Cool Jobs: On the Land and Sea

Chef Mary Beth Lawton Johnson ‘s long affair with food has taken her around the world, and yet this food stylist and mega yacht chef has the humble beginnings of a small town girl. “Cameron, South Carolina,” she says in a long drawl, “you don’t get much smaller than that. It’s a farming community of about 300 people, five churches and no stoplights. If you weren’t in church on Sunday, people would come looking for you. “

In the beginning of her career, she worked in food, making deliveries, waitressing in hotels.  She was around commercial kitchens all the time, but she didn’t think of being a Chef. Her former husband, Richard, was a professional “Captain” and she accompanied him on his assignments to private yachts.  One of the yacht owners asked her to start cooking-that’s how she became a Mega Yacht Chef.

Cooking on yachts for years has given Chef Johnson reason to create and name her own cuisine Ocean Fusion™. “A lot of Ocean Fusion is inspired from seafood--everything we have on board the yacht, we mix with what we catch fresh from the sea.”    
Once a year, Chef Mary Beth Lawton Johnson teaches at a southern culinary school as a featured guest chef extraordinaire. Her students dream of one day working in a restaurant or of opening their own restaurants. “You don’t have to get stuck in a restaurant,” she tells her students. “Some of the best jobs in food haven’t even been created yet.” Chef Johnson wants people to see that there are as many different possibilities in culinary roles as there are ways of taking ordinary food and transforming it into art.

Lately Chef Mary Beth has been cooking more on the land than on the sea . Due to a twist of events, she has developed celiac disease which requires her to be gluten-free.  For someone as innovative as Mary Beth, having to be gluten-free proved to be no obstacle. As a matter of fact, it gave her a new niche--the specialty of cooking for private individuals who also need to be gluten-free. Everything Chef Mary Beth knew about her culinary training in pastry had to be rewritten. Chef Mary Beth is currently on assignment on Palm Beach Island,  cooking for a celebrity whose name cannot be divulged. Do tell, Chef Mary Beth!!

-- Chef Mary Beth Lawton Johnson, CEPC, CCC is a Chef Johnson is also one of the highest credentialed chefs in the yachting industry today. Chef Johnson has cooked for numerous CEOs & corporate executives, and royalty such as the Prince of Orange, the author and English politician Lord Baron Jeffery Archer, Lord and Lady Astor.  

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