The Raleigh chef and advocate for a healthy restaurant industry reflects on the hard-won personal milestone that got him where he is today.
by Scott Crawford

Jan. 29, 2003, was the day my grandfather died. It’s also the day I should have died. I was 31 at the time, working as a chef for the Ritz-Carlton group in Amelia Island, Florida.

I was putting in 12- to 15-hour days, always followed by extreme partying. My drink of choice was whiskey, and it was normal for my friends and I to share an eight-ball of cocaine on any given night. I was usually out until 3 or 4 a.m. Sometimes I didn’t sleep at all; I’d just walk back into work the next day, still drunk and pumped up on cocaine.

This particular day came after a five-day bender with a buddy in Miami. My tongue was swollen; I was severely dehydrated and no amount of water seemed to make a difference. While driving back to Amelia Island, I called my doctor and told him my symptoms. He said, “I want you to find a sign that has an ‘H’ on it and go there.” I was reluctant — “Well, I’m on the 95…”  — but he insisted: “Go to the first hospital you see.” 

So I found an emergency room and discovered that I had type 1 diabetes and was in full ketoacidosis. My blood sugar at the time would not even register on their machine. My pancreas had stopped producing insulin about six weeks earlier. This type of diabetes was not genetic — it was autoimmune. 

After close to two decades of a hard-partying lifestyle, my body had attacked itself; my organs were shutting down. 

The doctors didn’t know what to do with me and told me I was hours away from dying. One of them said, “We’ve never seen anyone alive with blood sugar like that. Only dead people.”  

I was in the ICU for days and missed my grandfather’s funeral. But I left the hospital and immediately went to a liquor store.  

I grew up in a small steel town outside of Pittsburgh. There, my older brother Steve and I had freedom to run the streets. Our parents were completely self-absorbed, wrapped up in their own crumbling marriage. 

There was always a feeling of being lost, a feeling we deflected through alcohol and drugs. I took my first drink — whiskey neat — and smoked my first joint in 1982, the year my parents divorced. I was 11. By the time I was 12, I was addicted to getting high. My brother was in jail by the time he was 18. When he came out, he was sober, but I wasn’t.

At 17, I moved to Florida on my own and started working in restaurants. One of the reasons I chose this industry was that I recognized I wasn’t normal. I was wild and an adrenaline junkie. Restaurant work was a great way to continue the partying lifestyle. It was completely acceptable. 

I started out in the front of the house, but got moved to the kitchen one day when someone didn’t show up. I was already friends with the cooks because I sold them weed. After watching me work in the kitchen that night, the chef noted the way

I used my body and made decisions. He said it was like someone who had been cooking for 10 years. “This is where you belong,” he told me. I’d never heard those words before. And he was right: it was the first place where I felt like I belonged.

 When someone asks me why there’s a high ratio of people in the restaurant industry using and drinking, I think it starts with who the industry welcomes. Back then, anyway, it was people who had no money for college, who were working their way through school or maybe had had a rough childhood. You got credit for being tough: the longer hours you could work, the tougher you were, the cooler you were. There’s a great sense of comradery in that.

Alcohol and cocaine eventually took over my life. I dabbled in heroin, but I mostly kept it at bay, thankfully. Addiction is progressive. And a lot of people can set up their lives to be functional addicts, including myself.

 Looking back, one of the craziest things is how successful I still was at work. After that first cooking job, I made a point of always moving up to better kitchens, focusing on places where I could sharpen my skills. I didn’t yet know the language of classical cooking. I was always faking it ‘til I made it. This was before the internet, so when a chef would ask me to make a sauce that I’d never heard of — or didn’t know how to make — I would run out to my car and refer to a cookbook that I kept on hand. Eventually, I made my way to an inexpensive culinary school in Tampa, where I ran circles around the other students based on all my experience. I got straight A’s for the first time in my life.

After my near-death experience, I was promoted to executive chef of my own fine dining restaurant for the Ritz. I was taking risks in the kitchen that I’d never taken before; I was reading books, exploring without parameters and trying to develop my own cooking style. And I was still very ambitious. That led me to Charleston, to work for The Woodlands Inn, a Relais & Châteaux property that no longer exists. It was Forbes 5-Star rated, which at the time was the highest accolade you could get as a chef. 

This was in 2004, and my addiction was starting to catch up to me. I was living a double life. With my success as a chef, I was a public figure, in the media and receiving accolades. I would go out for drinks with my team, but when everyone went home, I would keep using. I couldn’t risk letting anyone know the depths of my addiction, because it just wasn’t socially acceptable. It was exhausting. I wanted to get sober, but I didn’t know how to do it. 

Until the day my brother Steve called me and said, “You are going to die. How can I help you?” I had just seen him after a weeklong bender, and he had noticed how unhealthy, incoherent and near death I was. Between the diabetes, the using and the intense stress I was under, my brother worried that I just wasn’t going to wake up one day.

Steve caught me at the right moment. He had been sober since he was 18; I knew he was right. The next day, I walked into my first AA meeting, terrified. I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly stay sober after 20 years of using to the absolute extreme. 

The only thing I remember from that meeting was that it had a bunch of old timers, people with decades of sobriety. And they all had peace. 

Peace was something I’d never experienced in my life. I wanted it for myself.

I took it day by day, brick by brick. I got a gym membership at an all-night gym so I had something to do after work to manage the high of service. I got a sponsor, Mickey Bakst, the co-founder (with Steve Palmer of Indigo Road Hospitality) and executive director of Ben’s Friends, an organization that helps restaurant industry workers get and stay sober. 

I also leaned on my colleagues at The Woodlands, particularly Stephane Peltier, the sommelier, and Hugues Le Berre, the maître d’. We hosted many wine dinners that required careful pairings, and, newly sober, it was too risky for me to even taste wine. So I went to them and said, “I’m going to need you to be my palate.” They were supportive in a discreet way, and to this day I don’t know if they knew the degree to which I was suffering. I was so ashamed, but they didn’t make me feel any shame. Hugues didn’t ask any questions — instead, he gave me detailed wine notes. I swear, those pairings were better than ever before. Maybe it was because we were trying so hard, but maybe it was also because my sense of smell was coming back.

When I started my own company here in Raleigh, Crawford Hospitality, I made a pledge to change the culture of restaurants, which starts from within. We have to be mindful about who we hire and what our deal breakers are. The first rule we implemented is no alcohol consumption at work, period. When we are tasting wine, we spit it out. There are no shift drinks, and many times I’ve given the same advice that led me to the gym: “find something to do after work.” I founded the Raleigh chapter of Ben’s Friends. 

So far, 2024 has been a pretty great year. In March, we opened Brodeto, and in June, the Crawford and Son team and I attended the James Beard Awards as finalists for the category of Outstanding Hospitality. 

But most importantly, I’m celebrating 20 years sober. A lot of people see my success today and have no idea the depths of darkness that I reached two decades ago. Real talk: most people don’t make it back from where I was. And that’s why I’m sharing my story. For anyone out there who is suffering from addiction: there is a path to peace and happiness. 

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of WALTER magazine.