Celebrity Chefs Who Worked At Fast Food Restaurants

It takes a unique set of skills to become a celebrity chef. Not only do your culinary chops need to be sharp enough to justify standing up on screen and telling other people how to cook, but you need a certain kind of character and resilience to go from "that guy on TV who cooks" to full celebrity status.

With that in mind, it's not entirely surprising that a significant number of celebrity chefs had their start in fast food. Anyone who's worked in the industry will tell you that few jobs build character or resilience quite like a stint in an establishment such as McDonald's or Burger King. This is high-pressured, fast-paced, tiresome work that gives you an accessible entry point to master the basics of food service — and imparts an immense amount of respect for the grind that goes into each meal.

Over the years, several high-profile chefs (some of whom have gone on to earn serious accolades, including Michelin stars) have opened up about their time working in the fast food industry. We've rounded up some of the biggest names who got their start flipping burgers, delivering pizzas, or manning the drive-thru — and may have even once been the employee responsible for crafting gyour Big Mac.

Bobby Flay has spent decades on the Food Network, having first joined the channel back in 1994. During his illustrious TV career, he's hosted the likes of "Hot Off the Grill with Bobby Flay" and "Bobby Flay's Barbecue Addiction," as well as becoming the first celebrity chef to gain a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and launching his own burger chain, creatively named Bobby's Burgers.

Before the burgers, fame, and multi-million dollar TV contracts, however, there was Baskin-Robbins. The ice cream chain counts Flay as one of its former scoopers (a list that also includes the likes of Barack Obama and Julia Roberts). As per Flay, he started the job when he was 16 and remembers that he "made tons of sundaes, banana splits & something called a Matterhorn: 8 scoops ice cream, 8 sauces + all toppings."

Even more surprising than Flay's time sporting a Baskin-Robbins apron is the fact that this wasn't even his first fast food job. Looking even further back, Flay worked as a pizza delivery boy in sixth grade (yes, really). "When there was down time the pizza guys would let me grate the cheese and open the cans of tomatoes but never let me near the actual pizzas," Flay recalled on Instagram, where he explained that he snuck in shifts after school. (For comparison, toasting a Pop-Tart was the limit of my post-school culinary adventures at 12 years old — but that's probably why I'm not a professional chef today).

It's hard to picture Duff Goldman without the frosting and fondant. As a classically trained pastry chef and the founder of Baltimore's Charm City Cakes shop, he's appeared on Food Network shows such as "Ace of Cakes" and "Cake Masters" thanks to his expertise in wacky sweet treats. With past projects ranging from a life-sized baby elephant cake and a cake with smoke effects, his unique talents have led to personal commissions from the likes of President Barack Obama (who requested a Chef Duff original for his inauguration), pop singer Katy Perry, and actor Sir Roger Moore.

Long before he found his calling as a pastry chef, Goldman worked a string of roles in fast food. As he told the Food Network, "I think serendipity did the job in the end, but the beginning of my culinary career simply involved working my ass off in a variety of jobs." These jobs involved a stint as a fry cook at McDonald's and a bagel assembler at Skolnik's Bagel Bakery in Virginia when he was just 14 years old. (His favorite flavor was toasted onion with cream cheese, for the record.) While we're sure these forays into the industry played a role in establishing his career path, Goldman has noted that he grew up feeling comfortable in the kitchen and always had a natural flair for food. Ultimately, all of these influences led him to study at the Culinary Institute of America. The rest is freshly frosted history.

When you compete in "Top Chef," the only thing more satisfying than reaching the final is doing so well after your season airs that you're invited back to compete in — and win — "Top Chef: All Stars." Blais has managed just such a hat trick, returning to the show after finishing as a runner-up in season four and taking home the gold over his fellow professional chefs.

While today he's a top restaurateur and cookbook author, Blais is open and honest about the professional path that got him to this point. Raised in a family that celebrated "Fast Food Fridays" – a weekly tradition in which they'd dine at a different fast food chain each time — he started working at a Long Island McDonald's at the ripe young age of 14. "I was the poissonier at McDonald's, which is a very prestigious position at a hamburger restaurant," Blais proudly told Mashed in 2021. "Poissonier means 'fish cook' in French, so a very important position."

Despite forgetting to put the top buns on his first batch of Filet-o-Fish sandwiches (a mistake he dismisses as an unintended "avant garde" experiment), Blais remains grateful for his days at the Golden Arches. "It was pretty chaotic," he said. "I think [it was] a good introduction to the restaurant business." His expertise later led him to fast casual burger chain Fuddruckers, where he claims he was scouted for a new steakhouse while flipping burgers. Now that's a true American success story.

YouTube has birthed a whole new generation of famous chefs — including Sorted Food's head chef, Kush Bhasin. He was recruited for the channel (which, at the time of this writing, has racked up over 2.7 million subscribers since its launch in 2010) thanks to his prestigious experience as a development chef at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons under Raymond Blanc and as an executive sous chef at the Michelin-starred Benares in London.

And that's not Bhasin's only Michelin experience. Including the year he spent at Benares, Bhasin boasts 17 years of experience in Michelin-starred kitchens. But if you rewind back to the very beginning of Bhasin's career, these kitchens aren't where he first got to grips with the trials and tribulations of food service. This happened at none other than Burger King, which Bhasin paired with working at a supermarket and has described as getting "started at the grassroots level" in the food industry.

Frustratingly, not everyone saw the value in these roles. As Bhasin recalled in a Sorted Food YouTube video that delved into his career, he applied to "every Michelin Star restaurant south of Birmingham" after graduating from university, only to be rejected for his lack of experience. However, the joke's on them, as this Burger King alumnus ultimately went on to spend time as a billionaire's private chef and is on the invite list of none other than Prince William for food-related events.

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone in the food industry with a resume quite as illustrious as Anne Burrell. The sassy TV personality — who was Mario Batali's sous chef on "Iron Chef America" and has also hosted "Secrets of a Restaurant Chef" — graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. She then went on to attend the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners in Asti, train at several top restaurants across Italy, and work as a sous chef under Lidia Bastianich. Impressive stuff, to say the least.

At the very beginning of Burrell's chef resume, however, you'll find a familiar name that isn't always associated with gourmet cuisine. As it turns out, Burrell's first-ever job in the food industry was as a fry cook at her local McDonald's when she was 16 (although Burrell likes to claim that her first "real" job was at a restaurant in downtown Syracuse, New York called Daniel Webster's). 

Decades later, this experience hasn't exactly instilled a sense of brand loyalty in Burrell. As she once told MSG Network, Burrell only eats fast food when "push comes to shove." Even then, she prefers to eat at California staple In-N-Out Burger or pick up a spicy chicken sandwich with cheese at Wendy's. McDonald's garnered not even a mention.

Like many professional chefs, Alton Brown didn't always operate in the category of fine cuisine. The celebrity chef is best known for his lengthy stint hosting "Good Eats," which ran for a whopping 16 seasons beginning in 1999, plus as co-host of Netflix's "Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend" alongside Kristen Kish. However, he actually started his career in a much more humble setting: the streets of Athens, Georgia.

As Brown previously told the Gwinnett Daily Post, he started out as a pizza delivery boy in the 1980s for local restaurant Sons of Italy (which sadly no longer appears to exist). Thanks to ravenous football fans, Saturdays were the most profitable days, which subsequently meant that Brown often worked weekends. "I wanted the 35-cent tips ... I needed the money," he said years later. Brown also admitted that the job was handy during college as there was almost always leftover pizza to keep him fed.

This didn't exactly steer Brown on an immediate path to culinary success. The presenter and food scientist actually attended college to study film and went on to do the cinematography for music videos such as "The One I Love" by R.E.M. With a vision of producing a higher-quality cooking show than the likes of what was shown on American television at the time, he went on to study at the now-closed New England Culinary Institute to make this a reality. Just two years after Brown graduated, "Good Eats" was on the air.

If you don't know Kerry Simon by name, you may know him by the rather more glamorous moniker of the "Rock 'n Roll Chef," courtesy of Rolling Stone. Prior to his tragic passing from Multiple System Atrophy in 2016, Simon was renowned for his creative and entertaining approach to cooking, with his long list of restaurants featuring several spots situated on the glitzy Las Vegas strip.

Long before he was rubbing shoulders with close friends and regulars such as Alice Cooper, Slash, and members of both Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, Simon was already in famous — or, to be more accurate, soon-to-be famous — company. His fast food origin story took place in the pizza joint Little Caesars, where he spent the summer working alongside none other than comedian and actor Bill Murray (who once told Jimmy Kimmel that it was the best job he'd ever had. Sorry, "Ghosbusters").

In true Rock 'n Roll Chef fashion, Simon initially took the job to save enough money to purchase an electric guitar. While Little Caesars clearly did nothing to sway Murray from his Hollywood path, it did instill Simon with a newfound interest in food and led to late nights testing Julia Child's recipes. Simon went on to study at the Culinary Institute of America, where we're sure he learned a lot more than in the kitchen of Little Caesars. Still, it's heartwarming to hear how a summer job opened the door for such a decorated chef.

Alongside ex-wife Gina, Pat is one half of the Neelys, the couple that served as the focus of Food Network shows such as "Down Home with the Neelys." Audiences fell in love with the couple, spurring the show on to 11 seasons of success and spawning multiple cookbooks.

Sadly, their duo days are long behind them now, with Pat and Gina filing for divorce after 20 years of marriage in 2014 (effectively canceling "Down Home with the Neelys" in the process). Despite this, Pat Neely remains positive about his time on the show and the fact that he was "able to share that with my high school sweetheart, a woman I truly loved, and to be me. I never had to act" (via PEOPLE).

Pat Neely remains a familiar face on the foodie scene to this day, which isn't surprising, considering that food has seemingly been in his DNA since day one. From the age of 13, Neely worked for his uncle's BBQ restaurant, where his love for cooking was cemented. Years later, he shifted to McDonald's, where he spent two years as a manager until, at the age of 23, he decided to take the managerial skills refined in the fast food chain and open his first restaurant, Neely's BBQ. Sadly, this establishment has since closed — as have its other locations — but Neely has thrown himself back into the restaurant business by supporting fellow This Is It! Southern Kitchen & BBQ with its franchising.

Jumping across the pond for a moment, Dan Lee is a British alumnus of the BBC's "MasterChef: The Professionals" whose culinary skills have taken him to kitchens in Singapore, Thailand, France, New Zealand, and beyond. Globetrotting opportunities like these were part of the reason he decided to pursue cooking as a career in the first place. As Lee told University College Birmingham, "It all started to click that I can use this to travel — I've always wanted to travel."

Even before Lee connected the dots between his love of food and his love of travel he was motivated to learn more about the art of cooking. For him, the turning point was working in the kitchen of his auntie's Chinese takeout spot. "I think that's where I could see the greatness in food and what it could do, and that's when it kind of pushed me to learn how to do it," Lee said.

It was this drive that pushed him to earn a Professional Cookery Level 2 diploma at University College Birmingham's College of Food, and through to the final of the 2021 season of "MasterChef: The Professionals." There, he took home the gold thanks to his twist on European and Asian cuisine. Today you can find Lee implementing that same drive while working guest slots in the kitchens of some of the world's top hotels, restaurants, and bars. 

Everybody starts somewhere. For Tiffany Derry, that somewhere was IHOP. The TV personality is known for her appearances on competitive cooking shows such as "Top Chef" (where she didn't place first, but did win fan-favorite), "Cutthroat Kitchen," and "Bobby's Triple Threat." It takes a combination of iron nerves and culinary prowess to come out unscathed — and Derry has praised IHOP for giving her a head start in both regards.

Speaking to Texas Highways, the Dallas-based chef explained that she started out at the International House of Pancakes at the green age of 15. Despite her youth, it soon became pretty clear that she had a flair for rapid food service. "I worked the graveyard shift after high school and all the way through culinary school, too," she said. "As a short-order cook, I was the fastest you could find. I took that foundation and applied it everywhere I worked."

Unlike some chefs whose professional roots were planted in a fast food chain, Derry is extremely positive about her time at IHOP. In fact, even after receiving her culinary degree from The Art Institute in Houston, she was reluctant to leave the restaurant for a full-time position at fine dining spot Pesce. However, for Texas natives, it's a good thing she did; had Derry remained at IHOP, the town of Farmers Branch probably wouldn't have her classic Southern restaurant, Roots Southern Table, which was named one of the top 50 American restaurants in 2021 by The New York Times.