Nightline Platelist: Bobby Flay

The award-winning chef shares the foods that inspire him.

ByABC News
June 9, 2008, 3:56 PM

June 9, 2008— -- Despite his many devoted fans grill fanatics and cooks who appreciate the extra spice his delicious southwestern cuisine puts in their lives Bobby Flay also inspires envy.

He's confident, sometimes to the point of being brazen, and he found success at an unusually young age in one of the toughest restaurant markets in the world: New York City.

Flay owns five different restaurants, has written seven cookbooks and stars in three television shows. But there is one thing that makes Bobby Flay a bit less of a super-human: He was a "really bad high school student."

"I was registered in high school, but I didn't do any work. And sometimes, I wasn't even there. Actually, a lot of times I wasn't there," he said. "We used to have this rule, my friends and I if it was too crowded to get on the first subway, we went to breakfast. And maybe that was the beginning of my food career, a Greek diner in New York."

After getting thrown out of three high schools, Flay earned an equivalency diploma. Then, one day when he was filling in for a bus boy at his father's restaurant, Flay was offered a job in the kitchen.

"It wasn't actually a groundbreaking moment in my life. It was just, I didn't have anything to do that day. So I was like, 'Sure, OK, I'll put some chef whites on and I'll work in the kitchen.' That was my first sort of foray into a professional kitchen," Flay said. It may have been "just a job" at first, but about six months later, things began to change.

"I remember sitting in my bed one morning and staring at the ceiling and saying, 'You know what? I'm really looking forward to going to work today.' I actually remember the day. From that moment on, I looked at it very differently," Flay said.

He moved up the food chain in a rite of passage familiar to everyone in the restaurant industry, first working on cold plates and then graduating to hot plates. But it was his decision to join the first class of the French Culinary Institute, now a famous New York cooking school, that Flay describes as one of the most important events of his life.