Chef Renee Kelly on life in a castle and overcoming food allergies

For a long while, it seemed that everyone in Renee Kelly’s life knew she would be a chef before she did. When she was 8 and growing up in De Soto, Kansas, her brothers asked her to make homemade doughnuts.

“That was my first introduction to a grease fire. It was my very own kitchen nightmare,” Kelly says.

The year she was set to graduate high school, her father, Randy Neighbors, gave her a floppy chef’s hat. “What am I, going to be a chef or something?” she remembers telling him. 

And after her first year as a premed student at Texas A&M, she was terrified to tell her parents that there wasn’t going to be a doctor in the family. They just laughed and told her to come on home. And it was then that her dad asked if she would ever consider cooking.