Anne Burrell Got Her Restaurant Career Started At This Familiar Chain

Anne Burrell has an impressive resume. She has starred in multiple television cooking shows, authored many cookbooks, and held the title of restaurant owner. She's even taught other aspiring chefs at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. Throughout her career, she worked in some pretty impressive restaurants, including the now-closed Felidia under the tutelage of Lidia Bastianich, so it might come as a surprise that she started her career in the industry at a simple fast food restaurant. At the sweet age of 16, Burrell began working in the kitchen at none other than McDonald's, a chain most of us are quite familiar with and one that might be considered a pretty humble beginning for someone as accomplished as this rock star of a celebrity chef.

As she shared in an interview with Restaurant Girl, when Burrell worked at McDonald's, she was the person responsible for making those iconic french fries that are full of secrets and bursting with flavor. (Perhaps that's where she learned the foundation for her epic crispy breakfast potatoes!) Now that you know what her starter role in the kitchen was, it may not surprise you to also learn that as an adult, her favorite junk food is none other than french fries, although mum's the word on her thoughts about whether she stops at McDonald's to get them. As a professional chef, Burrell is more likely to make these delicious snacks under the more sophisticated moniker, pommes frites. But regardless of where she indulges in these delicious treats or how she makes them, the culinary world will be eternally grateful that Anne Burrell caught the cooking bug early as a fry girl at McDonald's and kept at it.

McDonald's is the world's largest fast food chain, so it's no wonder that some famous faces have graced the Golden Arches. Anne Burrell is in good company with big names including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, singers Seal and Shania Twain, Olympian Carl Lewis, and even Mark Hamill, who played the iconic Luke Skywalker in the "Star Wars" franchise. But whether McDonald's employees are regular Joes, athletes, or actors, the fast food giant has a lot to teach, especially for aspiring chefs. 

To be successful in the kitchen, you don't just need to know how to cook fries and make burgers (although McDonald's has plenty of burgers, some better than others, for future chefs to learn from). The chain teaches essential skills useful in life and for running a restaurant efficiently. Skills like time management, respect for others, and teamwork all come into play with any job, especially in restaurant kitchens, and these are all ones that McDonald's employees learn from their work at one of the chain's many franchises.

Chefs like Anne Burrell don't work in a box. While cooking professionally requires you to hone a lot of independent skills, it also involves working with others, especially in a fast-paced, crowded setting. In Burrell's case, it can also mean working with teams of other chefs of varying skills, as she did for years on the set of Food Network's "Worst Cooks in America," where she taught and mentored teams of individuals with some seriously questionable cooking skills. If not for her first job at McDonald's would she even have survived the first season of such an entertaining show? We may never know, but we are glad for every step in her career that has brought her to where she is today.