This year, James Beard Award-nominated chef Dawn Burrell finds herself in a full circle moment. Twenty-four years after competing in the long jump at the 2000 Olympics, she is back, attending her first Olympic Games as a spectator and civilian, more or less.
The Top Chef: Portland finalist recently traveled to Paris in July for the Summer Olympics, where she prepared grazing boards and hors d’oeuvres for the Team USA house on Monday, July 29, and discussed her journey from athlete to chef. What she has learned, Burrell says, is that though transitions can be challenging, the skillsets needed to achieve success in sports and in restaurants are far more similar than some might think.
Burrell tells Eater Houston that her Olympic training has given her a different level of determination, drive, and discipline, which, in turn, shaped her journey to become a respected chef. “I’m certain that what I expect out of myself is unwavering and uncompromising. I need to be the best that I can possibly be,” she says. “I’ve been in places where I’ve put my body to the absolute limit, and I came out good on the other side. Therefore, I think anything is possible.”
Burrell further detailed her journey in an episode of Beyond High Performance, a podcast that highlights the power of coaching, noting that her training made her resilient. “As an athlete, you have to push yourself to the Olympic level — beyond what you think you can do physically. You have a coach to help you do that, and once you break these thresholds, a whole new world of your athletic abilities becomes open to you,” she says in the episode. But Burrell contends she wasn’t always confident as an athlete or chef. Not long after placing in the 2000 Olympics, she sustained an injury in 2001 that would plague her for the remainder of her athletic career. Each year, Burrell says she would increase her training and then re-injure herself, and “every year, my heart was broken.”
Eventually, Burrell gave herself an ultimatum. If she didn’t make the 2008 Olympic team, she’d officially end her career. That time came sooner than she hoped, when, in 2008 at the national trials, she injured herself again. Burrell stuck to her game plan and switched focus — instead deepening her interest in cooking, a passion that had deep roots within her family.
Burrell tells Eater she only realized as an adult that her family had a history of chefs. Her uncle had worked a 20-year career as a hotel chef following his time in the Navy. Her aunt is a culinary director in an educational system in Delaware, and one of her cousins trains high school students for major culinary competitions. As she deepened her focus on cooking, Burrell learned that similar to the athletic world, “coaches,” though rare, existed within the culinary world in some of its most elite kitchens. “I’m a good student, regardless of whether you’re going to teach me directly or not. I’m going to watch it and I’m going to learn it, and once I learn it. It’s going to be mine,” Burrell says in Beyond High Performance. “You have to find someone who’s willing to teach you, and so I was very careful where I chose to work.”
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In the podcast episode, Burrell says Houston chef Monica Pope was one of her earliest mentors. The chef gave Burrell her first restaurant job during one of the hardest periods in her life — Burrell says she was mourning her athletic career, a marriage, and her father, who died in 2008. She failed to land a job and a work visa during a stint in London and pursued culinary school as a way to survive the trauma. Pope saw something in her, she says, and hired her to work special events and farmers’ markets before giving her a lead position at her now-closed restaurant Sparrow. She taught Burrell how to understand and recreate a recipe and how to captivate an audience while cooking. Most importantly, Pope gave her confidence, Burrell says.
Austin’s renowned sushi restaurant Uchi was one of her toughest schools, Burrell says. She wasn’t always confident working in the highly detailed environment, nor was she good at it in the beginning, she says, but she went in daily as “a sponge.” The work paid off. In three years, Burrell progressed, moving from prep cook to sous chef.
These momentous, sometimes mountainous, experiences remind Burrell of her path to the Olympics. “My perspective is a little different. My discipline is different,” she says.