At 19, Cindy Wolfe made a decision that would change the direction of her life. She dropped out of college and moved back in with her parents who were in Charleston, South Carolina. She dreamed of owning a restaurant someday. And her dad suggested she get a job at one to try it out. So she got an apprenticeship at a fine dining restaurant called Silks.

I walked into that kitchen and realized within a day that this is what I want to do.

I just love the moment I got my hands on food. I love the moment that the chef came by and

told me my piping skills weren't what they should be. And, you know,

I needed to redo that. And he was like, mean to me. And that was good. It was good. I'm like, I get it. Yes, chef. I get it, man. And the pastry chef was like, here, clean these two flats of strawberries. And it took me forever. And she was like, now I'm going to show you how to do it the right way and quicker. I'm like, oh, okay.

She was hooked.

She quickly moved up to being a

sous chef, and on a rare vacation to Fort Myers, Florida, she happened to drive by a diner that had

an unusual specialty alligator. And I'm like, oh my God, I've never had alligator. I have to stop.

And I stopped and had it, and it had to have been fresh.

And it was fried.

And it was just so unbelievably sweet and good.

And I really didn't know what to expect from it.

I'd never heard anybody talk about eating alligator at that point in my life.

Okay, so decades later, that alligator memory came back.

Cindy is an executive chef now of a James Beard

award-winning restaurant in Baltimore called Charleston. She opened the place in her early 30s

with her now ex-husband Tony Foreman, and 28 years later, she still runs the kitchen. She's always

looking for ways to bring new ideas to the

menu. And recently, that Fort Myers trip came back to mine. I'm like, I should get an alligator.

So I call my, yeah, yeah, I'm like, how do we get an alligator? Here we go, chef. It's a good

question. How do you get an alligator?

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