“Maybe I just have a short attention span,” says 23-year-old entrepreneur Jenny McCoy, “but I feel like I’m into everything and I want to do it all.”
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She landed a job as assistant pastry chef at Gordon almost immediately after graduating from the culinary arts program at Kendall College in Evanston. She stayed for nearly a year, until the restaurant closed, then moved on to Blackbird, Charlie Trotter’s, the Park Hyatt, and Bittersweet bakery.
After three years on the restaurant scene, she says, she started to think that perhaps cooking wasn’t her calling after all. “You work crazy hours, you get paid shit, and I realized if I didn’t get out of this industry I’d start to hate cooking.” Since then she’s studied classical voice performance, Spanish, and massage therapy. In January she headed to Madrid to continue learning Spanish but, after four months, realized she was still unhappy.
