Jackson Free Press

Jordan Alexis Holley says that when she was younger, her dad would take her to Burger King once a week so she could try and eat all of a four-patty burger, the Quad Stacker.

"I was always one bite away," she jokes. But she says that it wasn't until she went to Europe at the age of 18 that she really saw food for what it could be.

She traces what inspired her to get into the culinary world to one meal she had wile visiting friends in France during that trip. Her friend made leek soup, and Holley says she ate almost the whole pot.

"It was not because I was hungry. ... It was because it satisfied something that I didn't even know I wanted," she says.

"I didn't even know what leeks were. I had never had a soup that had yellow mustard in it. (But) it's the one meal that I go back to that changed everything with how much I love food."

The Montgomery, Ala., native says that after that, she and her friends started having dinner parties once or twice a year where they'd find the hardest meal they could and do it.

"We would cook it and destroy the kitchen, and it would take a day and a half to cook it, and we would gorge ourselves sick at the end of it," she says.

When she was studying nursing at Auburn University, she says she would go to different cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans and try the food.

One spring break while in college, she visited Jackson and says she fell in love with the city. In March 2015, she moved here and says she never looked back.

"It's been the best decision I've ever made in my life," she says.

She made her first step into the culinary world when she became a line cook at now-closed La Finestra in May 2015.

"(The cooking staff) showed me what passion for food looks like," she says.

After La Finestra closed in October 2015, Holley began traveling with the business' executive chef and owner Tom Ramsey to food festivals, boucheries (butcher shops) and more, and she says she even got to cook with famous chefs such as Isaac Toups, who was on Bravo! TV's "Top Chef" show.

Holley came back when she was about four or five months pregnant and started working as a line cook at Parlor Market.

These days, Holley, 24, says she's focusing on getting ready for the baby and teaching her future stepchildren, Cassie, Noah and Ava, about food and where it comes from. Her fiance, Paul Yamas, works at Valley Foods as a food service director.