Richmond’s 2018 Elby-winning Chef of the Year has something he wants the city to know, and it has nothing to do with charcuterie or making better pasta.
In February, Joe Sparatta won the award for the second time, chosen by national journalists and chefs. Sparatta is co-owner of both Heritage and Southbound.
Joe Sparatta (Photo by Stephanie Breijo)
What most in attendance did not know was that only three months earlier the chef had suffered a personal low, when, in November, he checked himself into an outpatient program for alcoholism.
Today, Sparatta is going public to raise awareness in the community of chefs and restaurant workers, many of whom, he says, are in the midst of similar battles with their addictions.
Sparatta told me he had been sober for two years before he relapsed. “I had never drunk and tried to cook,” he said this morning, in a long phone conversation that the chef described as “freeing.”
“I would always use alcohol after service, but then that wasn’t the case,” says Sparatta. “I started getting crazy anxiety and panic attacks after [we] had our first child. He came into the world early, and it was a crazy, horrible experience … and I used alcohol to manage. I felt like I was f**king dying, and it became my medicine and it turned off those feelings, but when the alcohol wore off they would come back tenfold. … I was on antidepressants and alcohol, and you start mixing all those and it gets really ugly.”
Sparatta says the industry is appealing to many people — and also ruins many of those same people — because of its proximity to temptation.
“The restaurant world really champions how much you can drink,” says Sparatta. “Everyone is getting f**ked up all the time, it’s almost a badge of honor, like, look how drunk you can get and come into work the next day. I was a part of a bunch of shitty, reckless behavior, and I’m happy to not be anymore. I’d really like to help anybody try to switch that mentality and change it a little bit, so they know they don’t have to live that way anymore.”
Jason Alley (File photo)
Sparatta’s confessional comes seven months after another prominent, local chef — Jason Alley, the proprietor of Comfort, Pasture and Flora — admitted to his own battles with alcoholism, in a piece penned for this very publication.
Sparatta says that he was not only inspired by Alley, but that he “leaned heavily” on his friend and colleague as he struggled to get a handle on his life.
Alley says he has been sober for 15 months, but although he is proud of that fact, he doesn’t think in terms of years or months. Each day, he says, requires a rededication to staying clean.
“I was worried, Am I going to be able to do this? Who am I going to be?” he told me yesterday. “I knew if I didn’t make a serious life change I had the potential to lose everything. It was starting to affect my health, my relationships, and I wanted to stop before I lost everything.”
At the same time, making a change terrified him. “I’d been a drunk for 25 years,” he says.
Alley and Sparatta say there was no defining moment when they knew they had to quit drinking. No DUI. No car accident. Their drinking had simply become more intense and more frequent. Alley had been drinking for 25 years, Sparatta for 16. It was, they say, a way of life — a respite from a demanding, stressful occupation. And it was all around them, all the time. The biggest temptations were out of town, when they were invited to cook at culinary events and shows, and it was easy and natural to fall into drinking with their fellow chefs from around the country.
But what each, on his own, began to realize was that this carefree life they had embarked upon in their 20s could not be sustained. They had wives, children, and businesses that relied upon them.
It was that realization that spurred their turnarounds.
The notion that they are not independent agents, but belong to vast networks of people — that they are not alone, and don’t have to go it alone — is what is now spurring them to team up on a project to entice their colleagues in the industry to take the first difficult steps toward sobriety.
The two chefs are starting a chapter of Ben’s Friends, a food and beverage industry support group for those struggling with addiction, the first of its kind in Richmond. The idea is to try to provide a support system for people in the restaurant industry, as well as for themselves, as they cope with sobriety. They are hoping to launch sometime this summer, with meetings initially at Comfort and Heritage.
Ben’s Friends was founded in 2016 by restaurateurs and recovering alcoholics Mickey Bakst and Steve Palmer as a way of honoring the life of Ben Murray, a chef at Palmer’s Indigo Road in Charleston who unexpectedly took his own life after struggling with alcoholism and depression for years. Bakst, who himself is celebrating 35 years of sobriety, says that they were tired of seeing people in their industry getting destroyed by drugs and alcohol.
“We kept saying we have to do something, we have to do something,” says Bakst. “We realized in [food service] it tends to be younger people, and they are not comfortable going to NA or AA; [the service industry] is a little more gritty. Line cooks, chefs, bartenders, general managers, servers — we talk differently, we swear differently, and nobody else understands the experience of being on a 100-degree line with 40 tickets up and a chef screaming at you. Everybody needs to blow off steam, and the industry is a pressure cooker. When [industry workers] get out of work, there’s no place for them to blow off the steam that’s been built, except to go to bars.”
Bakst has clearly identified a need: There are chapters of the organization in Raleigh, Charleston, and Atlanta, with plans to start chapters in Greenville and Charlotte.
According to a 2015 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, the restaurant industry has the highest rates of substance abuse in the country. The food service industry is a breeding ground for addiction — late hours that extend into the next day; the daily grind of pleasing demanding customers; a core business model driven by alcohol sales and providing an escape for patrons; the constant pressure and need to stay awake and focused, paired with the desire to unwind and decompress.
Alley and Sparatta want their brothers and sisters in the industry to know that they can lead clean lives, that it’s not a badge of dishonor, that heavy drinking is not synonymous with being cool.
“We want there to be a conversation about recovery and talk about the journey,” says Alley, as he lays out a vision for a judgment-free space where people who are trying to make changes in their lives can lean on each other. “I’m not the one with the answers, but I know having a safe space to figure them out is important. The whole deal is to create a space where there’s encouragement for people to make the best decisions they can.”
Sparatta echoes these sentiments: “It’s easy to drink; we want it to be easy for people to reach out.”
