Main Street Meats chef de cuisine Jonathan Ferguson, 42, calls Mobile, Alabama, home, but his native Louisiana is perhaps where he developed a knack for making good gumbo since his family didn’t cotton to cooking.
“Not at all,” he says. “I come from a family of lawyers, engineers and educators.”
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But having loved dining in restaurants from his early childhood, he realized he could work in one for a career. Once that was decided, “There was no looking back,” he says.
He started from the ground up, washing dishes at a pizza place in college before moving to Chicago. For 15 years, he worked his way up through the kitchen at places he describes as neighborhood joints and even a country club. He then moved to Houston, where he worked at Coltivare, a popular Italian eatery.