Yachtie life

There are worse places to have a career breakthrough than somewhere in the middle of the Adriatic. Before becoming a yacht chef, I had always cooked for people I loved. Friends, family, dinner parties—the people who had been eating my food for years and, admittedly, may have been slightly obligated to tell me it was delicious. Then suddenly, I was island hopping through Croatia, cooking for complete strangers from a tiny galley at sea. It was as dreamy as it sounds. Mornings in little coastal towns, finding local produce and fresh fish for dinner. Afternoons sailing between islands with the Adriatic outside my galley window. Evenings cooking while the sun went down, knowing that whatever I was making would soon be carried upstairs and shared around a table on deck. But the beautiful part came with a learning curve. Provisioning became its own art form. I would walk into a grocery store where half the packaging was in a language I couldn’t read and somehow have to leave with everything I needed to feed a boat full of people for the week. Once we left the marina, there was no casually popping back to the store because I forgot something. There might be an opportunity to top off provisions along the way, but mostly, I had to learn to anticipate what we’d need before we needed it. And then I had to make it all fit. I became frighteningly good at stacking a tiny yacht refrigerator. Every inch had a purpose. Produce tucked into one corner, proteins carefully packed away, ingredients organized by when I planned to use them. It was part Tetris, part meal planning, part blind faith that I had remembered enough lemons. The galley itself wasn’t exactly a chef’s kitchen either. One week in the British Virgin Islands, I discovered that my entire knife collection consisted of a paring knife and a bread knife. So I cooked with a paring knife and a bread knife. That’s the thing yacht life taught me: there usually wasn’t time—or room—to panic about what I didn’t have. You looked at what was in front of you and figured out how to make something wonderful with it. And somehow, I thrived. The experience challenged my cooking in ways I hadn’t expected, but it also showed me that I was far more prepared than I realized. I learned to improvise, to cook around dietary restrictions and language barriers, to trust my instincts, and to make the most of whatever beautiful ingredients happened to be available on the island that day. Most importantly, I started cooking for people who didn’t owe me a compliment. And they loved it. They asked for seconds. They wanted to know what was for dinner before we’d finished lunch. They lingered in the galley while I cooked. They sat around the table long after the plates were empty. Somewhere between provisioning and plating, the strangers I had welcomed aboard became my guests. And very often, by the time we returned to the marina, my guests had become my friends. That’s what I didn’t expect when I packed my bags for that first season. I thought yacht life would teach me how to cook professionally. Instead, it taught me how to trust myself as a chef—to walk into an unfamiliar market, step into an impossibly small kitchen, look at whatever I had in front of me and know: I can make something out of this. Preferably with a better knife. But, as it turns out, that’s optional.