Chaos, pressure, stress … it doesn’t sound like the ideal recipe for making a life decision, but for Seth Charest, 30, executive chef at the Southside restaurant No. 10 steakhouse, it was the perfect mix, one that led him to a culinary career.
“I was at a charity event cooking in the room with the jellyfish at the Tennessee Aquarium, and the grill was outside and four floors down,” he recalls. “So for every course, I was sprinting up and down the stairs carrying food for what felt like 200 people. I was working at the hot-flame grill, too, then running back up and plating every plate with the chef like my life depended on it.”
In the end, he says, everything came out on time, looked beautiful and the event was a big success, leading to kudos for the culinary team from the guests for a job well done.
“I was working so fast, so hard, though, that I didn’t even notice how difficult it was. It’s a huge rush being under the chaos and the pressure. You get obsessed with it. As I was packing up the truck to head back to the restaurant to clean all our equipment and work even longer after that, I knew I wanted to be a chef.”
A native of Clearwater, Florida, Charest and his family moved to Mount Juliet, Tennessee, when he was in fifth grade. Following high school, he enrolled in the engineering department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. For the next few years, he dabbled in several trades, from lawn care to construction, but it was a job at Feed Table + Tavern — the restaurant where he worked the aquarium dinner — that gave him his start in the culinary world.