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Food

How Texas Elevated My Pastry Game to a Whole New Level

Some of the best restaurants in the country are in New York, but I wanted to be able to have a life. When I came to Launderette in Austin and it was 75 degrees and sunny, I said, "This is the spot; a place I could start anew."

For a while I was a hippy, running around on a VW bus. I was vegetarian and really wanted to save the world by not showering one day at a time. It was fun but it's the antithesis of what I am now, although I do wonder if my love of pastry was born out of a fear of meat.

I love everything about baking; there's a serenity to it that begins from when you walk in the door. When I was training, some chefs said I shouldn't pigeonhole myself but I knew this is what I wanted to be.

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First and foremost, desserts should be delicious and have a whimsy and nostalgia element to them, maybe something that reminds you of childhood.

There are lots of components on all the desserts at my restaurant, Launderette, but I'm not going to put anything on that does not belong there. You can scale it back and ask, What does it contribute to the dish? The process can take a day or three weeks, then sometimes the ideas are just–bang!–that is what I want to do. That's the reward, when you get to a spot you are happy with.

My ah-ha moment about becoming a chef was kind of unexpected. I had studied art history and contemporary female artists in college in Colorado and had moved back to New York. I was working at the Brooklyn Museum as a curatorial assistant, but I was not making enough money to eat, so I started working in restaurants.

I was in the gynecologists' office reading a magazine and I realized I'm not picking up Journal or Forum, but food magazines. I loved everything about the restaurant environment, the nightlife, the bakeries. But I always say that if I had been reading Golfers Digest, things could have been totally different.

I went to the CIA in Hyde Park to train, and would stage in all the top restaurants that would have me. Then, in 2008, I was working in a restaurant in Brooklyn. It was election night, and we were having a party with about 150 guests at the restaurant. During the concession speeches, one of the guests and a server who were outside saw that the whole second story was engulfed in flames. We made sure everybody was out and safe, but by then the scaffolding was coming down, the windows had blown out.

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I had a cocktail in my hand, it had been raining so the ground was wet and I slipped and fell. The drink went crashing across the street and I looked at my wrist, and this [part] was over there.

It turned out to be a compound fracture in my wrist, I had nerve damage and some pretty epic surgery. I thought I would not be able to cook again, or be that one-handed chef. It was really traumatic.

By February, the economy had plummeted, and I had not been working. It was freezing in New York when Rene [Ortiz, the co-chef at Launderette] asked me to come to Austin to consult on a dessert menu.

The surgeon told me my wrist was at 75 percent, so I came out for two weeks and just loved it. I said if you'll have me, I'll stay. All these terrible things had happened and I came to Austin and it was 75° F and sunny and I said, this is the spot; a place I could start anew.

It's hard living in New York. The best restaurants in the country are there, but I wanted to be able to have a life. I did not want to eat hard-boiled eggs and cold tuna and barely make rent. We think of ourselves, as New Yorkers, as being these martyrs who work so hard to get by, but here the sun is always shining, the sky is blue.

So the move just made sense. Austin is a rad town, and while the food scene was quite small then, the restaurant scene had this pulse it was exciting to be a part of. 2008 was a hard year for me, but maybe if all those things hadn't happened, maybe I would not have left New York, maybe I would have left months later.

Six years on, and I couldn't be happier with the team we have at Launderette. I'm pretty calm in the kitchen, and I'm very patient. I don't like people to fuck up my food, but rather than belittle them or get angry I teach them how to identify if there are any problems. It's about how to fix them.

I do suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, that's something that has reared its ugly head in the kitchen sometimes. The same things I'm teaching I have to internalize myself: it's just a restaurant, it's just food. This is our livelihood, our pension, but you can't hurt yourself over something as silly as food.

As told to Laura Dixon