“You’re making them smile through their stomachs. You can completely change a person’s day by making them a good meal.”
—Lish Steiling
As many teenagers do, Lish Steiling earned extra money by bussing tables at the Chancery in Mequon, WI. The restaurant had an open kitchen, with a wood-burning oven in the middle of the restaurant where the guests could watch pizzas being made. After getting an opportunity to learn the station and how to make pizza, she soon found herself becoming the main chef for the job. She says, “I was this fifteen-year-old girl trying to train forty-year-old men who couldn’t keep up with me. That was my first exposure to real restaurant cooking, and I loved it.”
Her culinary fire stoked, Lish later enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America and worked at a variety of restaurants in Germany, Wisconsin, and New York for the following ten years. While in New York, she found a job working with BR Guest, a large and very successful restaurant group. Starting as a sous-chef at Blue Fin, their modern seafood concept, she soon went on to work at Hilo, the lounge in the Meatpacking District, and then Dos Caminos, the Mexican restaurant before ending at another fine dining seafood restaurant, Blue Water Grill. There, working in the largest restaurants she ever had before, she began learning all the logistics needed to run a kitchen from the computer systems to the scheduling to expediting. “It was a great experience in that I truly learned how to run a kitchen from an office perspective.”
Again, restlessness overtook her, and she decided to pursue working in television food show production through a chance connection. She says, “The senior vice president of production at Food Network used to dine at Vento,” another now-closed restaurant from BR Guest. “Sooo … I might have accidentally taken his name and number out of the reservation book before I left.” The rest, as they say, is history. A few meetings later, Lish found herself freelancing for Food Network as an assistant food stylist.
Lish has since done food styling for such places as Food Network, Gourmet magazine, and The Today Show, where she currently works as one of the assistant food stylists. She says, “I get to work with some of the best chefs in the world, and they come to me and I get paid for it. It’s like going on a stage every day.” Lish continues to keep her cooking skill sharp—winning an episode of Chopped in 2009—and dreams of one day returning to a kitchen. “I’ll end up back in restaurants…. When you are in that environment, it’s a whole rush when you are doing it and you either love it or you hate it, and I love cooking on a line.”
Lish’s passion for cooking carries over onto her body. A radish and a carrot adorn her forearms, and she has a spoon and fork inked on the back of her arm. Lish got her first tattoo from her sister for her sixteenth birthday. The two each have matching tattoos of “sister” in Chinese. Lish says, “That was my first one, and from there you’re addicted.” Seems like there are more tattoos—and more great food—in Lish’s future.
Lish says, “[I] just love all of the flavors that happen in this recipe. It’s comforting without being heavy.”
