You won’t find Morgan Goldstein hanging out with friends or going to the movies most Friday nights. Instead, the Laurel School senior has spent the majority of her free time in the kitchen of one of Cleveland’s most popular restaurants, slicing and dicing away.
Since coming in second on Food Network’s Chopped Teen in 2014, Goldstein continued to sharpen her culinary skills with an internship at Jonathon Sawyer’s Trentina in 2015, where she then stayed on to work as a prep cook until earlier this year.
“I was working the pizza station,” says Goldstein, who was featured as one of Cleveland Magazine’s Most Interesting People in 2015. “It definitely changed me and I loved it. I met some incredible people and it made me a much stronger chef.”
She’s now thinking about college where she hopes to major in food science. Her dream job is to lead a recipe test kitchen.
“My ultimate goal is to develop a crop that would help end world hunger,” she says. “Something along the lines of a sustainable food that would help developing countries.”
The Shaker Heights teen also partnered with local food writer Douglas Trattner to develop a cookbook of her own recipes, with a release date yet to be set. Goldstein hopes it will help others be the champions in their own kitchen.
“I really wanted it to be a book that talks about how to actually cook and how to put flavors together rather than how to blindly follow a recipe,” she says.
