Before he was a drug dealer, a federal inmate, and the first African-American chef de cuisine at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Jeff Henderson was just a hungry kid in South Central L.A. "I didn't grow up in a house with a double-door refrigerator and another refrigerator in the basement," he says. "We had a single-door refrigerator that was mostly empty. We never had a fruit bowl or a cookie jar. The school lunch program was big for me. I was always able to hustle up a few extra tickets so I could get more fruit or burgers to fill myself up."
Hustling got Henderson a lot more than burgers. As he wrote in his best-selling 2007 memoir, Cooked (William Morrow), by age 19 he was running a $35,000-a-week cocaine operation; at 24 he was arrested. He spent nine years in federal prison, where he worked in the kitchen and discovered his love (and talent) for cooking. In 2001, after working his way up the ranks in some of L.A.'s top restaurants, he landed the Caesar's Palace gig. Most recently, Henderson, now 43, was executive chef at the Café Bellagio in Vegas, where he lives with his wife, Stacey; daughters Noel, 9, and Troy, 6; and son Jeffrey, 11. (He has another son, Jamar, 25, who lives in Spokane, Washington.)
Since his early days in the joint, Henderson has lectured at-risk teens "about choices and consequences." Now he's reaching a much bigger crowd. On his new Food Network reality show, The Chef Jeff Project, he employs six young people (among them a recovering heroin addict and a former gang member) at his catering company, Posh Urban Cuisine. "This is culinary and life-skill boot camp!" he barks in the first episode. Four weeks later, Henderson has made a searing impact on each aspiring cook.
"My message is very raw and very street," he says of his tough-love approach with the cast. "They tried to play me. I had to let them know that I have a Ph.D. in streetology. Eventually they got with my program." In return, "they ate lobster, filet mignon, caviar—things they'd never had. They met celebrities, went on movie sets, and won scholarships to culinary school. They didn't believe the American dream was attainable. Now they can dream."
If his story sounds like a Hollywood tearjerker, soon it will be: Will Smith's production company is making Cooked into a movie. Henderson's family is picture-perfect, too. The kids are homeschooled and vegan, and Stacey cooks. "They love miso soup, veggie sushi—anything Asian," he says. When Daddy makes himself fried chicken using a prison recipe, they tease him: "They're like, 'Eww! You're eating the wing of a bird!'" But he can handle it—he's had tougher critics.
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