"I grew up in the business. I'm Brazilian and my parents owned three Churrascaria style restaurants. I graduated high school and went to culinary school at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. I got a job at the Marriot when I was 19 and the opened 3030 Ocean with Chef Dean Max.
It's hard to find good places to eat here..they're few and far between. I like....
Michael's Genuine down in Miami, Lemongrass in Ft. Lauderdale, I like to try and dabble here and there, Todd English,
wherever the new It spot is, I try and support local chefs."
"This
is all so new to me, I'm kinda just going with whatever happens. I'm
kind of quiet by nature and don't like tension so it'll be interesting
to see how that pans out. We're having a show premier party at the
Marriott, I haven't seen any edits of the show, so I'll be seeing it
for the first time just like everybody else in America."
"They've
done casting in Ft. Lauderdale before. I went and auditioned the first
time and didn't make the cut. I mean you see the people that do these
shows and think 'they're completely ridiculous, I can do better than
that.' And my cooks wanted me to go on there so bad so they could see
me get yelled at, so I tried out again and met the
casting directors and just went on from there."
"I do yell. There's
pressure, heat, a lot going on, the pressure is high, I hold myself and
the people I work with to high standards, if there's problems then it's
nothing personal, it's just the nature of the business. There's
plenty of drama going on during filming because there's so many
different personalities and we all think we're better than each other."
"It's a competition, I made friends there that I think I'll have for life, but while you're in there, you're competing."
"They built a set just for
Hell's Kitchen in Los Angeles. It was in a huge warehouse and the set
was downstairs and the dorms were upstairs. Imagine having your living
quarters right above where you work. There's cameras everywhere, not
cameramen, just those little spot cameras, you're on camera 24 hours a
day. We didn't really get to go anywhere. We were always busy so we
just ate whatever we could whenever we could. We had our own personal
shopper and we could buy whatever we wanted, but we didn't have time,
so we had to eat fast. I ate a lot of turkey sandwiches and cereal. A
lot of people had the freezer stocked and they were just constantly
going in there and microwaving stuff. The eating was the worst."
"Gordon Ramsey is intense and crazy, that's just how he is, it's not
acting, but when we were outside of the kitchen, he's a normal
guy...like a big kid, joking around. He's still intense as hell and
very passionate, but he's not mean when we're not cooking. When you're
at work it's different, but when the jacket comes off, we're all just
normal people."
"I would go on tv again, I don't know if I'd do something like that, but I would love to do a cooking show."
