I walked in and said, "Here's my resume." I had started as a busboy at 13 and I'm all of 16 and I'm ready to go. He almost threw me out of the restaurant. He said, "What do you mean you want to be a chef?" So then I went to Joey's and talked to the owner. He listened and heard me out. He said he didn't need a cook at that time but he did need a busboy. So here we go again, but I said I'd take it because I wanted to get into that level of fine dining. 

I'll never forget it, he told me to get a tuxedo shirt, a bow tie, black pants, and black shoes and show up here on Friday at 5:30 p.m. and I did.

At Joey's they had a front dining room and that's where then Governor Edwards and the wealthiest people in the whole state ate. That was the ticket to be in that room on a Friday or Saturday night. All the waiters were in full tuxedoes and white gloves. There was a big  waiter in the room, Charles, and he said to me, "Get that tray out of here." I'd never carried a tray. It's got a few champagne flutes. I pick up the tray and start walking with it. You have to understand this restaurant was in what was once an old house. The main hallway going back to the kitchen was a beautiful wood floor and halfway up was where the owner stood at a podium in one of his $5000 Armani suits! I start walking and one by one the glasses start crashing to the floor. If I stop abruptly I'll lose the whole thing, so I'm thinking maybe if I can make it in there I'll only lose a couple of glasses. By the time I made it to the kitchen there are about eight (8) glasses broken down the hallway. 

Your first night! 

My first hour! The owner/manager walked back to me and said, "Did you buy that tuxedo stuff today?" I said, "Yes sir." He said, "Do you think you can get your money back?"

I said, "No, I'll turn this around for you, tonight." I was devastated. There had to be something I could do to impress him before the night was over.

Back in that same dining room, it's about 11:30 at night and the last table has placed a dessert order. The people ask for two decafs and one regular. I ran to the bus station and made the coffees and got back to the table before that waiter finished the dessert order. He looked at me asked, "What are you doing?"

I said, "They ordered coffee." He said, "They ordered two decaf and one regular and you don't know the difference." I said, "These are the decaf (pointed to them) and this is the regular." He smiled. I put the coffee service down and he went and begged for my job for me.

I probably did that for the first summer. Whenever I had free time, I went back in the kitchen to watch Philippe . It was close to Christmas, I remember well, and he said, "You want to do this, don't you?" I said, "Yeah, I want to do it." He said, "I'm going to talk to the owner, Jim."

I get this phone call from Jim, he says, "I talked to Philippe , he says he wants you to be a chef, he wants to train you.  Here's the deal - you get five days next week with no pay in the kitchen. If it doesn't work out you lose both jobs. Is that good for you?"

I said yeah, because I didn't want to be a busboy so it worked good for me. That's what I did and at the end of the week I got the sous chef's position in that restaurant. 

That takes us back to those experiences in the kitchen you had with food and he could see it. 

Yes, he saw the passion. Philippe was big on the work ethic and the commitment. He's still a very close personal friend. He spends as much time teaching you how to be a chef, as much as developing you to be an individual. It was about honor and trust and loyalty.  

He truly was a mentor. 

The first five days before I got the job that we talked about, he was teaching me how to make Crème Anglais, Roux or Gumbo. It's hard to remember all the things and I come walking in the 3^rd or 4^th day with a book and he asked what it was for. I said to write down what you are doing. He grabbed it and threw it in the trash can. He said, "I don't need you write down recipes. If you can't make it, tell me and we'll do it another day, but you're not writing down the recipes." 

You worked with him 3 ½ years. How long is it that a student attends a school like Cordon Bleu? I ask, because in reading about you, your bio and history of who've you worked for and with, you are every bit as classically trained as those who attended school. 

I had told my parents that I was going to finish high school and then CIA, or Cornell or Boston University. Every year that passed by I got a better opportunity and I'm flying around the world with John Folse at 18-19 years old. I'm making $40,000 a year and I'm going to quit the job, lose the opportunities and pay $40,000 to learn what I'm learning fist hand? I never got there. 

Did your parents ever forgive you for that? 

Yeah, it ended up working out alright. (Laughing) 

We've heard both sides, pro and con about school.  Do you think you are better off without going? 

Here's what I tell a lot of people, because that question eventually comes up. The neat thing about it, is that I've always worked with at least one person that has that formal education on my staff. I tell them I'm going to sit down with you and tell you how I did it, then I'm going to have you sit down with "Jason" and he's going to tell you how he did it. This is a decision only you can make. You have to have the willpower and you have to understand you.

I knew I had the discipline to do the things that are school taught. I knew I would read the books and check out the magazines. I knew I'd go online and take a management or sanitation correspondence class. If you don't think you have that structure in your life you might want to go to school. My passion for learning was so strong, I thought to myself, I'm just going to be wasting time and it would frustrate me to be in school.  

You already had a taste of what was out there. 

Right, exactly. When Joey's was really doing well, here I am the p.m. sous chef 18-19 years old and we needed more people, so Jim hired two CIA graduates to come in and help. Middle of the night we yell, we need more Hollandaise and the CIA graduate walks out there and pulls out a book! He's looking through the book, finds Hollandaise and blows it.

I said to him, "Look, you made it one day in class, it's not your fault. These guys have had me making it every day for the last three years. You don't have the training or the practice. That's a hard sauce to make." One day in class is not going to cut it. The practical experience will get you there.  

Then I had the American Culinary Federation (ACF) which I joined, it was an opportunity for me to get a piece of paper, Certified Executive Chef diploma. To even qualify to apply for a CEC you're seven (7) years running a kitchen. I had five (5) years over a CIA grad before I applied for the paperwork.

I think my opinion has changed more so now. The technical side of this business has ramped up. It's gotten more technical, so some of the things you pick up at school are more invaluable and you couldn't just 'pick them up.'

I think the answer to that question, 10 years ago would have been one thing, 20 years ago would have been another. Today, I'd strongly urge most people to attend school. If you've got the time and money, get it out of the away and learn most of those things you need to learn. Then give yourself five (5) years in a good kitchen, or several good kitchens. 

Is that fear ingrained in you from your parents? 

No, not at all. My mother said I would go around the house at 9 or 10 years old with a paint brush. She'd give me a paint brush with nothing on it and I'd be painting the walls. I'd go back and get the spots that I'd missed. I was so detailed and intense at a young age and I didn't know why. 

It's how you are wired. Are you a believer in that your mindset determines what comes to you ion life? 

Yes , if you are looking at something negatively that's what you're going to get.

So along with the money went the 'so called' friends? 

Oh yeah. A kid that was living like a king with me, for 17 years, flew around the world, not so much as a phone call or a text since the newspaper put me on the front page. I'm not a paycheck any more, he's done with me. 

It's a very telling thing, knowing who is with you, when you don't have anything to give them any more. 

What has happened to commitment? It blows my mind. 

Lou:: You said something when we first started this: Trust, Respect and Loyalty. my life mantra. I think it's very hard in these times for people to respect others, because when you really look at their lives, how they work and conduct themselves with others when no one is around, they've never respected themselves let alone learned how to respect others.. 

...it's going to come back. Agreed. Let's move on...You have cooked for some prettyaAmazing people. Tell us how that started.

That was back when Cajun and Creole was having its national stage. We were invited up to the Crosby Open Golf Tournament. It's when ESPN was new and was covering it. The whole cast and crew of Hill Street Blues, Alan Thicke, The Crosby family, and so on, you get the picture on who was in attendance. 

Sure do. 

They just went nuts. They'd never experienced Cajun Creole, didn't know anything about it. That particular Open was a tribute to Bing, the one where they donated the picture of him. To have Cajun/Creole cuisine selected to be the featured cuisine of that event was pretty neat.  

And the doors of opportunity just kept opening for you. How old were you? 

I was seventeen. 

That was before the Moonlighting and Cybill. 

Yes. Cybill was after that and then Hong Kong. 

Let's talk about Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Hilton does a promotion every year, it is two weeks long. They pick something they want to feature from the standpoint of cuisine. The chef actually takes over the main dining room of the Hong Kong Hilton and that year's decision was the American Harvest promotion. As they thought about what was American cuisine, they had to default because Cajun/Creole is the only true American born cuisine.

They picked that cuisine and brought us out to Hong Kong and we literally took over. The menu was our menu for those two weeks. I learned a bunch about Asian food working with Chinese chefs, going to their markets and working in the kitchens with them.

It was the first time I had ever seen their level of professionalism. Any time I'd ever traveled and cooked for anyone anywhere, they always offer staff to do things for you. I'll never forget them. We had two heavy weeks of work and I go downstairs the first day and the German chef (who was the executive chef) says, "You going to go ahead and give us the recipes and show us what you want with these dishes and then we'll see you when dinner starts? You won't be here much I'm sure." I said, "No, I plan on working every shift. This is my special food, y'all never seen this before."

He said, "No, you just make each dish once in front of my chefs, the Chinese guys, and you're done. Your dish will be replicated to perfection every time." I said, "Okay, I've never seen that before." Sure enough, I went through every dish one time and that was it. They actually improved some of them.  

That's amazing. 

Yeah, it was. Absolutely amazing! 

What did you garner from that experience that you still use today? 

I was heavily into Asian before I went there. I worked in a purely Chinese restaurant when I was 15 in the summertimes. I'd work from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. Then I'd drive to Donaldsonville and work from 3 to close. I was the only American speaking person in the kitchen.  

You were working in a kitchen 18-19 hours a day? 

Oh yeah and loving it, wishing there was another 15 more hours in a day. 

I'll never forget, I got one of those car cell phones, the kind they installed into the car. Remember this is back in 1980. My phone number was 0069 because back then they numbered the phones by the actual number of phones in the state. I was the 69^th phone in the state of Louisiana. (Laughing) The bill was $1500.00 a month almost.  

Oh my God! 

But the only time I could communicate was the 30 minute drive from one job to the next. All the stuff had to be done; I talked to my family, etc., in those 30 minutes, because I worked from 8 a.m. to midnight every day. It's so funny when I look back at that thing (the phone).The advantage I had when I worked in that American-Asian restaurant, typically there is a Chinese owner, maybe even a Chinese chef but not very often. Laotian, Thai and Filipinos do all the work. They just want to learn enough to steal it from you and go open their own restaurant. That's why there are so many Asian restaurants. The Chinese Chef/Owners cannot share anything with them.

This owner saw this as an opportunity with me and taught me every single recipe in his repertoire. I had to go in, in the morning, before they came in and I gave them the sauces done, the marinades done, and they assembled food. They never learned how to make the recipes. The trade up was that I taught him American and French cuisine. 

What did he do with what you taught him? 

It was just a passion for him. We all ended up in Destin because of the oil crash in Baton Rouge and everything just went to hell. We saw the opportunity to come here. This was a very accomplished Chinese chef. He had cooked for Emperors and other high profile people in Asia.  He was just fed up with Baton Rouge and he came with me to Destin as my first sous chef. A man 25 years older than me. He said, "I want to come and work for you and be your chef."

It was neat because my Chinese background got so strong. He was a very intelligent man and he'd sit back and look at me doing something and asked if he could try.  When he did, he'd insert a Chinese technique into a completely French, Gulf Coast or Italian dish. I couldn't identify it, but he said, "This would be easier to do if you use this Chinese technique." It reinforced the fusion part that we talked about cuisines and certain techniques that can blend but doesn't have to be apparent or stated. My passion for Chinese food came from loving to eat it.  

I can relate to that without question. I could probably eat Chinese 5 out of 7 days a week.  (Laughing) Let's talk about coming to Destin, which was a life changing move for you. 

I was 18 years old and had been the corporate and executive chef, running all seven locations of Ralph and Kacoo's Seafood Restaurant in Baton Rouge. I wasn't crazy about my role, but it was a good experience to be a corporate executive chef.  

A couple years after I left Joey's, the owner called me asked me to replace Philippe as the executive chef. I told him I was not ready. He was pissed and bothered by it and tried to talk me out of it. But I was just not ready. 

Another year and a half went by and he called me back up and asked me if I thought I was ready yet. I said, "I do, but I don't know how crazy I am about Baton Rouge any more." He said, "Perfect, because I'm opening a restaurant in Destin."  

Jim asked me to give him 6 months at Joey's in Baton Rouge and then I would come and open the restaurant in Destin and he'd make me a partner. I opened Marina Café as the executive chef /partner in 1987 (I was 20). I structured a deal with him that was a sweat equity deal. I owned 10% and for every 100,000 dollars in profit that I brought in I had to invest 100 percent of that into buying the next 10%. I never saw any of the money I just converted it back into more stock.  

We were doing so well in Destin, there were only 3 fine dining restaurants in Destin and we got every accolade under the sun, Golden Spoon, etc., you name it, we had it. Every night was Saturday night; we didn't know what day of the week it was. Literally from April 1^st to August 15^th we did fine dining 600 covers a night. It was printing money, $500,000 a month in revenue from a dinner restaurant when back in the day's entrees cost $20.  

Problem with the business relationship was that I was buying the restaurant way too fast. All of a sudden at 26 I owned 26% of the restaurant.  He started playing nasty game where he took his salary to $500,000 a year and took his travel and entertainment to close to a million. He drained the restaurant of any profits. Now there are no longer profits. He figured he had me good enough. It was the principle of the thing now. 

I walked up into the office one day and I said to Jim that I was having a tough time with this deal, we're partners. He chuckled. I asked what that was supposed to mean. He said yeah we're partners on paper but you're never going to be my partner.

I said, "Really?" I walked downstairs, cleaned all my accolades, photos, etc. and put them in my truck. I took the keys and set them on his desk and that was the last day that I worked at Marina Café. 

What happened to it? 

It's still there, it's doing miserably. They've been through 13 chefs since I left in 1998.  

That's more than one per year. 

Oh yeah. He was a difficult man to work for, but that was okay for me. I had high standards. I didn't care if he pushed me. The owner would go into the kitchen and throw a plate of food back at you across the line. I thought no big deal. If I didn't give him the opportunity to throw something back at me then we're good, right?  I never had a plate of food brought back, for anything, 7 days a week for 13 years. Food costs at 28%, he budgeted 33%. I brought an extra $130,000 he didn't expect to make. I could have walked with it out the back door. Took steaks home, etc, but I never did.

I went down the street and opened a place called Creehan's Market. Basically I knocked off Eatsy's, had a scratch bakery, pasta kitchen, gourmet NY style deli, Sushi raw bar, Johnny Rocket's style hamburger joint, etc. 100,000 square foot facility with a $3 million arcade in it. Thirty (30) investors put up close to $50 million dollars to do this deal. They said we should name it Creehan's Market. Great concept, just a few flaws, even though it was located in the busiest shopping and highest grossing (at the time) outlet mall in the country. When the stores were open, there were no parking spaces, which were the day parking problem. We thought, okay, we'll have parking at night. When the stores closed no one came to the mall! Numbers just weren't there. 

Our problem in Destin, is that people love it here. How can you not love it? They all wanted to make it Atlanta, Chicago or Miami.  Destin wanted to have something like that hoping for 4000 people a day and they only had 12, 000 residents (at that time)?!  That's unrealistic and what happened to everything in Destin. There are 300,000 beds for rent every week and more than half are empty. 

Sounds like the real estate issues in our part of Florida.  

I don't know if anyone ever got the inflated nonsense. The space that Jim (Marina Café) and I built for $1 million dollars, he turned away $50 million in 2007 'cause he thought he'd get more. He got so tired of the offers that he asked for $3 million dollar cash deposit non-refundable for any reason and three (3) guys didn't close. He made $9 million on deposits. Today, he couldn't get $6 million dollars for that location. His highest bid was $60 million dollars and he passed it up, thinking it'll go up. It's crazy. 

Why are you here....Beach Walk? It changes what you were doing. 

I believe in fate. I'd grown really big and December last year, I had the toughest time in my life. I'd never seen failure, I'd never gone backwards an inch. 2007-2009 I'd put every dollar I made back into businesses that were sucking down 40-50,000 dollars a month negative cash flow. In December, I said this is stupid, I was out of money and it was also stupid to try and fight it and get more money. The writing was on the wall and it was time to let this go. I closed down everything except my great events center, the cooking school, and filed personal bankruptcy. I told myself that something would come to me and that this would be okay. It wasn't two weeks after I shut everything down, and two guys walk up to me at the event center. They said, "Tim Creehan?"  I said, "Well, I'm not admitting that openly to anyone right now. You don't have a badge or are with the IRS are you?" (Laughter)  They said no, they had met me one time when I cooked for Senator Clary and "We have a real neat property in Destin that we think you are a perfect fit for." I asked them where it was and they told me Henderson Park Inn. I told them I knew it well as I had designed it. 

When the Abbott brothers built this they had no restaurant experience and they came to me and asked me to design the kitchen for them and maybe get involved in consulting and running it. In 1995 I designed this kitchen and restaurant space.  

Full circle. 

I didn't ask for any money, I thought that maybe it would come back to me one day. I walked in here and said, "Holy shit, how do I do, what I do, in this space?"  When I got here it was 22 seats, I made it 43. I had to face reality that it was going to be a big change. Then when I sat down with a list of 100s of employees I worked with over the years, I decided that if I was going to come back, I was going to do it right. I was going to work with the best professionals that I'd been around. I was going to pick the top people and call them in that order. Everyone I called from the top of the list down said yes. 

Says a lot about you too! 

We got together and I asked how they wanted to do this. They said they didn't want a bunch of rules, managers and bosses. They just wanted to get together and share their passion. That's what I wanted to do. It became that every dish was prepared every day and we shopped for the ingredients daily.  There was no more big restaurant business. Within the first month I said, "Holy shit, this works. It works in a big way." 

This is very intimate and a very relaxed atmosphere. It's a perfect fit.  Your food is very intimate. It's not inaccessible and is very personal.  Looking back now, I think it actually fit your style, you just didn't know it. 

Yes, I agree. From a business standpoint, I didn't see how you could make money this small. I went from $25,000 a week payroll to a $5000. I can have a slow week it's no big deal. You can't have a slow week with a $25,000 payroll. If we have a slow week, no one's stressing out, losing their mind, bankers aren't getting nervous. One of the other things I decided when I opened this up, everything is on a cash basis. I don't ever want credit again. 

On the business end you had to make a huge adjustment. 

Oh yeah, I haven't taken a paycheck in three years. I used to fly first class 5 days a month, I drove 2-3 exotic sports cars......I got nothing. I've got my puppy; I live in a house that's going to be foreclosed on. This is just starting over, but I believe in it. 

We didn't expect to hear that. 

I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life. People who know me well, say that I look better and never happier. 

We're surprised at how you are handling it. 

I started from nothing, it's not so difficult to start over again, when you are doing what you love.