A year ago, he was just wondering if he would ever find another restaurant job -- but he was also enjoying a vacation with his new wife, Caralyn. Meanwhile, he'd been having some unusual stomach cramping. Then, last October, three days after his first wedding anniversary, Mowry was diagnosed with colon cancer.
He now considers himself lucky to get the diagnosis: One local physician, after hearing of his intestinal complaints, refused to approve a colonoscopy for Mowry, telling him, "You're not 50 years old yet. We can't do that."
Fortunately a second physician signed off on the procedure, which revealed a large tumor. "When I came out of the anesthesia," Mowry recalls, "there was no one there except my wife. She looked at me and said, 'It's not good.' "
Mowry had surgery and, two months later, the first of what would be twelve rounds of chemotherapy. At one point a bacterial infection put him back in the hospital, and there were days when he was too ill to even get out of bed.
I saw Cole around that time at a midtown supermarket. He looked pale and tired but was surprisingly upbeat. "I've got a lot to live for," he said.
I've known Mowry since he was the executive chef at Il Trullo, the Avelluto family's now-closed Italian restaurant at 90th and Metcalf. What I didn't know until recently is that Mowry's culinary career started late. He didn't attend culinary school, but instead received a degree in communications from UMKC in 1986 after a long stint as a bartender at Annie's Santa Fe in the northland, and other venues such as Fred P. Ott's, Grand Street and the Paradise Grill. He says he never thought of cooking until 2001, even though genetics might have ultimately nudged him in that direction: His grandfather Adolph "Ace" Mowry owned a few diners in St. Joseph, Missouri, running the show as chief, cook and bottlewasher.
Eight years ago, Mowry went to the American Restaurant's then-married chef couple, Michael Smith and Debbie Gold, and asked for a job -- any job -- in the kitchen. He started at the bottom, prepping salads. "Then they threw every kind of responsibility at me," Mowry says. "I learned everything."
Mowry followed Smith and Gold to work in the kitchen at 40 Sardines (Smith now operates his own namesake restaurant and Extra Virgin in the Crossroads; Gold recently returned to The American) and held a second kitchen job at The National golf club. And taught cooking at the Plaza Williams-Sonoma store. Later he took the top chef job at Il Trullo, where he started flirting with a female customer; he and Caralyn were married in 2007.
While we were talking, Mowry interrupted the conversation to take a phone call from the birth mother of the child -- still unborn -- he and Caralyn are adopting next month. Caralyn is an executive with a computer firm and has been transferred to the Washington, D.C. office. The Mowrys will move there permanently after their baby is born. Cole plans to stay home with the infant and be a full-time "Mr. Mom" and, maybe later, open a coffee house in their new Alexandia, Virginia neighborhood.
"Right now," he says, "I'm most interested in learning how to prepare fresh, organic baby foods for when our daughter is ready for that. Jackie Habiger (the wife of Room 39's chef and co-owner Ted Habiger) is very into that. I'm planning to talk to her."
Yes, he's got a lot to live for.
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