I got my first job as soon as I turned sixteen. A restaurant had just opened about a mile from my house (which was a miracle in and of itself, because there wasn’t even a corner store within about five miles). Our neighbor, Ron Nicoli, was a renaissance man. He raised cattle. (He named one after me! Laura the cow! Then he ate her.) My dad used to bring home trailers full of Ron’s “black gold”—a soil he’d created out of garden compost and horse manure. The stuff could grow anything. Ron was also an amazing Italian cook and a contractor, and he just so happened to open a restaurant right as I was turning sixteen and could legally work.
On my very first day, I spilled an entire tray of drinks on a seventy-year-old woman, and … wait for it … it was her birthday party! She was very gracious about it, thank God, and I recovered from the trauma and went on to become a pretty badass little server. I loved the job because it forced my introverted angsty teenage self to be extroverted and borderline hammy.
It was a very small restaurant, and I wore a lot of hats. For some reason the servers were responsible for making the salads for our tables (which I later learned was definitely not up to health code standards!), but I liked working with food, so I didn’t mind. The chef had come up with all kinds of combinations that I had never thought of. He added fruit and cooked squash and seeds, and made all his own dressings. (At that point I had only really had bottled Hidden Valley Ranch, so that alone opened my eyes.) I learned that it takes only a few fresh ingredients to make a salad work.