Cooking Up a New Outlook

Joseph Messina reckons he was born to cook.

The friendly but determined 16-year-old remembers helping out in his grandmother’s warm kitchen, with the fragrance of fresh basil wafting and the faces of well-fed relatives beaming, knowing this was good.

It was good even when life outside the kitchen turned bad: There were family problems and his parents divorced.

It was good even when the pressures of adolescence--schoolwork, drugs, runaway hormones--tore into him with a fury. Suddenly he was an angry teenager, smoking dope, lashing out at his parents, his grades sinking. His parents confronted him with his drug use, and he agreed last September to enter a residential drug rehab program.

But through it all, there was food and his love of cooking. Now the teenager from Sun Valley is honing his passion into a promising skill that is winning him acclaim.

While he continues in the Phoenix House program in Lake View Terrace, Joey is taking a culinary class.

He recently entered a regional cooking contest for high school seniors sponsored by the Art Institute, a Pittsburgh-based arts and culinary-oriented school with 20 locations, including Los Angeles. His shrimp cocktail and sauteed breast of chicken chasseur with fresh broccoli and rice pilaf won him first place among 30 West Coast entrants.

Joey leaves later this week for the institute’s National Culinary Cook-off Scholarship Competition in Atlanta; it’s a chance for a $30,000 scholarship to an Art Institute culinary program. His philosophy of cooking is simple: People must eat and it is his task to make it enjoyable.

“I like seeing the expression on people’s faces when they take that first bite and it’s like, ‘Wow.’ I take pride knowing that I made that,” said Joey, who resembles Wally Cleaver from the old “Leave It to Beaver” TV show, but with darker features and fashionably long sideburns.

That sense of self-assurance stood out to the judges who looked at Joey’s initial entry, which included a resume, an essay and a photo and written presentation of a dinner menu (double-stuffed supreme of chicken, garlic zucchini with orange segments and warm lobster fajita salad).

“In his essay he talks about washing pots and pans as being as important as doing the fancy work, understanding that it’s not all glitter and glamour; it’s hard work and grease,” said Joe Zoellin, one of three judges who screened his application.

Joey’s single-minded pursuit of his goal, against long odds, has helped him confront the uncertainties in his life. And his enthusiasm has spread to other young Phoenix House residents who see him as a role model.

“Some of the other, younger kids are watching him and saying ‘Hey, I can do that too,’ ” said Brian Moody, Joey’s vocational counselor at the Phoenix Academy, an educational annex of Phoenix House.

It is not hard to see why he would inspire such regard. He is quick to smile but exudes a quiet intensity. It is evident when he takes a paring knife to a young spring carrot destined to join a medley of sauteed squash and roasted new potatoes, part of the Atlanta menu for which he is practicing in one of the Art Institute’s gleaming kitchens in Santa Monica.

A thick chunk of the carrot is deftly and quickly sliced into an elegant, angular wedge. The medley will soon be paired with slices of roast tenderloin in a wild mushroom sauce that will be the entree for the finals.

He is here with the regional cook-off’s second runner-up, Lindsey Bishop, 20, of Las Vegas and they are under the watchful eye of one of the institute’s instructors, Chef Kurt Struwe. All three will go to Atlanta for the competition with about 30 regional winners from across the country.

They will be judged on their cooking skills, of course, but also on their comportment and general knowledge of sanitation and safety practices.

“If you see meat left out of the refrigerator, or butter or mayonnaise, don’t be shy, put it away,” Struwe advises Joey and Bishop as they set about preparing a Caesar salad that is part of the Atlanta menu. “That’s what the judges are looking for, to see if you’re smart enough to notice.”

Joey has something of a gunslinger quality about him, whipping out the slim black leather case that houses his set of professional knives (worth $150 and paid for with a state vocational grant).

Bishop relates a story from the regional competition. All the other competitors were using the rather plain plates provided to them to display their dishes, when Joey whipped out a silver platter he borrowed for his shrimp cocktail. He had asked the judges ahead of time if it would be OK and they had said yes.

“People were jealous,” said Bishop, who has an 18-month-old son and works as a cleaner for a maid service. “But we knew right from the start he was going to win it. As soon as we saw him work, we said, ‘He has it, hands down; we just have to figure out who’s in second place.’ ”

When asked about role models, Joey doesn’t mention Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Legasse or any other star chefs, but credits his mentor, Chef Rudy Garcia, a faculty member in Mission College’s culinary program who teaches a food course at Phoenix House.

The night before the regional competition, the two drove around for hours, Garcia pumping him up like a football coach would before the big game. Garcia, a former executive chef with the Hilton hotels, does have something of a Vince Lombardi about him, a no-nonsense taskmaster who expects his charges to succeed.

“A lot of them will end up in places like Black Angus, Macaroni Grill and other high-end chains as prep cooks or cook’s helpers,” said Garcia. “But there are a few who want to be chefs and have the ability, and that’s where I see Joseph in 10 years.”

Joey credits his family with supporting his career path, especially his father, a Food Network devotee who would start cooking a pasta sauce Friday night for Sunday’s dinner and who taught Joey how to use a knife when he was 11.

In Atlanta, Joey will have all the men in his family--his dad, grandfather and two uncles from Boston--cheering him on.

“I remember on his 12th birthday he wanted to make real homemade pasta, so we went out and bought a pasta machine,” recalled his father, Joe Messina, 41, a Sun Valley technology consultant. “It took us three hours to make a pound of pasta and I told him it’d be another 10 years before we tried that again. But it got to the point where he could crank it out in no time.”

At Phoenix House, Joey spends most of his free time in the facility’s kitchen, either working on his own or, as on one recent day, helping to prepare a lunch of Spanish rice, chicken tacos, refried beans and fresh fruit compote for 140 residents, ages 13 to 18. This is in addition to attending regular classes--where he maintains a 3.8 grade-point average--and group counseling and therapy sessions.

He also is learning basic life skills--handling responsibilities and managing his emotions--that will be important when he graduates from Phoenix House in June.

“That was probably my biggest issue,” he said, sitting in the shade in the hot courtyard. “Anything would tick me off, and marijuana only enhanced my mood swings.”

Drugs, he said, were easier to come by than alcohol. But he takes responsibility for his own actions and doesn’t blame peer pressure.

At Phoenix House, he said, he is learning that when you do good, good consequences usually follow. The hard work and satisfaction of cooking only reinforce that message. In the end, he has chosen to follow his own heart.

In Atlanta, he expects to have a blast--and to win.

“I want it to be like it was at the regionals,” he said, smiling. “I want to blow everyone away.”