With over 100 majors, 120 masters programs, and a plethora of minors and degree certificates available at the University at Buffalo, it is hard to imagine that anything is missing. But it is. For those students who would rather create a culinary masterpiece than sit in class with textbooks, UB is lacking one important degree option. As a result, most aspiring chefs opt not to go to a four year university like UB, but rather go straight into a culinary arts school, or even right into a professional cooking career directly out of high school.
But one UB student has decided to take a different road to follow his culinary dreams. Patrick Dawson, a junior legal studies major at UB, is not here to become a lawyer as his degree would imply. Instead, he is on his way to becoming a professional chef.
From a young age, Patrick knew that he wanted to spend his life making food. In middle school he realized that he probably wanted to be a chef when he was an adult. He recognizes the fact that he took an unusual path to achieve his goal, but he says he did it with logic behind it.
At first, Patrick decided to go to a four year college instead of a culinary arts school because of “social norm.” Like many young American kids, Patrick says he felt like he was supposed to attend college, because that’s what “everyone” does after high school. But he doesn’t regret his decision, because he feels that a legal studies career will help him succeed in the cooking world down the road.
Aside from being a chef, Patrick wanted to learn about business to help him succeed in the restaurant business and in the real world in general. Being a legal studies major, Patrick says he can “learn how to get around things, how to get away with stuff. You just learn stuff you’re actually going to use in life.”
His goal is to eventually open up a microbrewery-style restaurant and he feels that having business skills, in addition to cooking knowledge and talent, will definitely help him in the long run. The type of restaurant he wants to own he describes as, “A huge place where they do all their own brewing. With a restaurant attached that doesn’t have fancy food or bar food, just good food.” His ideal dream would be to open up his restaurant in Northern California, but he knows that the competition there is fierce. “It’s obviously got to be somewhere that there isn’t the same type of thing,” he says.
Although he naturally loves cooking, it was his experiences growing up that made him choose this career. Patrick says that his biggest influences were probably his parents’ friends. Being around them as a young boy, Patrick enjoyed the food his family ate as well as all of the surroundings that came with it. He says that he can’t remember a specific thing that made him want to become a chef, but mostly attributes it to living in Vermont and “eating ridiculously good food every night and the whole atmosphere behind it.”
He also says that a huge reason why he would love to be a chef is because he loves to eat. He can remember that when he was little, he used to take every pot and pan out of the kitchen and make a mess with it all. “I would always hang out in the kitchen while my mom was cooking,” Patrick says, and this is when he developed the love for cooking himself.
These days, Patrick is trying to gain real world experience in the cooking world while attending school. So far, he has worked in restaurant environments as a dishwasher and busboy. He also enjoys making his own beer. “I started doing it last year,” Patrick says, “It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time but you don’t have to be 21 to do it.” He hopes to gain more experience this summer and in the next few years by working at the Albany Pump Station, a microbrewery restaurant similar to the one he would like to open someday.
The reason behind this absolute necessity for experience is simple; he wants to attend the Culinary Institution of America, which is likely the most prestigious culinary school in the country. Being such an esteemed school, it’s imperative for students to have a lot of experience in order to deal with the competition of getting into the CIA.
As of now, Patrick is mainly enjoying himself making food and having fun with it, and not worrying too much about the future just yet. He says he cooks every day, and mostly loves making seafood and Italian food. He also grills a lot, and enjoys making steaks and stir fry. But his favorite thing to cook with is wine.
Patrick says that while he is talented in the kitchen now, he definitely had some interesting times learning how to make appetizing food. He can remember one summer, when he was out fishing with friends in a little row boat. “We had caught some fish and we just decided to eat them so we made a little fire in the boat and wrapped the live fish up in tin foil and cooked it whole.” Obviously, this wasn’t exactly the normal way people cook fish in the modern world, but Patrick says it worked that day because he and his friends had fun with it and were creative. “After that we used parts of the fish to keep fishing. We had this little kid with us and he thought it was the coolest thing.”
So while many of us are striving to be doctors, lawyers, and accountants, students like Patrick are looking forward to a life of creating dishes for other people to enjoy. But he never cooks with recipes – instead, he says, “I just kind of make different things every time. The same thing never comes out the same, especially when I’m at school and have nothing to work with.” In the end, he has fun with it, and says mostly he likes to cook because “food makes people happy.”
