South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Giving others some hope
Support group offers help for restaurant workers gripped by drug, alcohol abuse
Jennifer Brock was on the way to her job as a sous chef at fashionable French restaurant Bistro Aix in Jacksonville’s trendy San Marco neighborhood when she realized that, on a sunny afternoon on busy Interstate 10, she was losing control of her car.
She was overdosing, that much she knew. It did not totally surprise her — heroin and crack cocaine were her preferred company. Gripping the wheel, everything got hazy, and then it all went black.
Brock does not remember her car swerving into a delivery truck filled with Coke, then flipping into a screeching roll that ejected her onto the pavement, her face submerged in an oily pool of standing water. She has no memory of the stranger who held her face out of the water until
paramedics arrived.
While she was not seriously injured, Brock says the incident was a moment of reckoning for her. Heavy drug use had turned her drive to work into a roulette wheel of death. She knew something had to be done.
So Brock stopped driving. She traded her spot in the fine-dining kitchen at Bistro Aix for a series of less challenging cooking jobs near her home, including a barbecue joint and a breakfast-lunch diner.
“I started working at places I could walk to, because at that time I thought driving was the problem, not the drug use,” Brock says. “I continued to use drugs heavily.”
After five years of clean and sober living, the 34-yearold Brock, now working as a private chef and living in Lake Worth Beach, relates the grim story of her downward spiral with unaffected candor, free of dramatic embellishment and any trace of self-pity.
Brock is honest and accountable about the decisions that led to a place, when she was not yet 30, that she was convinced she would not leave alive. She says it is important to tell her story, because it is not just her story.
“The hope is that by speaking some of the darkest moments of my life, someone who’s going through that can relate and say, ‘OK, there’s hope for me, too,’ ” Brock says. “If they’re using or they’re alcoholics, and they think that’s the only thing they can ever be? My story is that you can get past that, if you choose it.”
On Monday, Sept. 12, Brock will join chef Emerson Frisbie and Palm Beach Meats owner Eric San Pedro to introduce the first South Florida chapter of Ben’s Friends, a support group for food and beverage professionals struggling with alcoholism, addiction and substance abuse.
The first meeting will take place at Palm Beach Meats,
4812 S. Dixie Highway, in West Palm Beach, from 10 to 11 a.m., timed to allow attendance by hospitality employees who work at night. The meetings will be held each Monday at the same time and place going forward.
Ben’s Friends was founded in 2016 by Charleston, S.C.based restaurateurs Steve Palmer and Mickey Bakst to honor Ben Murray, a chef and colleague who took his own life after struggling with alcoholism.
The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health published by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in 2015 found workers in the hospitality industry had the highest overall rates of drug and alcohol abuse of any industry.
The West Palm Beach chapter of Ben’s Friends will be the 23rd across the country. The national group hosts daily Zoom meetings, and there are also weekly women- and men-only online gatherings.
Frisbie says the in-person meetings in West Palm Beach will be the first in South Florida dedicated specifically to hospitality workers.
A prolific chef in Palm Beach County — he’s the resident chef for Swank Specialty Produce, owner of Clandestine Culinary and operates Ghost Kitchen Collective at Palm Beach Meats, where he is a consultant — Frisbie is also both a recovered heroin addict and a certified addiction counselor.
He says the South Florida hospitality market, which is filled with food and beverage workers who come and go with the season, is particularly vulnerable.
“The fact that we have a transient workforce adds to the notion of not really feeling like you have a place,” Frisbie says. “You couple that with, maybe, someone that’s got a pre-existing substance abuse issue and mentalhealth problems, and you add the pressures of the kitchen, that feeling of aloneness can really be a lot.”
Ben’s Friends is not a faithbased program, and Frisbie says he will not approach the meetings at Palm Beach Meats as a counselor. He says it’s more about creating a community based on similar experiences and stories, which he and Brock and San Pedro are eager to share.