Experience the journey of Chef Josh Morris and his unconventional path to success as he teaches us to elevate those around us and appreciate life's blessings.

"Being a chef is about elevating everybody around you. Right. Because they've got to execute your dream, your visions. So the idea is to elevate everybody around you."

Josh Morris is a chef from Gainesville, Texas who has been cooking for 20 years. He has an obsessive personality and has been influenced by his wife and Anthony Bourdain to pursue a career in the culinary arts.

Josh Morris was always passionate about cooking, but lacked formal direction. Unfazed by the lack of formal training and with a strong puppy-love for the industry, he took it upon himself to learn and grow in the kitchen. He took on restaurant roles and quickly found himself in leadership positions, learning valuable lessons about delegating tasks and elevating those around him. When he had children, though, he found himself having to take things more seriously, as he had to provide for them. He was gifted with children, and subsequently had to adjust his priorities, his decision making process, and even become a student of books. Ultimately, this is how Josh Morris learned about delegating tasks in the kitchen.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. How Do You Delegate Responsibilities as a Chef?

2. What Are the Challenges of Being an Underprivileged Chef?

3. What Are the Pros and Cons of Going to Culinary School?

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Other episodes you'll enjoy:

Josh Morris: Balancing a chefs drive with family life

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Chef Made Home

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Transcript:

Welcome back, everyone. We're here with Chef Josh Morris. Man, I almost lost it again. There Josh Morris. And we're doing compare. Contrast. Not even that. I'm going to kind of edit that out. All right, let's start this over. All right, everybody, welcome back. We're here with Josh Morris, and we're going to be talking paths. The path I took versus the path he took. Very different paths, but pretty much ended up in the same spot at one point. So not really a but we did. So, Morris, tell me kind of your path a little bit now. The other part to this, though, is we're not going to touch base for everybody listening on his entire kind of history. If you want to know more about Morris, go ahead and take a look at season one, episode one, and there's a full interview with him then kind of a little bit more detailed about who he is, the life of his apparent and chef and all that fun stuff. Morris, your path?

Speaker B 00:05:16

Yeah.

Speaker A 00:05:17

I mean, what got you into it then?

Speaker B 00:05:21

I grew up in Gainesville, Texas. It's a really small town just south of the Oklahoma border. Didn't have a lot of money growing up. Our meals consisted of ground beef, potatoes, cream of mushroom soup for pretty much every meal. There was no interest in food in my entire family, except my great aunt owned a diner on the town square.

Speaker A 00:05:56

Right on.

Speaker B 00:05:57

And at one point or another, everybody in my family worked there. But it wasn't like any interest in the restaurant business. It was just a way to make money.

Speaker A 00:06:07

Sure.

Speaker B 00:06:08

I even worked there a couple of times. I remember being like, nine or ten years old and standing on a milk crate so that I could reach the plates in the bottom of the three bay.

Speaker A 00:06:19

Yes.

Speaker B 00:06:23

That was pretty much the extent of it. We ate a lot of canned vegetables, but both at the grandparents had gardens, so we'd have tomatoes and peppers and onions in the summer. And I was the kind of kid that I didn't hate anything. Most kids like having a don't like broccoli or asparagus or something like that, and I just loved food all the time. It didn't really matter what it was. And I liked going out to restaurants, even though we didn't do it very often. I think because we didn't do it very often, it was much more of an experience. And I can remember as a kid being really excited to go out and meet with my parents, and my kids are most definitely not like that. We're going out to eat again. Why? I've always been a creative person as a kid. I would draw a lot. I got into music fairly early. I was a writer for a while, so I've always had that creative bug. But actually getting into the restaurant business was it was just for money. It didn't really hold any other appeal other than a nice steady paycheck at first. And then as a cook in a town that's kind of, like, known to be a drug town, got to fall into the pitfalls of that lifestyle. Like, a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, a lot of hard partying, and your ambitions kind of fade when you're living like that. I mean, it's just like the whole point is to get fucked up. I lived that way for, I don't know, from the time I was 17 till I was, like, 20 or 21. When I turned 21, I got into a relationship with a girl that had two small kids. And I didn't get into that with any intention of becoming, like, a father figure, but that's ultimately what happened. It was a very fucked up relationship, to say the least, but she ended up being a really bad person, and she left us. She left me and the kids. So I became a single father for a while, and I was working two cook jobs at the time and taking care of kids by myself. So it was kind of a hard row for a while. But the bug, I guess, was always there for creating stuff. But I worked in restaurants where there was zero creativity. It was all about volume. Right. It wasn't until I started dating my wife now that the idea of becoming a chef really sat in. And the two people that I cannot overstate their influence on my career are my wife, who allowed me to pursue more dreams of becoming a chef, and bourdain. I think a lot of chefs of our generation can chop bourdain quite a bit. So for the first ten years, I say I've been cooking for 20 years. For the first ten years, I cooked things in a microwave. The only skill I really picked up there was how to be fast, how to be efficient, and how to cook a steak with your fingers, which is a great skill to have.

Speaker A 00:10:08

There's one good takeaway.

Speaker B 00:10:10

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker A 00:10:16

Obviously, your wife was I'm assuming she was in the industry when you met her then.

Speaker B 00:10:22

Yeah, we actually knew each other at that first restaurant. We worked together, but we didn't date for the first ten years that we knew each other.

Speaker A 00:10:30

Okay.

Speaker B 00:10:31

Our path just kind of crossed back together later on in life, and things turned out okay after all that bullshit.

Speaker A 00:10:42

That I went through, what got you into cooking? What is it about her that got you into it? Was she just kind of did you cook at home and were more creative? And she's like, man, you need to drive this further?

Speaker B 00:10:58

It was certainly that. Yeah, because when I was a single dad and I had two jobs, I would have $50 to last three people groceries for two weeks.

Speaker A 00:11:11

Fucking impressive. Yeah.

Speaker B 00:11:14

I did what I had to do, but there's not a lot of creativity to be had when you have to live