A Conversation with Chaz French
On an unusually sunny Tuesday morning I set out to a cafe in the Castro district of San Francisco to meet up with my old acquaintance Chaz to talk about life and get some information about what he has been up to for his redesigned site. We exchanged greetings and hugged long; Chaz has always been a hugger and gives great hugs.
He left Los Angeles over 20 years ago to go back east and be near family during a trying time that ended up being an 8-year stay. Chaz’s had a lot of time on his hands and his long-time love of food really came into its own as he taught himself more techniques and started creating his own recipes; eventually he took a bread baking course at the French Culinary Institute and later did the chef’s training program at The Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts when done, he decided it was time to move back to California and be among his own tribe, though this time he decided on the San Francisco area. After an apprenticeship at Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, Chaz did some catering and spent 3 years cooking at a private language immersion school making gourmet lunches and snacks for twenty-eight kids and fourteen adults before deciding that cooking professionally was too much for his back and feet to bear.
For the last 10 years he’s worked for California’s premier continuing legal education company, CEB where he started in Composition for print publication but recently took on a new role on the digital side of the business as a Content Validation Specialist, he said ‘it’s the longest I’ve stayed with any company by far, but after 10 years of print composition I was really getting burned out”: so when the new role on the digital side was offered he jumped for it stating “I really needed the change, and it came at the perfect moment.”:
These days Chaz is living happily in the San Francisco area where he is active in the local leather and kink communities and volunteers his time helping organizations within those communities. Chaz recently became a certified Dungeon Monitor to be of further assistance within the community in a “much needed safety role.”
During the pandemic he lost his love of cooking and baking stating “It became a joyless chore, and food shopping was an anxiety and stress ridden nightmare.” He only recently started cooking again and baking followed not long after. He re-found some of his joy in cooking by making a simple tomato sauce from tomatoes he grew himself. He added “I knew Stella had got her groove back when I tasted the sauce and let out a loud “Fuck Yeah! That’s fucking perfect!”” He’s since been cooking every day again and is back to creating new meals and putting his health supportive culinary degree to use at home. While he’ll never be a vegetarian again, and veganism is repulsive to him he has been cooking a number of meals that are either vegetarian or vegan but mostly out of necessity due to the rising costs of food, inflation, and the current regime’s “idiotic fucking tantrum-throwing orange shitgibbon spewing economic nonsense and imposing foolhardy tariffs that only hurt Americans more.”
Chaz had to stop watching the news and is mostly off social media due to its affects on his mental wellbeing at having to see “that god damned ass monkey motherfucking grifter on every fucking channel evey single day causing more chaos and spewing his vile lies and hatred” Instead he is currently focused on his gardening, and to a lesser degree his writing, it is his hope that Food, Gardening and Writing will once again find that convergence point and recipes for the things he grows will follow.
Poetry is still a “difficult journey” but one that he feels is still worth pursuing through the pain, as his meditations on life, nature, and the world around him are often pulled from traumatic experiences. “Life has been shit, after shit, one fucking trauma after another for decades, my whole life really, but still, I persevere, and am generally a happy person, but poetry…” after a pause where he looked off into the distance* he added “Storytelling is easier; more observational and direct, but I don’t get out a lot so there aren’t many stories to tell these days. I will be getting out more now that I have gotten through some other recent shit that made it hard to get out and about.”
On that other “Chaz French”, “he’s a decent rapper, and we’ve chatted a few times via twitter, but I was here first and got the domain, the twitter, the insta, and some others, but they are all available for the right price if he wants them.”
Finishing his third cafe latte, Chaz said “I’d love to talk some more, but I’ve really got to get my day moving along, the dogs need walking and then I’m off for an appointment.” We hugged, said our goodbyes and he was off, looking back only briefly to smile and wave as he left the cafe.
*After reading my draft Chaz commented “I wasn’t looking off into the distance, I got distracted by a hot guy and was checking him out.” And that, dear readers, is the Chaz I know and love.
By L. Mahavir from a conversation with Chaz French – December 2025.
L Mahavir is a Los Angeles based bon vivant, Buddhist, occasional writer, and long-time acquaintance of Chaz’s from their days at Los Angeles City College.
