Brooke Williamson has known she wanted to be a chef since she was a kid. “By the age of six or seven, I found myself watching Julia Child and Jacques Pépin on the TV Saturday mornings instead of Saturday morning cartoons,” she said in a 2021 Food Network Obsessed podcast. She would then take what she learned into her childhood kitchen and “go experiment.” Based on this precocious behavior, it’s really no surprise that Brooke became a sous chef at the ripe old age of 19.

It was around this time that Brooke decided to apply for culinary school, but her then-boss and mentor, Michelin-starred chef Ken Franks, gave her some unconventional advice instead. “Ken said to me, ‘Why not just work off of life experience and stay here? You have an entry-level job in a good kitchen and we’ll get you to where you want to be,’” she recounted.

Brooke took his advice but also understood that, “Because I didn't go to culinary school, I did definitely feel like I needed to spend the extra time educating myself in the fundamentals of cooking.” In her spare time, she worked on her knife skills, spent hours mastering sauces and read cookbooks to further her self-imposed education. Brooke also acknowledged that she had some incredible co-workers who stepped in as pseudo-teachers, too. “There was a sous chef at the Argyle hotel who really took me under his wing and made a point of teaching me a new technique or method almost every day, so I had my own personal culinary school,” she said.

This self-taught process certainly paid off for Brooke because by the time she was barely of legal drinking age, the LA Times was already reviewing her work. She admitted that, “The press that I got was partially because of my age and my gender, and I stuck out among a city full of older, male chefs.” However, Brooke’s talent certainly lived up to the hype and she soon became the youngest female chef to cook at the James Beard House, which is considered one of the highest honors in the culinary industry. That is to say, she wasn’t just a media darling; she was the real deal.

That said, proving yourself to your peers, especially in a male-dominated industry, was something that Brooke knew she still had to do. She recounted being a “small female in a kitchen full of men … It was motivation to me … proving to people that I was more than what I maybe looked like,” she said.

These days, Brooke has nothing left to prove. Between running multiple successful restaurants, writing a cookbook (that was even endorsed by her childhood idol, Jacques Pépin!), raising her son and appearing on multiple Food Network shows such as Tournament of Champions (which she won), Brooke’s career speaks for itself.