How Pro Athletes Built a Second Career as Chefs

For Masako Morishita, the James Beard-award winning chef at Perry’s in Washington, D.C., being a professional cheerleader was much harder than being a chef. 

Before Morishita decided to pursue a career in restaurants, she spent five years on the cheerleading squad for the Washington Commanders. During that time, she worked a full-time job and regularly trained until after midnight, cheering at games and traveling on weekends. In contrast, she says the hours and physical work of a restaurant actually feel easier.

“Being a chef seems like a completely different thing, but I learned a lot of important skills as a cheerleader that have been really, really useful in becoming a chef,” she says. 

Morishita is part of a small cohort of professional athletes who have built flourishing second careers as chefs. For these chefs, the intense physical challenge, team dynamics, and singular focus required to thrive in sports have helped them prosper in the restaurant industry.

Among this small community is 2024 F&W Best New Chef Lawrence “LT” Smith, the chef of Chilte in Phoenix. He credits his time as a Division 1 college football player and in the Indianapolis Colts’ summer training camp with much of his success in the kitchen. He says the singular focus required for professional football has served him well, as has his ability to work as a team.

Smith says the brigade system, the traditional French structure for a kitchen, is similar to a football team.

“An expo is like your coach,” he explains. “They’re not necessarily in the trenches, but they’re calling the plays and seeing the overview. Whoever is your lead, talking with the expo, they’re like the quarterback.” The comparison goes on, he says, as does the sense of competition that exists. 

But, according to Smith, there’s often tension on a football team and in a kitchen, between the need to compete with the cook next to you, while also working together to achieve a common goal.

“Kitchens are a competitive place, but they’re also a team,” Smith says. “When I’m working expo and I’m like the coach, I’ve learned to try to encourage that competition, while also trying to make sure everyone is working together.”

Morishita’s management style is also informed by her time as an athlete, though she sees it as less competitive, perhaps because of the more collaborative, team nature of a cheerleading squad.  

“Everybody comes from different backgrounds, different cultures,” she says of cheerleading. “But we have to achieve the same goal, it’s the same as the kitchen.” Today, Morishita’s kitchen is predominantly women, and she tries to offer positive feedback just as much as negative. As with cheerleading, she believes the energy of the group is essential to the restaurant’s success.

“In cheerleading, I would talk to an individual and say ‘your dance looks really good’ or whatever it is,” Morishita said. “Teaching prep [in a kitchen] is kind of similar because if my team members are doing better on just a small thing and I point it out, you can see their faces light up.” That kind of granular feedback is part of how she creates a sense that everyone in the kitchen is working toward a common goal.

Dawn Burrell, a former Olympic long jumper who went on to a culinary career as a chef, appeared on season 18 of Top Chef. Burrell compares the competition in a kitchen to the track and field Olympic team. There’s a collective goal of winning points, she says, but everyone is trying to perfect their own skill set. The ability to measurably improve, and to be able to compete on shows like Top Chef, was part of what drew her to the kitchen in the first place. That transition has not always been simple, though. 

“For better or for worse, I had learned to measure my success through competitions and how I placed, whether it’s good or bad,” Burrell said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I can go on these shows and see how I measure up.’”

It is, of course, much easier to measure yourself against a competitor in long jump than it is in the kitchen. For that reason she says the Top Chef finale was far more stressful than even her time competing in the Olympics. Over the years, though, Burrell says she came to understand that competition might not be the best way to measure success in the kitchen.

“[Competing] fueled my determination to learn more about my past and what’s authentically mine,” she says. “The way that I build flavor and how that measures up to how another person builds flavor can be different, not worse, if we even need to measure it at all.”