Scott Neuman Chef Scott Neuman enjoys cooking various entrees, appetizers and other menu items at Jasper’s in The Woodlands.[/caption]

Scott Neuman may not have any formal training in the culinary arts, but after getting into the restaurant industry as a teenager, the current chef at Jasper’s in The Woodlands now has two decades worth of professional cooking experience.


Neuman, who was born in Texas and earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from The University of Texas, grew up outside of Chicago and did not always think he would become a chef.


“Maybe I have more failures because of it, but maybe I also think differently because I’m not put into the classic mold,” he said. “Over my career, I’ve certainly learned everything I would have learned in culinary school in that sense.”


Neuman said his interest in cooking really sparked when he moved back to Texas for college partly because of all the Mexican food options. In Chicago, he said there were few Mexican restaurants to choose from, but the Southern staple became a source of inspiration for him.


“As a young person, I didn’t grow up thinking, ‘Gosh, I want to be a chef,’ but I was always interested in food,” Neuman said. “I loved being in the kitchen, in particular, more with my father than with my mother. My father was a little more experimental, but he was also a great grill cook.”


Neuman said he fondly remembers spending weekends in the backyard with his father watching ribs cook and sharing stories. Part of his father’s philosophy was that eating well is the best revenge, so when the Neumans would go on vacation, his father would look up the best restaurants during their stay.


“I was very fortunate to take over my first restaurant kitchen at a very early age,” he said. “That’s a good and a bad thing looking back on it. The things I regret—and what I tell young culinarians are—work in as many places as you can before [taking over] because once you are in that top spot, it makes it harder to learn. It doesn’t mean you can’t, but this business is all about learning [and] you never stop.”


Neuman said although every day brings new challenges, he cannot imagine doing anything else.


“One of the joys about [cooking]— and one of the frustrating things about it—is that no day has any semblance to another day,” he said. “Every day the reset button gets hit.”


Neuman said his favorite part of being a chef is the instant gratification he receives when customers enjoy his cooking. He remembers going to
a restaurant as a child and thinking the chef must have been a magician for making his food taste so good.


“It’s kind of neat now that I get to be the magician,” he said. “I’m the guy who’s behind the curtain.”


Creativity is only about 5 to 10 percent of the job, Neuman said, adding a restaurant kitchen is like an orchestra, in that everyone has a role in making sure meals come together at the same time.


“What a chef really does is they do the same thing 10,000 times, and the 10,001st time has to have just as much passion in it as the first,” he said. “There’s no other career like it.”