’re opening Port Sa’id (another Eyal Shani restaurant) in May. Victor will transition to the new restaurant. If you want it, we’re ready to make you head chef here at North Miznon.
I wasn’t lying about being positive. I’ve had maybe four bad days in the kitchen, total, in almost two years. I mean, I love it. I love the restaurant. I love being there. When I was growing up my dad told me: “Explore all the options — cast a very wide net when you’re thinking about what you want to do. Try some different experiences, try some different fields. Along the way, you’ll find what you are passionate about. And if you work really hard at developing that craft and developing that passion, people are gonna pay you to do it, and you’re gonna find success in it. Because when people do jobs not for the job and not for the paycheck but because it’s what they want to do, it’s a different world.” So now, when I’m hiring for the kitchen, I feel like finding people who are gonna be passionate about cooking and the craft — versus just clocking in for a job — is gonna make the difference. Think about it. Your job is taking you away from doing what you want to do, whether it’s take a nap, go ride a bike, or other fun things in life. It takes you away from your family, and your friends. It’s paying you, but it’s taking you away from those things.
So if you can find something that you really love — that you can really pour yourself into and enjoy, where you don’t mind that it’s taking you away from those things — your job can actually give you life.
