The Whittaker Story

Several of you who are reading this blog might know how Andrew and my story began, but for those who don’t here is a cliff notes version of the story.  Andrew grew up in a small village in Southeast England between Dover and Canterbury called Nonington.  It was a neighbor in his village that planted the cooking seed in Andrew’s heart when he was a young boy.  He would go to her house before school and they prepared culinary creations.  During his university years Andrew pursued a hospitality degree with an emphasis in culinary from the University of Dundee in Scotland.  It was while he was a student at Dundee that Andrew did an exchange year at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN.  (I didn’t meet Andrew until a few years later as I was still in high school.)  After his exchange year he returned to the U.K. to finish his degree and work back in England.  Then in 1997 Andrew had a meeting that I think he would agree changed everything.  The hospitality school (known as RHIT at the time) offered Andrew the opportunity to be a graduate teaching assistant for the restaurant capstone course that all undergraduates were required to take before graduation.