Scott grew up in what he calls a "housing development—a project,
really", unlike me, who grew up in a leafy green wonderland of brick
colonial homes, distant lawn-mowers, backyard croquet games, gurgling
goldfish ponds and Cheeveresque cocktail parties. Scott went to
Brookline High, a public school where the emphasis seems to have been
on technical skills; they had a culinary program and a restaurant open to
the public. I went to private school, a tweedy institution where kids wore
Brooks Brothers jackets with the school seal and Latin motto (Veritas
fortissimo) on the breast pocket. Scott learned early that he might have
to actually work for a living, whereas I, a product of the New Frontier
and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed
me a living—all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than
my parents.
At an age when I was helping to rack up my friends' parents' expensive
automobiles and puking up Boone's Farm on Persian carpets, Scott was
already working—for Henry Kinison at the Brookline High restaurant.
He was doing it for money. Junior year, he took a job in a "Hungarian
Continental" joint, and as a fishmonger at Boston's Legal Seafood. One
worked, and that was it. Scott, though still unmoved by the glories of
food, found that he preferred cooking to his other imagined career
option: electrical engineer or electrician.
His early mentor, Kinison, urged him to attend Johnson and Wales'
culinary program in Providence, and along the lines of "Why not?" he
went along.
He hated it.
While studying, he began working for Bob Kinkaid at the much-vaunted
Harvest restaurant in Cambridge, and if there is a single epiphany in
Scott Bryan's life, a single moment when he decided what it was he was
going to do for the rest of his life, it was there—when he first tasted
Kinkaid's lobster salad with foie gras and truffle vinaigrette. His reaction