It’s 11:30 a.m. in the kitchen at Café Bellagio and the vast restaurant is on pace to serve 3,500 people today. On one side of the 30-foot cooking line, cooks in white coats prepare the fare of the day: salmon burgers and pot stickers and pancakes. On the other side, servers in tan and sage uniforms scurry around, loading large trays with plates, grabbing bottles of ketchup and rushing out to the restaurant. Striding through the room is Executive Chef Jeff Henderson, 42, a calm and strong presence above it all.

And every few minutes, his cell phone rings. Henderson answers with the same polite greeting: “Good Morning, Chef Jeff speaking!”

The busy chef has written a memoir called Cooked (William Morrow, 2007) that tells the story of how he embraced cooking and came to work at Bellagio. But it’s a little different from most chef books: the first thing Henderson shares are the the ingredients for crack cocaine.

Before he became a chef, Henderson was one of the biggest crack cocaine dealers in San Diego. At 19, when most kids are still figuring out their career, Henderson was making $35,000 a week. It seemed like he had it all: a spacious hilltop home in San Diego’s most prestigious Black neighborhood, women at his beck and call, eight cars including a custom Mercedes Benz 500 SEC convertible, shopping trips to Rodeo Drive, and VIP stays at Caesars Palace when the fights were on.

Things started to unravel in 1987 when he broke a drug dealer’s taboo against doing business around Christmas. A street dealer under Henderson carrying cocaine and $50,000 in cash was pulled over at the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint near San Onofre. The dealer later implicated Henderson. He was arrested, jailed and eventually sentenced to 19 years.