Chef Matthew

Chef Matthew’s cooking career started as most cooking careers do, in the childhood home.

“The first time it hit me… the people that controlled the household were the people that controlled the food.” says Chef Matthew.

“My Nana was the shit. My Nana was the matriarch. No matter how wonderful my Grandpa and Uncle were they still didn’t control the house. Whoever was making the food was controlling the situation and making it happen.”

Food is a huge part of Chef Matthew’s family and always has been.
His family has enjoyed food from all over the world as long as he can remember.

“Learning foods from other worlds, places and countries has always been what my family’s been about. The things that my family eats have always been a collage from every country in the world since the beginning of time. As long as I can remember, I’ve been eating food from Germany, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Russia and every other country you can imagine.” Chef Matthew confides.

“I remember very simply Nana making roast pork and sauerkraut, a family experience everywhere with the food we were making and eating, a combination of cigarette smoke and the food we were making billowing throughout the kitchen.”

Chef Matthew started as an adolescent at a place called Luther’s Bar-B-Q in Chicago scrubbing pots at thirteen years old.

He was a pot scrubber at first then graduated to dishwasher. He started becoming friends with the manager of Luther’s. The manager found it amazing that a child of thirteen had a work ethic and drive at the same time. Chef Matthew explained to him that it came from his father and grandfather both of which had worked hard their entire lives.

Chef Matthew quickly became fry cook and started running their regular service line, making French fries, fried foods and flipping burgers.

Here the work ethic learned by his Dad and Grandfather proved to be priceless.

They continued to promote him until he ran the regular service line. At the age of fifteen he ran that side of the kitchen.

Then he was promoted to ‘smokehouse grunt’; “There I absolutely fell in love with the combination of fire, wood and food and I learned how to smoke and charbroil properly, from the six to seven hours it took to cook a whole beef brisket to the seven minutes it takes to cook a steak.”

While still at Luther’s Chef Matthew started culinary school at Moraine Valley Community College and upon graduating moved to Florida.

He came to Florida and started working at Peter’s Place International Café on Beach Drive.

After Peter’s Place he worked at the Don Cesar Beach Resort as a Sous Chef in the King Charles Room for about three years. He left the Don Cesar in order to spend more time with his children as they were growing up.

“I worked three crappy jobs to suit their schedule, I worked at 7-11, waiting tables and was line cook in order to be there when the kids left for school and came home in the afternoon.”

When his children were older he went back to work at Peter’s Place in the Barnett Towers in downtown St. Petersburg, they had just built a brand new restaurant.

After spending time at Peter’s Place Chef Matthew went on to be a Chef at Kash-N-Karry running different culinary programs around Pinellas County.

While working for Kash-N-Karry he was offered a job rebuilding a warehouse in St. Petersburg. The owner of the warehouse was also the owner of Rohrer Prosthetics.

Through working with the owner at the warehouse he was offered a job as a prosthetic lab technician.

“As it turns out, being a lab tech has a lot of recipe and procedure like cooking does.” Said Chef Matthew. He took to it “like a fish in water” and has been a prosthetic lab technician ever since.