Food connects us all, and cooking with others who share this same passion as me is always a special experience. It was through our mutual love for cooking that chef rodrigo fernandini and I that have become good friends, and I feel like I’ve gained a true mentor in all this. As someone who’s completely self taught, being in the kitchen with real life chefs like rodrigo is inspiring. There’s a real difference between someone like him and I–these people just operate differently, everything is just second nature, automatic, done perfectly without hesitation. See, I can make something that tastes really good, but someone like rodrigo can bang out a hundred of that same dish in a single night quickly and nail it every time. When I told rodrigo I was looking to work on myself as a cook, he invited me to come work at his Peruvian fine dining restaurant. I took him up on that–and a few weeks in it’s been the most humbling, amazing learning experience. Now here’s where it gets crazy, the first day that I started a picture popped up on my snapchat memories from exactly two years before; the picture? a lomo saltado I cooked for my Peruvian roommate, the first time I ever cooked a Peruvian dish. A dish created by Chinese immigrants in Peru, a beef stir fry that marries the flavors of the country they’ve arrived to so that they can appeal to the national palate. Food really does bring us together, and life can really work in mysterious ways.