The Chef

As a boy growing up as part of a large family in Framingham, Mass., Allan Levine always associated mealtimes with happiness: the entire family gathering together to share delicious food and enjoy one another's company.

But it never occurred to him that he should go into the restaurant business. Instead, he graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1981 with a degree in geology, a major he had chosen largely because he enjoyed being outdoors. (He had spent some time in Montana, where studying geological formations meant hiking in the Rockies.)

Degree in hand, Levine was hired as a geophysicist by the Amoco, the big energy firm, which transplanted him to New Orleans to be part of a team looking for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico.

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"Living in New Orleans really opened my eyes to food and cuisine," he says.

Levine left the Crescent City in 1989 when Amoco transferred him to Houston, but he continued to cultivate an interest in good food. By this point, however, working as a geophysicist had begun to pall.

"I was basically bored by what I was doing," Levine says. "I really wasn't happy, and I didn't want to become depressed. I wanted to pursue something that I truly loved to do."

By 1993, he was ready to make a radical career move. It had dawned on him that if he became a chef and ran a restaurant devoted to fine dining, he could replicate the warm atmosphere of those childhood family meals, while challenging himself creatively in the kitchen--and making a decent living in the process.

Still single at 35, he had no family responsibilities to deter him from taking the plunge. He decided to quit Amoco and enroll at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt., which offered a two-year program that would turn him into a chef.

"I just wanted to make a run at it and do something for me," he says.

A last-minute complication arose, when fate chose this very moment to introduce him to his future wife. But she was very understanding about his situation. They married in April 1993, and he departed shortly after for Montpelier. Two and a half years later, he returned to Houston a duly certified chef, thanks to the Culinary Institute and an internship at a restaurant in the south of France.

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Levine ended up as executive chef at Charley's 517, a restaurant in Houston's theater district. He found he had a flair for the business side of running a kitchen, thanks to the management skills he had developed at Amoco. "All of that now came into play," he says. "I loved it. It was fabulous."

There was only one problem. He and his wife by now were the parents of a young son, who Levine rarely saw because he was working 80 to 90 hours per week. He didn't mind the long hours for his own sake--that's life in the restaurant business, and he was enjoying his job immensely. But he wanted to spend more time with his family.

This is an issue that does not plague the average geophysicist. Restaurants do much of their business in the evenings and on weekends. If Levine wanted to thrive as an executive chef--and he most certainly did--then he faced an ongoing conflict between the demands of his job and of his family.

Here was irony. Levine had been inspired to become a chef in part by nostalgic memories of the meals his family had shared during his childhood. Now he found himself pulled away from his own child to make meals for strangers. What to do?

A solution presented itself one day in 1999, when Levine noticed a want ad in the Houston Chronicle. Stanford Financial was looking for an executive chef to run the Eagle Room, a new private dining room the firm was setting up in its worldwide headquarters near Houston's Galleria. (Stanford Financial is headed by Allen Stanford, who is No. 205 on the current Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.) Levine got the job and has been there ever since.

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The Eagle Room does most of its business during the day, allowing Levine to spend more evenings and weekends with his family. (He and his wife now have two children.) "It's still a lot of work," he says of his current job, "but for a chef, it offers more stability."

At 50, Levine is now a decade and a half into his second-act career. He has no regrets about his decision to leave Amoco. Running a restaurant has held his interest and made him happy.

"This was a passion I had. I found that I was good at it," he says. "It's worked out beyond my expectations."

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