Sara Turney, 36, has been cooking as long as she can remember. In fact, her family used to joke that she was born with flour in her hair and a knife in her hand. Cooking, she said, runs in the family.
“My grandmother, Elva, would never have called herself a chef. She would always just say, ‘Well, I can cook a little bit.’ But she was a chef through and through,” Turney said. “She ran a kitchen in a gas station, but everyone knew who she was.”
Readying for the first-ever Chattanooga World Food Truck Festival, which will be July 11 at the Tennessee Riverpark, Turney, the event creator and organizer, talked about what led her to bring the festival to the Scenic City, as well as her background as a chef, both in and out of the food truck business.
Q: Where did you receive your culinary training or did you come up through the school of hard knocks?
A: The real story of how I became the chef I am today is rooted in the hardest things I have ever gone through in my life. I was a single mother with three children by the time I was 19 years old. I was a domestic violence survivor who had to flee to a homeless shelter to get away from my abuser and start over. Every day, I’d wait at the bus stop in front of a restaurant called Table 310. It was the kind of restaurant that had chefs in white coats with service so tight you could hear a pin drop.