I Met Comedian George Willborn

My journey as a chef is an interesting one. My family is from a small town in Southern North Carolina. This is the place where it all started. We didn’t have much money but we never wanted for anything.

My grandmother spent a lot of time in her garden growing different vegetables and fruits. She we would harvest turnip greens, garden peas, squash, tomatoes and other vegetables.  Although the garden wasn’t the largest in the world she made the most of what she had.  One of my favorite meals to this very day consists of her cabbage and rice with fresh garden peas.  Scrumptious!  I am getting hungry as I think about it.  She would work miracles with what she had. She made fresh biscuits from scratch every night for dinner. One of my other favorites was her homemade cornbread stuffing.  I think I ate so much fried chicken growing up that I can’t eat anymore.

As a kid, I was always a little chubby, as you can imagine.  I ate a lot, I mean a lot!  I think I fell in love with food.  In retrospect, I understand now why I can walk into my kitchen and make a good meal out of almost anything.  My culinary journey has been influenced by many things but it all comes together as I reminisce over my life.  For example, Senator Fred Thompson was in my restaurant a couple of weeks ago for dinner so I decided that I wanted to make him something special.  In the middle of executing 400 covers for dinner, I decided that I would make him an amuse bouche.  This is a one bite item that is full of flavor, sometimes called tapas. 

Anyway, I made him roscuitto crusted scallops with fennel saute and basil infused olive oil in about 10 minutes without even thinking about it. I delivered the food to his table personally. He said he had hoped to meet me while he was here. I was very surprised.  Little did I know that he and his associates were guests of the hotel three days prior.  Senator Thompson said he had been enjoying our room service food three times a day so he had to come down to the restaurant before he left town. I was more than happy with those accolades.

On another occasion I was walking through the dining room and a guest stopped me and said, hey, are you the chef?  I said yes, how are you? He went on to tell me how much he loved the food and that he would love to bring his wife in next Sunday morning for lunch. He looked familiar but I didn’t know exactly who he was. I said sure come by anytime and I will make you something special.  When Sunday arrived, he came in with his wife.  He walked into the kitchen and started talking to me. We were preparing seafood but he wanted meat loaf so I said give me 30 minutes.   I ran back into the prep kitchen and whipped together ground beef, peppers, onions and seasonings.  I made the meat loaf and served it with mashed potatoes and gravy and French green beans.  He and his wife were so appreciative. They thanked me and left the restaurant. About an hour later he came back to thank me again and to give me one of his cards.  It turned out that it was comedian George Wilbourne from the Michael Baisden radio talk show.  Mr. Willborn gave me tickets to his comedy show and we are still friends to this day.  I have attached a photo of the two of us.  

Food and restaurants are so cool.....