When I ask Bill Bracken for his most poignant moment as a chef, he doesn't gush about his former career in posh restaurants in Beverly Hills and Newport Beach, California, cooking for megastars like Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone. He tells me about a homeless woman named Ruby.
In 2013, Bracken had started a non-profit, Bracken's Kitchen, which feeds homecooked meals to the displaced, the old, the poor — “Anybody who's hungry,” Bracken says. Ruby lived with other individuals in an encampment near the Orange County Civic Center, but Bracken had a problem.
“Homeless people scared me,” he admits. “I wasn't scared physically. I was raised by a dad who taught me how to take care of myself. But for whatever reason, big, tough, bald Bill Bracken was scared.”
Bracken developed a
