After graduating culinary school, Javauneeka Jacobs, 27, has spent most of her career—apart from an internship at Disney’s Epcot—working at current and former Rick Bayless restaurants like Xoco, Leña Brava, Cruz Blanca, Topolobampo, and the flagship Frontera Grill.
I grew up in a farm town. I had a cornfield in my backyard. As kids, you just meddle around with things. I had no idea it was field corn. They use it to feed cattle, and it’s hard. It’s not for consumption. When I was ten or 12, I picked some, and I put them on the stove. I’m waiting, waiting, the house smells like corn, but I’m waiting. My mom wakes up from her nap. “Why do you have this field corn in a pot?” I’m like, “I’ve been cooking it for hours.” She’s like, “It’s not gonna cook.”
We were not farmers. My parents are from the south side of Chicago, born and raised, and as they started to have a family, they moved out to the suburbs and bought a home in Harvard, and that’s where I grew up.
My mom grew up with a lot of southern food. There were six of us all day. It would seem like we didn’t have anything in the house, and then all of a sudden we had this big meal on our table. She was always creative and just doing stuff from her heart, very intuitively.
I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. Even though I wasn’t physically cooking with her, I was doing a lot of watching. Couldn’t ask any questions, nothing. It was just her thing, and she didn’t want to take the time to show this kid what to do when she just needed to cook and get it done. That was her safe space, and that’s what she loves to do. I always loved to eat. Anything you put in front of me was really good because she’s a good cook.
As I got a little bit older, I tried to repeat what she was doing. And I also watched a lot of cooking shows. They were able to explain it to me. I just started putting it together. I remember having my notebook and then presenting it to my mom, like, “Can you cook this?” Sometimes she would cook it, and sometimes she would say, “Oh, let’s not
do that.”
I’ve always had a garden. My mom always had a garden, so when I started ag class [in high school], I [could] actually choose what I’m gonna plant and we could do it better. That’s always been like a part of me. How can we make this place better? Being in those classes and seeing how everything is the circle of life, how we need each other to survive. If I’m a chef, then I have a little bit more control over that, because I’m gonna choose what I grow or what I cook with.
I didn’t have exposure to restaurants. Our fancy dinner was Applebee’s. But where you got the good food was at people’s houses. My best friend, she’s from Zacatecas. I remember going to her house, and her mom would be making pozole, or she’d be cleaning nopales. I would ask her mom, “How do you do that?” And my friend would get upset: “Did you come to cook with my mom, or did you come to hang out with me?”
That was the first time I had a taco. I didn’t know what cilantro and onion was, and I was eating it. And [saying], “Whatever’s on here, it tastes so good.” The first time I had a tamale, I didn’t know how to eat it. I bit into the husk and they were laughing at me.
When I was in junior high, my dad was like, “You need to figure out what you’re gonna do for the rest of your life. You should think of something that’s not gonna go away.” I was going really hard in sports. I was in basketball, track, cross-country, and I performed really well, and I did receive scholarships.
I think I had the epiphany: everyone’s gotta eat. And so, “Hey, I like the cooking channel. I love food. I love chemistry and biology. I wonder if I can combine that with cooking and see where that gets me?”
I looked up culinary schools. I had everything organized, so I presented it to my parents, and I said, “I’m not gonna take any scholarships. I am going to go to culinary school.” And my dad’s reaction was: “Being a chef is not a real job.” My mom’s [was], “She’s doing what she wants to do, and I’m gonna support her.”
I ended up going to Le Cordon Bleu. School started at 10. So I took the 7 AM train for two hours. My first week, I’m in love. This is for me. This is like having your own science experiment and being able to eat it too. I learned everything that I wanted to. And then I really wanted to get some hands-on experience, a year into culinary school, and I kind of wanted to move out because of the commute. I ran around just trying to get a job, and I got turned away from 30 different restaurants. I was really discouraged.
I was really close with my chef instructor, who had taught someone that was the chef of Xoco, and they needed someone to come in for a stage. I staged for two weeks, and eventually they gave me a job.
As far as my career, I think that this is the place that I want to be.
I wanted to work at a restaurant who had the same morals as I did: Are we working with our local farms? From a cook’s perspective, it was a full circle moment for me. I wasn’t destined to come to a Mexican restaurant. I just really wanted to work at a good restaurant that I was going to learn and grow at. The fact that it was Rick Bayless, the fact that it was Mexican food, the fact that we’re doing all this stuff with the community, and we’re working with farmers, it was just really full circle to me. After hearing so many no’s, they were all for good reasons, because now I’m here.
I was very fortunate to get that. I was really killing it. I put tiny empanadas on the menu for an amuse for Topolo. And they’ve been on the menu for like five years now.
And then [the] pandemic happens and [they’re] doing whatever they could to bring people back to work. They started doing Topolo 2.0, which was held up in the library, and Rick asked me if I wanted to be his culinary assistant for his YouTube channel. He trained me how to write a recipe, how to test a recipe, and it was really cool, super intimate. I learned a whole different side of things, like how to do a swap. How does the TV world work?
We started getting a little bit busier in the restaurants. I was 24, and I became the youngest sous-chef at Frontera Grill. Everything I’ve learned, including at Disney, has helped me with this job because I run the production kitchen and we make huge batches of tamales and stuff like that.
I’ll arrive to work around 7–7:15, and I’ll start consolidating the walk-in, doing my inventory, everyone’s prep list. And we taste dishes every day. So I’ll write the dishes that we’re gonna taste for the day. And then we just get right into the prep list. I try to get a lot of my prep done before we open up, so I can expo the line. Around 11:30 we open up for service. And then we finish service around, like, two to three o’clock, depending on how busy we are. And then I’ll just wrap up the kitchen. Then if I’m up to it, I’ll go to the gym again and go home, go on a walk with my dog. I’ll tend to my plot in the community garden.
My balcony is not very big, but it’s definitely full of lots and lots of plants. It’s facing east. We get amazing sunlight. I have figs. I have raspberries, lemon in a pot. We have lemongrass, ginger, eggplants, tomatoes. I have some flowers, and basil, thyme, rosemary, all of that, all the regular herbs and chiles.
We have this rule at home where we don’t cook any Mexican food. But as far as my career, I think that this is the place that I want to be.
This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.