234 | Nio DiPietrantonio: From Burnout to Bliss - A Chefs Journey to Purpose and Balance

Welcome back to the Show Chef.

What if I told you that burnout doesn't have to be the end of your story, that

you could walk away from the chaos, not in defeat, but with clarity, purpose,

and a deeper connection to your craft?

In this episode of Chef Life Radio, I sit down with Chef Neo DiPietrantonio

but not before completely butchering her name, who went from chasing perfection.

High pressure restaurants to rediscovering balance, health and

meaning in the most unexpected at places senior living communities.

We talk about what it takes to slow down without giving up how creativity

and care can coexist and why changing kitchens might just change your life.

We also dive deep into the origin of serving up Support Maine, a

grassroots initiative, chef Neo Co-founded to help hospitality workers.

Battling burnout, substance abuse and mental health challenges,

and why it's always true.

That need is the mother of all invention.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

This is a story about reinvention, resilience, and the radical idea that you

don't have to suffer to prove you care.

Whether you're just getting started in the industry or you're wondering how much

longer you can hold on this one's for you.

Stick around.

We'll be back with all that and a whole lot more.

Welcome to Chef Life Radio, the podcast dedicated to helping chefs and culinary

leaders take control of their kitchens, build resilient teams, and create

a thriving career in hospitality.

I'm Chef Adam Lamb, your host, leadership coach, and industry veteran.

If you're tired of high turnover.

Burnout and the daily grind, you're not alone.

This podcast is here to give you the real strategies, insights, and tools you

need to lead with confidence, build a culture of excellence and craft a kitchen

that works for you, not against you.

Because the best kitchens don't just survive, they thrive.

Hit that subscribe button and let's get started.

Hey, chef, real quick.

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And now back to the show

because I'll have to do it again, so

no worries.

Say it one more time again.

DiPietrantonio

dri Dupri.

It's ridiculous.

I,

I know.

I'll say just Chef Nio.

That's what everybody else does.

So

really

DiPietrantonio

DiPietrantonio okay.

Forget it.

I'm, I'm a little tired.

It's not you, it's me.

It's always me.

No, that's

fine.

I hear you, brother.

I hear you.

It's been a long day.

And so, but you didn't even go to work today?

I didn't, but unfortunately my mom, she had

a really bad accident at work.

She fell and broke her leg last month.

She's not able to get herself around, so I've been taking her to

do like grocery shopping and to her physical therapy appointments and

doctor's appointments and stuff.

So trying to help her get her life back on track.

And do you find that, uh, for most of your

life you have been a caretaker?

Yes, definitely.

Yes, for sure.

Oh, it's fantastic.

It's fantastic.

Yeah, it's, I think one of the weird things is to actually understand

that we're in a life of service.

I would say that's for probably the same for most people in

the hospitality industry and for chefs.

We

give ourselves to people all day long.

Yeah.

But we hold everybody else in judgment because they don't get it.

That's true.

That's true.

And the thing that I had to come to terms with is

like no one will ever understand.

So why am I expecting them to,

at least to encourage the conversation, to have a little

bit of empathy with each other to

see

Nio DiPietrantonio: where we're coming from.

Yeah.

That very often gets into, I don't know, I spent lots of nights.

Service bars way, way late.

And inevitably the conversations get to this point where, you know,

the, everybody just wants to bitch and be a victim of the circumstance.

And that would've really hit me is no, I made this choice, so therefore

I have no right complaint about it.

And the cool thing is, is like understanding that I

have the power to change it.

We do.

And we did.

I'd say for sure we did choose the life, but that doesn't mean

that we can't make it better for ourselves and for other generations.

Couldn't agree more.

Couldn't agree more.

So tell me one thing that you want me to know and tell me one thing

that you don't want me to know.

How about

you?

All right.

Let's see.

One thing I want you to know is that I take a lot of pride in what I do,

but I don't want my pride to ever get in the way of learning something.

And that, I think that's easy to do, especially in our industry where we have

a certain body of knowledge and we get to a point where we're like, I know how to do

that, but you also have to learn to hold yourself in a certain level of humility.

Mm-hmm.

And that's something I am very aware of in myself to.

Take a step back and be like, okay, check your ego and pay attention

to what's going on in front of you.

It's very admirable for sure because that takes,

it's hard,

a bit of maturity.

That doesn't necessarily happen right outta the gate.

You have to fall on your face a couple times.

First, first to get there.

Oh yeah.

That's so much fun.

It sure.

Let's call it that.

And one thing that you don't want us to know about you.

I don't want you to know how sensitive I am.

I do take criticism very personally, even as I got older.

So I try to be very stone faced when someone's saying they don't like something

or something didn't hit well or land well.

And I'll just be like, okay, thank you for the feedback.

But then inside I'm like crying.

I'm sad and I'm like, I'm trying to put that wall up of like shame

that I had because it didn't come out the way I wanted it to.

And it's learning to separate my emotions from my, my aptitude.

And to just to learn from that experience and not take it personally.

Yeah.

I think it's, I think it's a given that if you're in this life, if you're in

this career, you're already sensitive.

That's true.

It takes a certain bit of sensitivity to be able to work with, really find products

and the nuances of flavor and be able to.

Have some sort of reverence for where they came from and where they're gonna be, and

yet we put ourselves out there every day.

It becomes almost like a self-fulfilling fantasy that we want criticism,

even though we don't want it.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely.

I went to art school.

My degree is actually in fine arts, so that's where like my passion started when

I was a a kid, fresh outta high school.

And I've always loved cooking, but when you put out a piece of work, whether

it's a painting or a plate or a pastry or something like that, and you put it

in front of somebody and they don't like it, you're like, Ugh, I just put all

this work and effort and love into it.

Why don't you like it?

And then you gotta take a step back and be like, okay, why don't they like it?

What can I do better next time?

One of the things that I'll say that I don't want anybody to know

is that typically what would happen is I would work really hard on like a

particular beer dinner or wine dinner or huge event and be charging all the

way up to the minute the plates hit the table, and then I always had this

huge sense of depression afterwards.

I don't know what I was expecting.

Did I have an expectation that people were just gonna jump up or

whatever, and then that didn't happen.

I'm not quite sure that's it, but I just understood innately that

that's a shit load of energy to put into something that for most folks,

will be forgotten in about 48 hours.

I can understand that there's a certain level of

expectation versus reality where you build something up in your head.

How much work went into that event and when it feels like it's not appreciated,

that can be very demoralizing.

Yeah, and that's why I, a lot of my coaching is around, I hear

time and time again how chefs feel like not appreciated or not valued,

and I had to come through the fire myself only to understand that if

I'm expecting someone else to value me, then I'll be waiting a long time.

Like no one will ever be able to know what we do.

The nuance and the effort and the passion, the calculation and the

time travel and all that stuff.

And so when we come back to the space of, we expect everyone

else to know that's, that I don't think that's fair of us to them.

And again, becomes like a, forgive the word, but a circle jerk.

It's almost, geez, what are we gonna do now?

No, I, I can understand that.

And I think too, maybe a certain aspect of that social media has helped and

hurt in a way because it shows, we see a lot of, especially with younger

chefs taking these elaborate videos and photos of the work that they

do and the work that goes into it.

And that's great, but it, they also don't show necessarily what goes on

in the background, the long hours.

The cleanup, the having to stay late to take care of the dishes and the, the

weekly cleanups of scrubbing out the ovens and the ranges and the salamander,

and taking everything apart and taking apart a greaser and all that stuff.

And that's the real kitchen life that people don't see.

And sometimes when they come from culinary school or what have you, and

step into that world, they're like, whoa.

Yeah.

Like even just mopping a floor.

Yeah.

There is joy to be found even in mopping the floor.

It's a very zen experience, especially after a crazy

shift when you just have that, like there's silence in the restaurant and

there's silence in the dining room and everything else is clean and you're

mopping the last thing of the day.

It's a very.

Centering time, which is you need after a busy day

for sure.

Now you got a lot of, I was very intrigued by watching your, or reading

your content on LinkedIn because it resonated so deeply with me because I

wish our paths had crossed because it seems like you and I have a very similar

aesthetic, and so that's why I wanted to bring you on the show, and there's

several things that we want to get into.

I appreciate

that.

But before that, why don't you let the listeners know how you got here?

Yeah, of course.

So I've been in the hospitality industry since I was 16 years old.

I started as actually a hostess for a chain restaurant up here in New

England, like a mom and pop kind of aesthetic where it's like a burger joint,

milkshakes, ice cream, that kind of thing.

And at that point we had some chefs who just decided not

to show up for work one day.

So my manager's like, Hey, can you hop back there and help?

And I was 17 at this point and I'm like.

Sure.

Okay.

So that's how I got started cooking, and I found I really liked it back there.

I liked being creative.

I liked learning about different styles of cooking because that's where I

have a very strong Italian background, as you can tell by my last name.

I'm a third generation immigrant, which is really cool.

I learned how to cook WIC and with like my Nona in the kitchen

when I was little, so that really.

Spoke to me on a deeper level.

So learning how to cook is where I stayed.

And I picked up some other part-time jobs as I stayed in that role, learning

how to cook from other, other really great chefs who were willing to teach me.

And I eventually got to be like a manager, a general manager.

I served as a director for a very short period of time.

It's just 'cause I didn't really, I didn't like leaving home that much

and leaving the state that much.

Um, and then I just went back into cooking and all that.

But during the pandemic, obviously is when a lot of

hospitality folks were struggling.

Myself included, it was a little bit before the pandemic that I actually

had a small stroke while I was at work.

Boy, oh boy.

Yeah, it was not a good time.

I was working, I would say, anywhere between 14 to 18 hour days at this point,

just because we were very short staffed.

I was working as both a cook and a manager, and.

Dual roles, which is never fun when you're a restaurant manager.

And I was also abusing like caffeine pills at the time just to

be able to get through my shifts.

I. And on top of that I was having like three energy drinks a day.

Very healthy lifestyle.

Don't recognize.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

And I was also, unfortunately going through a rough divorce, my husband

was struggling with a substance abuse problem, so I was not in a

good space mentally or physically.

And that's what eventually led me to that, that unfortunate health event.

And it forced me to make some lifestyle changes and that's how I got into

cooking for a senior living community.

So when you say lifestyle choices, like what were some of

the lifestyle choices that you decided to make at that time?

I had my, I had to go to the hospital obviously because of

what happened, and I saw a neurologist and I still see her a couple times a year.

And she told me that I needed to consider a career change at that point.

And that made me so depressed because I didn't wanna stop

doing what I loved doing.

And the narrative I kept being here, being told from my doctors was

that this lifestyle is killing you.

That this job is bad for you, that like you, you need to get out.

Boy.

Oh boy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when you keep hearing that from people who are educated, and I

assume that they were smarter than me, telling me that you need to stop

doing this thing that you love, it's.

It hurts.

It made me sad and I was very conflicted and I was fortunate enough that one

of my cook buddies was like, Hey, I know this place that's looking for

a chef that I think would probably be better 'cause it's less stressful

than what you're doing right now.

And I'm like, all right, hey, I'll check it out and look into it.

And I'm really glad that I did because I think the lifestyle fits me a lot better.

So let's talk about the lifestyle change.

So you went from standalone restaurant, small chain.

To a senior living facility.

Yes.

Yes.

And

so just culture

shock.

I'm just kind curious about that mindset of, okay, I still wanna do

this, but I need something that's I, I don't know, less intense or whatever.

Let's say that that's the phrase.

That's what I was thinking.

I was in the mindset that it wouldn't be as like I didn't have to deal with

online orders and delivery orders and in-house orders and bouncing back and

forth between manager duties or going to other restaurants to bail them out when

they didn't have enough staff members.

Sure.

And just the absolute chaos of being in a restaurant versus being in like

a kitchen with a couple of other chefs, taking care of like older

folks is what I just imagined it.

I just make 'em like a grilled cheese or something.

That's was the first thing that came into my mind, and it's not like

that in case anyone's wondering.

Right.

But it was a culture shock when I got there.

But I will say that I think that it's a much better fit for me

because it's cooking with a purpose.

It's serving what I think is a, a community that really needs

more support and engagement.

Talk a little bit more about that.

The need, I guess, is the thing that comes up as the way you said it.

There's not a whole lot, or What I will say is that I see a

lot of turnover, of course in restaurants.

Everybody knows that hospitality has an incredibly high turnover rate, but

even in senior living communities, the turnover rate is just as bad.

I worked at one facility where tenured service was considered

two years, and I'm like, okay.

But when we.

When I work in the kitchen, I'm working in right now, we have five chefs and that's

unheard of for the ones that I've been in.

Usually it's like one, two, or three people, three working

at one time, if you're lucky.

And they don't tend to stay long just because it is a little

different in the terms of you.

You see the same people every day, and if they don't like something, they're going

to tell you in no uncertain terms what was wrong with it, why it was wrong, and

why you should be ashamed of yourself.

You have to get very comfortable hearing extremely direct feedback from people.

Yeah.

But that can also be very refreshing.

Yeah.

And when you're working with a senior population, you get to

know them on a deeper level.

These are people you see every day and you're encouraged to go out and spend

time with them and do activities with them and engage with their families

and spend time in the dining room.

They even ask us to go out and share a meal with them at least once a week.

Yeah.

I, I also worked at a senior living facility.

Yeah.

Um,

and I think the thing that shocked me the most was

I hadn't counted on acknowledging the amount of stress that I put myself under

on a daily basis, and I reflected that.

When you're on the street, it's just not that one plate you put out.

It's the 10 people that they're gonna tell and the 10 people that they're gonna tell.

And before you know it, I'm living underneath a bridge in a

cardboard box with my Natty ice.

And so there's that kind of mania that's expected, even if it's just a slow burn.

Some people internalize it, don't really put it out that much, but

it's still that kind of manic desire to keep everything up.

Which I'm, I'm sure you experienced when, you know you had your little stroke.

I mean, shit.

Gotta keep going.

Gotta keep going.

Absolutely.

That's the hustle culture.

And then you get back into the, you get back into the

senior living facility and all of a sudden everybody's like, just chill.

Just chill bad.

That's, it was such a culture shock because I was used to just

running back and forth, get to this meal, get to this station, get to this order,

get to this prep, put this away, and then when I get there it's just, oh, we've got

a couple hours to put together this meal.

We have some stuff we gotta put away.

They're starting an activity in an hour and a half if you wanna

go participate in an activity.

And I'm like, what are you even talking about?

What is an activity?

What do we do?

Yeah.

And I thought it was, it was such an interesting thing.

I was there probably about three weeks before I recognized, I started

falling in love with the residents and

absolutely

hadn't expected that.

Because to your point, you see them every day.

And I thought that would be a bad thing.

But what I recognize is it's a perfect feedback loop.

Absolutely.

And it, it can be really intimidating because you are gonna meet those people

who are a little extra spicy, I like to say, and they'll, they'll tell you.

What the hell did you guys do to dinner last night?

That was the worst thing I ever had.

Oh my God.

And how they'll be like, oh yeah, breakfast was amazing.

Thank you.

Great job.

I'm like, oh, thanks.

Yeah, thanks.

Feedback.

Yeah, and it's, it's weird to like, um, again, there's

that thing about the energy.

Like I felt my body just settling into itself and someone pulled me on the side

and like, I was in my, I was in my thing, I was in my jam and someone pulled me

off the side like, what are you doing?

I'm doing my thing, man.

And.

You don't understand.

You got 650 fans here.

They want you to try stuff, they want you to fail.

They want you to like, at least something's changing, right?

They can see it in front of their eyes.

Like they want you to experiment.

So don't think that you're gonna that, that this is a place where they're gonna

criticize you until you walk out the door, because it depends on your skillset.

But um, and the other thing that's probably a lot of people don't understand.

Who've never worked in that market segment.

Is that weird thing about seeing folks transition?

I.

Yes.

Yes.

So if you work, it depends on obviously what community you work in.

Sure.

Because I, I went from originally independent care to assisted living care.

And when you move to those communities, you do have people who live in an

independent lifestyle, meaning that they, they don't need necessarily medical

assistance or mobility assistance, but when you move into assisted

living, that usually means that you need help doing something somewhere.

And then we also have what they call a memory care unit, which is for people

who are obviously struggling with, um.

Mental ability or memory loss, things of that nature.

And when you work in a senior living community, you do see that transition from

when somebody, it might be independent to moving to assisted living and

eventually up to the memory care unit, and they might start forgetting certain

things or remembering that they don't.

I. That they don't like certain things or they don't like to eat certain things or

it, and then it's just, it's disheartening and saddening at the same time.

As much as you love this person because you see them every day,

they're part of your family now.

Yep.

And that can be very hard to watch.

Yeah.

Some folks could be on property for 20 years because they spend most of that time

in independent living and whether it's a little cottage or whatever, and then

they start moving to the interior of the property where the more intense care is.

And it's almost.

I got really emotionally invested in the residents.

I had a group of, I don't know, 15.

After I got there, they pulled me into a room, had a meeting with me,

and the one guy is saying, listen, you know I have prostate cancer.

I said,

when I eat the food, my PSA is like 15, and when I stop eating it

and eat at home, it comes down to six.

Adam, you gotta help

me.

Like you gotta help me.

Like I know that food is medicine and if I don't get the right nutrition,

you know it's gonna be short.

But once they moved, it seemed, once they moved into the building,

it was like, yeah, weeks or months.

I. Yeah.

And that's a big thing too, is that they care about

flavor as much as anything else.

But we also have to take into account nutrition needs.

Yeah.

We have to learn how to cook without salt in a lot of issues, which can be

very challenging for, for some chefs.

Yeah.

Is that you have to learn to create flavor without salt or without sometimes fat or

without dairy because you have to cater to a lot of different diverse needs.

Yeah.

And you're also in partnership with a nutritionist.

You submit your menus and the nutritionist comes back, green

beans are a starch, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

And uh,

you've got two starch.

You do have to

work with the nutritionist, which is it.

It can be difficult.

I've worked with some good ones and some bad ones.

But a lot of times what I've noticed is that they just, you'll work with

a nutritionist who also doesn't really know how to cook either.

That's correct.

They'll come up with some of these crazy recipes that make absolutely

no sense, and I'm like, how did you even come up with this?

I'm like, oh, somebody submitted it to us.

I'm like, this is garbage.

They're not gonna eat this.

It's a very interesting way to work.

You know, wield your craft, like in partnership with these people.

Like to your point, someone's always coming in with a recipe

like, they wanna try this and I had this with my nana, or whatever.

Yeah.

And you're almost kind of,

yeah, sure, why not?

I could sit there and kick my feet or whatever, but it

just seems so much easier just to, yeah, let's be together.

I started a little newsletter every week and

I love that I

kept saying, we're all in this together.

I did it.

It wasn't completely altruistic.

They were used to raspberries in December and I'm like, I only

get so many dollars per month.

Per year.

Yes.

I'd rather spend that on high quality meats

during

budget.

Yeah.

I started doing a commodity report and they were like, oh yeah, strawberries

are getting really expensive.

We're gonna stop having, yeah, man, because I wanna keep giving

you this really great, these great proteins and vegetables, and so

not only are you working in.

In assisted living, senior care, but then you decide that you're gonna

dedicate a portion of your life to.

Hospitality mental health.

Yes.

Yes.

So when I was going through my own mental health struggles is when I actually

discovered the Burnt Chef Project.

And I know you're a big advocate and I'm, I appreciate that.

It was very cool and that I was listening to Chris Hall doing a podcast when

I was actually doing like Job Post Searchings one time, and he was talking

about how that we shouldn't have to give up doing something that we love

just because everyone's telling us that it's broken or it's wrong, or.

For whatever reason that it's fundamentally flawed and that it needs to,

it does need to change, but we shouldn't have to walk away from it to make it work.

And I was sitting there like aggressively nodding.

As I'm scrolling through indeed looking at job postings, I'm

like, okay, why am I doing this?

I don't want to leave, but I need to figure out a way to make this better.

And what happened during the pandemic is that it was a small group of us

who were actually like in a text-based chat from different restaurants,

and we were all talking about the different struggles we were having.

So one of our coworkers has two special needs kids, and she was

having trouble finding care for them because in the middle of the

pandemic everything was shut down.

And another one of our.

One of our support group members at the time wasn't able to afford enough

food, so they were looking for a food pantry that was still operating in our

area so that they could get groceries for the week, and other members

started suggesting resources for that.

They'd be like, oh, check out this.

This pantry on this street, in this in your area, or check out

like the Autism Society of Maine because they might be able to help

you find resources for helping with your kids and stuff like that.

And it was that little support group that we decided, why

doesn't everybody have this?

Why doesn't every restaurant have a group of people just willing

to look out for each other?

Isn't that interesting?

Yes, yes.

Especially with how cliquey it can be.

I'm sure you've worked with plenty of chefs and plenty of groups where it was

very like tight knit and everybody knew what was going on in each other's lives,

and that's just, that's what we do.

We see these people sometimes 80, 90 hours a week.

We are typically a family.

Whether or not we wanna admit it,

we are spending more time with them than our families.

Yes, I certainly was.

And so this starts as.

For lack of a better word, no one else is doing it, so we might as well do it.

Right.

Essentially.

Yeah.

We wanted to create, we wanted to take our support network and make it bigger.

We wanted to be able to include more people in it and get more people

involved and try to find more resources.

We wanted to try to find more like food pantries to help

battle in food insecurity.

We wanted to try to help people with, if they were struggling with

financial problems to help with like debt counseling and things like that.

The, unfortunately, the pandemic hurt a lot of people in a lot of restaurants and

people were struggling to pay their bills.

So trying to find people to help with paying bills was good.

And any kind of resource like that, that would help.

And, uh, substance use is very high in the hospitality industry, so trying to

help people find clinics that they could get into to, to help them battle their.

Their substance use disorders.

That's another big one.

Yeah.

And

trying to collect resources to help all of these

people with these things is what we decided we wanted to do as a group.

And so that turned into

serving up Support me.

It's a nonprofit organization.

We decided to turn it officially into an organization.

It's me and two other former restaurant managers.

Unfortunately, they're no longer in the hospitality industry, but they're

invested in helping to make it better.

Chris Hall from the Burnt Chef Project.

Not a chef, not in the industry.

He was servicing the industry.

He was a salesperson and he kept going into these kitchens and just hearing

all the horror stories and said, shit, someone's gotta do something.

But it seems to me, catkins, there's so many people from the outside

who will listen to our stories, then go, oh, we need to help them.

No, like a Sarah McLaughlin commercial.

No, but I'm just saying, very few of us, very few of us were like going,

oh, let's get together and do something until the pandemic, which I think.

From my perspective was a good thing.

It hurt a lot of people, and I don't want to demean that, but I also

understand that this is a great opportunity for us to reset the

industry, our culture, if not now when.

And some of that's panned out and some of that hasn't panned out.

So I celebrate the fact that you started as a grassroots

organization just because you could.

That's exactly what it was, is I wanted

to make a difference here.

I wanted to help more people here because I've unfortunately

lost people to, to overdoses.

I've lost people to alcoholism and I've lost friends just

from just leaving the industry.

People I still talk to, but were just so burnt out from the way

that they were treated by people or by their managers, or just by.

The very nature of the business that they're like,

I just can't do this anymore.

It's crushing my soul.

Yeah.

And I don't want that to keep happening.

I want people to be excited to be in the industry.

I'm excited to be in the industry.

I just needed to find my niche.

Yeah.

Like the meme, like I just want chefs to be happy again.

Yes.

Essentially.

I really want them to enjoy their work.

Happy chefs create innovative dishes and you can

taste it in the food when they're happy and when they're not happy.

Well, it's no secret that anger cooks make shitty food.

So

yes, agreed.

You can taste the impatience.

And so what does it look like now moving forward for this organization?

I think in 2024 you guys won an award.

You're.

For your efforts?

Yes.

We got a best innovative mental health approach for 2024 from best

of best review, which is really cool.

Very unexpected, but very cool.

And it's just, it's nice that it's being seen as a movement.

It also feels like maybe in a way it's, oh, helping people that's so novel.

And it's just, it feels like if it was any other industry, it maybe it would've

been taken more seriously earlier, but because it's hospitality, and hospitality

is generally seen as being like low income or lower skills are needed to do the job,

that it's just seemed like a throwaway job or a throwaway industry, and it's not.

Hospitality is everything and everywhere in our society,

it couldn't be more.

I gotta ask, how you feeling?

I'm feeling good.

I'm definitely, one of the challenges of working in senior living is that you

do run the risk of losing residents.

Mm-hmm.

And we actually, within the last two weeks, we've lost four just from different

things, unfortunately, like memory care, dementia and illness, general illness.

And there were four people I really cared about, and it's hard

to have time to process that.

Especially because the care staff also doesn't really get a chance to process it.

And these are people that you work closely with and they don't get the opportunity

to cry and grieve because they have hundreds of other people to take care of.

So you carry that with you and you miss it when you don't see those people in the

dining room anymore at their usual tables.

So not having that space to grieve there is challenging, but you have to

make time to grieve and to appreciate the people for who they were.

And, uh, yeah.

For your emotional healths

and physically.

Nio DiPietrantonio: Physically, I'm doing better.

I'm doing well.

I do have to take medications for life, it certain meds that I have to take, but they

keep me happy, they keep me well focused.

All the big free things that I need to do my job well, and to

be able to be a better person.

I need to be present for my family and I need to be present for my

husband and to be who I wanna be.

And so how long you think you're gonna be able to do this?

I'm gonna keep doing it as long as I can.

I, I don't see it ending.

I wanna see us grow.

I wanna see our organization grow.

I wanna see the Burnt Chef Project grow because I'm an ambassador.

I wanna bring that.

I would love to have the Burnt Chef Project in the Burnt Chef

Academy in every restaurant.

I think everyone should take the courses if they can.

Same thing with like healthy hospital courses.

Same thing with the chow organization.

I think everyone should go to a chow meeting at least once just to

see what it's about, because having that catharsis is so important.

I love the Wednesday night meetings.

I dial in whenever I can.

It's the men's only group, and I've done a lot of men's work, so that's a

great environment for me to drop into.

And I love the fact that sobriety is not a prerequisite to being there, right?

So you still have to handle yourself, but the point you can't go and smash.

But, but the point is like, they welcome all and it's, I, I.

I've been beating the drum since about 2008 about these issues and

thought to myself like, no one else is gonna clean this shit up, man.

This is our mess.

It's our responsibility.

And I know a lot of these organizations were starting before the pandemic, but

of course, during and after is really where it came up because they think.

To a certain extent, we, the industry lost the narrative because now all of

a sudden the Washington Post and the New York Times are writing, oh, it's

shit to fucking work in restaurants.

Okay dude, we do that all along, thanks very much.

But now the outside world knows that, but there's, I don't know if there's

some, like a certain amount of honor or props that we give to one another

for slogging it out or for being in the grind and patting each other on the

back and trying to outdo one another.

I think that.

That badge of of courage is, is really misplaced because I think we

continue to egg each other on even now.

Oh yeah.

And until a chef from a hotel or a chef from a restaurant

can meet a chef from a senior living facility and go, yeah, dude, you got it.

Restaurants close at seven o'clock at night, you're going home to kids.

I'm still at the job like, oh yeah, each particular job has its own thing.

But I think that there's a certain amount of, I don't wanna say respect,

but I. Grace that we should be giving one another no matter what market

segment we work in, because we're all dealing with the same stuff and it's

just a little different on each end.

And I, there were, I had been shamed a couple times.

I had a, a sous chef who said to me on the line, he's getting ready for a Saturday

night and a little Italian bistro, and he's like, dude, I'm quitting, dude,

you've been here like seven years.

What do you mean you're quitting?

Yep.

Going to healthcare.

Healthcare.

What do you what?

That's such a great transition.

And he said it very simply to me, he's, I wanna be home for my kids.

And I'm like, oh, now that's somebody who really knows what his core values are.

And I didn't know what they were mine like owing mine.

Like I spent so much time chasing the pinnacle of my career that my children

spent a lot of time like without me.

And even though as they're grown now, I. They have a lot of compassion

and for me, and they're like, no, dude, you were the, you were great.

You were a great father.

I know, I know.

Like I could have done things differently, but at the time I only did

what I did because that's all I knew.

And having said that,

I'm just, I feel very grateful to be here, to be talking to you, be talking

about things like the Burn Chef project, about you serving up support Maine.

I think these are things that are very positive and anything I can do

to support you, I want to do that.

I'm so grateful and I appreciate that.

And same with you.

I love listening to you.

I love listening to Chef Life Radio.

I learned a lot.

I did the, I was listening to your last episode about like adaptivity

and adaptability and how that's a skill that can be nurtured.

And I had to take a step back and think about it and I'm like, you know what?

That's true.

And no one ever really put it that way to me before.

Mm-hmm.

So I learned a lot from that too.

Thanks.

You have to teach how to be adaptable, and that's not something I think anybody

talks about in the restaurant industry.

Yeah.

I've come down to this one simple statement, which is like, nobody

teaches leadership in culinary school.

Yeah.

And at some point we all need to lead E, even if we just lead ourselves.

'cause of course you can't lead anybody else if you're not leading yourself.

But the point is like getting thrown a set of keys and now I'm the chef.

That's the recipe for disaster.

So that

field promotion,

like you, I wanna leave this industry better.

Then when I found it, because as many crazy times, as many hard times, as

many frustrating and, and, and sad times, I also had some amazing times

and it has really been a gift to me.

So I wanna make sure that I do everything possible to, uh, be a resource to others

because I don't want to have another hospitality professional take their own

lives because they didn't feel seen, heard, or had access to resources because.

That's bullshit.

It is.

And maybe some of it is a little bit generational too.

My own mentor who I adore this, the chef who literally taught me everything I know.

I still talk to him regularly.

He thinks I'm crazy.

He says, I don't.

I appreciate what you're trying to do.

I just don't think it's gonna work.

I don't think it's gonna go anywhere.

This is like a 65-year-old chef.

Sure.

I love death.

He's amazing.

But that's, he's A-A-C-I-A graduate and he was an instructor.

He, if he doesn't think that we can change it, that can be a little demoralizing,

but I wanna make it better for him too.

I want you to see that we can make this better.

We can do better for you.

We can do better for everybody else.

He even used to tell me how he missed his entire child.

His kids growing up because he was busy working or busy teaching,

and he regrets that he regrets not being there for his kids.

Like how you were saying he is.

He is a great father.

He's a great man, but he has so many regrets for not being there, for

his family, and we can find balance.

We can find a way to make this work for people regardless of what stage you are.

I couldn't agree more because.

To be frank, everybody wants to blame the industry.

We're the industry,

right?

I, we're only as good as our industry and right.

We have to make it better.

Like how, like I say, very often that I've been trained, shamed,

and conditioned to be the way I am.

Because there was always somebody looking at me like outta the corner.

And when you think about it.

Comparison is the death of joy, right?

Yes.

If you're comparing yourself to someone else constantly, but

that's what our industry does.

Every single competitions or whatever down the street and you cook,

comparing yourself to someone else and never quite, that was the original

Instagram to be in this industry, yo.

But that is also a recipe for disaster because it.

It skews the journey of you discovering what you're possible.

So to your mentor, I would say, dude, just because you made that choice doesn't mean

you have to continue to make that choice.

It's that simple, and when enough of us decide that we're gonna create

something different, it'll happen.

It's just a point of leverage.

There's a certain amount of energy that needs to build up before things

start changing, and it's not gonna be, listen, we could just sit there

and go, okay, it'll never change.

And then it won't exactly.

But we certainly have no idea what's possible unless we try.

I remember when I started my management training, granted

this was when I was 18, I had no business being a manager, but again, somebody

didn't show up for their job, so I got a battlefield promotion and when I

started my training, they actually had us watch a video called The Lone Dancer.

I don't know if you've ever seen or if you know what that is, but it's this

little video of a guy I think he's at.

A Woodstock concert or something, something crazy like a hippie, everybody,

right, go to music and et cetera.

Dance.

Dance.

And this one guy gets up and he starts dancing and he looks a little silly

doing it, but eventually one person will join him and another person will

join him and eventually he's got a whole crowd of people dancing with him.

And the, obviously the message of that is that you do eventually.

Have to be that one crazy lone dancer.

If you want other people to join you, and you do have to put yourself out

there, you have to look a little crazy to, to get people to, to join you.

I love it.

If they don't feel heard, they're not gonna be with you.

So I guess I have to be the lone, crazy dancer and I'm glad that

you're up there dancing with you.

I'll

dance with you anytime, Christopher, you.

They can find me on on Instagram.

We are at serving up.

Support me as our Instagram handle.

I'm on LinkedIn, Neo duped.

Antonio, we have a Facebook page for both that and LinkedIn

page for serving up support me.

We have also a, a place on our website where if you are struggling with

anything, you can contact us and we will help you find resources in your area.

We are not just exclusive to Maine or New England.

We will help you no matter where you are.

We will help you find resources for what you're struggling with.

Thank you very much for what you're doing, chef.

Of course, we owe it to us.

We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to our industry.

I look forward to having you back very soon.

Thank you so much, chef Adam.

I'm so grateful for your time.

That's a wrap for today's episode of Chef Life Radio.

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Keep learning, keep growing, and as always.

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