Behind the Pass: Troy Kline
Most guests never see the person who runs the line. They see the plate. The sear, the timing, the sauce that shows up exactly when it should. What they do not see is the years it took someone to make all of that look easy.
This is the first in a series about the people in our kitchen at The Barn. I wanted to start with Troy Kline, our Executive Sous Chef, because his story is the kind that does not get told enough. He did not arrive in this kitchen. He built his way into it, one shift at a time, over most of his life.
It started at fourteen, behind a Subway counter
Troy got his first job in this industry at fourteen, making sandwiches at the local Subway after school. It sounds small. It was not. That counter taught him volume, taught him how a franchise runs, taught him how to work alongside a management team across different locations. Most people would not call a sandwich shop the beginning of a culinary career. Troy would. He was paying attention before he knew what he was paying attention to.
The dish pit, and the two men he could not stop watching
In college he took a job washing dishes at a fine dining restaurant in downtown Fairhope. The kitchen was small and open to the dish pit, which meant that every shift, Troy had a clear view of two cooks turning out extraordinary food with almost nothing but their hands and their focus. That view did something to him.
He picked up a busser and service assistant position and learned how to take care of guests in a formal room. He was good at it. He liked the people. But the pull was always toward the other side of the pass. He kept volunteering for dish shifts, not because he loved washing dishes, but because it put him near the cooking.
One Sunday, over family meal, he asked the executive chef and owner if there was any way to work him into cooking shifts. They said yes. That yes is the whole hinge of the story. He started on lunches, learning the things that never make it onto a menu but hold a kitchen together: how to measure, how to prep, how to store, how to handle product with respect. He stayed until the restaurant was sold.
He changed his major for this
Troy was studying psychology. Somewhere in that first real kitchen, he changed his major to culinary arts. That is not a small decision. That is a person rearranging his future around something he finally understood about himself.
He moved on to a high-volume chain and learned streamlined efficiency, the kind of speed and systems thinking that only a big operation can teach you. When he needed an internship for school, he found an organic café where everything was prepped in house, a real departure from the boil-in-bag kitchens he had passed through. Starting on the line there, he got to build dishes from raw product again, the way he had first fallen in love with in that Fairhope dish pit.
From line cook to running the whole thing
Life moved him a few hours away for a while, and even then he kept picking up the occasional serving shift, because the industry does not let go of people like Troy easily. When he moved back, he returned to that café as a cook while he finished school. After graduation they made him kitchen manager. Then executive chef, running the entire operation.
He went from the person watching two cooks through a dish pit window to the person responsible for everything that came out of the kitchen. He earned every step of that.
Where he stands now
Today Troy is Executive Sous Chef at The Barn at The Hope Farm. He is the person who holds the line together, who turns concepts into consistency, who makes sure the food you remember tastes the same the next time you come back. Consistency is its own kind of creativity, and it is one of the hardest things to do well in this business. Troy does it every service.
The next time you eat with us and something arrives exactly as it should, know that there is a person behind that. His name is Troy, he has been chasing this since he was fourteen, and this is his kitchen too.