So Kriska (Woods) from Charlotte Remedy, she and I connected - because we both graduated from South Carolina - and we decided to start doing these pop-up dinners, called Mortar & Pestle. But I wanted to be cooking the food, then serving it, seeing them have the experience and curating that food experience. All the foodies were taking pictures of the food, and here I was on the side talking with the chef, like, “OK, but how did you make this? What went into this?” I was drawn more to the food process than the social-media part. But those weren’t the connections I needed. We started going out to eat more and meeting all these chefs and farmers in Charlotte, and I was just like, These are my people. In 2018, I started my food blog - started Freckled Fork - and got involved with the Charlotte food community. This was something that I felt good about. I took a few more of her cooking classes, and she actually hired me to help with their summer camps for kids in the kitchen. I took a knife-skills class, and it just clicked for me. We moved into Charlotte in 2010, and I think I took my first cooking class with Chef Alyssa in 2014. I liked food for food, but I really liked the connecting piece, and the food-with-people piece. Doing dinner parties, or when I had friends who would have baby showers or birthdays, I would make a spread. I made a different recipe every day for six months, just went through all these different cookbooks. And before it was even a thing, I Julie & Julia’d myself: I picked some cookbooks that I had gotten from our wedding, and started cooking through those. So when we first got married it was like, Alright, I want to cook. I knew scrambled eggs, and I knew how to zhuzh up a ramen packet. And I didn’t know how to cook anything, other than scrambled eggs that weren’t very good. But instead, I got married right out of college - a very Southern thing - and moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina. So when my roommate and I graduated from South Carolina in 2005, she moved to New York immediately, and a big part of me wanted to go up with her right then. From the moment I stepped off that bus in this city, I was like, Oh my God. The first trip to New York that I remember was my senior year of high school. About how persistence, confidence, talent, creativity, luck, attitude and even her separation from her husband figured into her transformation from someone who thought she’d be good at being an NYC restaurant head chef into someone who actually is. Masanotti, 39, spoke to us last week about her journey. “It was a huge deal for me when I worked up to saute and could hold the station on my own on a 100-plus cover night.” Courtesy of Jess Masanotti “It’s the one where we make our homemade pasta, sauces, et cetera, and requires a lot of skill,” she says. ![]() Jess Masanotti, photographed working the saute station at North Miznon in New York City.
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