She grew up in the shadow of perhaps the greatest restaurant city in the world, and her dream was to be a chef. Instead of pining for the next available gig in The Big Apple, though, Elyssa Silva packed her bags at the first opportunity to leave New York City for good.

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While the road to New York is congested with white-knuckled dreamers hoping to make their mark where it counts most, there in the oncoming lane is Silva, a Long Island girl who wants nothing to do with those city lights.

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“I never wanted to stay in New York,” says Silva, who until late December was Executive Chef at Arthur’s Restaurant in the Hilton Ocala. “I wanted to leave; I wanted to experience new things.”

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Unimpressed by the hustle and bustle of New York City, Silva took off to Rhode Island upon high school graduation, enrolling at Johnson and Wales University in Providence where she would take advantage of one of the country’s premier culinary programs. At age 18, New York City was in her rearview mirror and would remain so to this day.

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“Whenever I tell people I’m from New York, they say, ‘Oh, that’s such a great city!’ … but I hate it,” Silva says. “I’m not a huge city person. There’re so many people – they’re rude and it’s dirty. 

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“I love hustle and bustle in the kitchen, but in everyday life I like the option of sitting out in the back yard by a firepit, just sitting back, relaxing or sitting on the beach listening to the waves.”

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New York is to a chef the way Florence, Italy, is to an architect, or Paris to an artist. But for Silva, there were enough fine-dining options elsewhere to learn her trade and satiate her appetite for discovering the world beyond the Empire State. “I know New York is the Mecca for food; I just didn’t have an interest. I wanted to do what nobody else in my family did – I wanted to leave New York and experience other places.”

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Silva is a woman on the go, not to be tied down anywhere until she gets to the exact place she wants to be. And where is that? She’ll know when she gets there.

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So she eschewed New York for… Boston. After completing her master’s degree, she accepted a position as culinary supervisor at the Westin Boston Waterfront. There, Silva was thrown into the fire of dealing with massive convention crowds that came flooding in all at once. It was her first “big girl job” as she likes to put it, and where she started to groom her management style which is less about volume and more about example, an important factor as a female executive chef leading her team.

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“I grew into leadership very quickly,” Silva said of her time in Boston, where she went from culinary supervisor, to banquet chef, to executive sous chef, and finally to executive chef. “As I grew in roles and had leaders underneath me – I had a sous chef who could not stand that a young female was his boss – there was blatant disrespect.”

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It’s the kind of situation she has learned to deal with in mostly diplomatic ways. Not only being female, but so young for her position – she’s 33 years old and raising a young girl in the middle of her “Terrible Twos” – Silva has had to deal with an amount of disrespect that usually dissipates quickly.

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“I’m not the type of chef that’s, ‘It’s my way or the highway,’ – any leader that I’ve had beneath me, my goal is for them to take my job, and, if it’s not my job, ‘where do you want to go?’ I want to help them get to their goals.”

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She admits most kitchens are dominated by male cooks, and that was the case even at The Hilton until recently, which has begun to skew more female, but not by design.    “I don’t actively seek out any gender – it doesn’t matter to me who you are, if you can cook you can cook.”

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The same goes for educational levels, which seem to hold little sway over Silva when she is assembling her kitchen team. One reason is her most significant mentor, Joseph Florio, never went to culinary school. His reputation in Boston was so strong that Silva stepped away from her role as executive chef at the W to become sous chef at the Sheraton Boston under Florio.

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At the Sheraton, Florio made special efforts to bring Silva along in her game, teaching her tricks of the trade that don’t come in college, but in real-world experiences.

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“He went to the school of hard knocks,” Silva says of Florio. “But he was one of the most talented chefs I ever met. He took me under his wing and we brought in an entire fish, and whatever it was, we would sit down and learn how to do it. If it was something I didn’t know, he would walk me through it.

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“Most important was his passion and his drive. This wasn’t work to him and that’s what’s relevant to me with people on my staff: how hard you work, how much passion you have. If you’re not passionate about what you do and it’s only a job, then I don’t really want you in my kitchen.” 

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In Boston, Silva led teams of all sorts which helped her to diversify her field of expertise. She was in charge of the cold side, the hot side, catering, banquet, bakery – all bases were covered.  It’s also one of the reasons she shies away from claiming to have a “specialty” and also evidence of her constant attempts to branch out into new genres of cooking.

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Her family is mostly Italian, so she grew up in that style mainly, but whenever she meets new people in her life, it generally means taking on new styles of cooking. In a relationship years ago with a person of Chinese descent, she embraced Chinese-style cooking, and now she is married to a man of Brazilian heritage – naturally, she has branched out into Brazilian-style cooking.

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“When I learn something about a different cuisine or different type of meal, I like to take it and then adapt it to something in the way that I would like to eat,” Silva says. “What can I do to make it something different from the same concepts?”

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When she came to the Hilton Ocala, her task was simple, yet broad – she was offered a blank slate, told to flip the menu upside down and take it to the next level. How do you keep “comfort food” available, but do it in a more refined way?

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The first thing Silva did was to take meatloaf off the menu. “I love meatloaf at home, but I wouldn’t go to a restaurant of this caliber and order meatloaf.” Instead, she replaced meatloaf with braised short rib, keeping a beef comfort food on the menu, but elevating the option “to the next level.”

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The main point is that nearly all options are on the table, from her simple garlic bread that draws attention from a half-mile radius when she pulls it out of the oven, to her steaks and burgers which never become acquainted with the flat top (‘you need those char marks”). She’s equally comfortable baking bread, searing filets, or even tossing salads, and it could be for two or 200.

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Such has been a big plus for Silva at the Hilton Ocala, which has afforded her the opportunity, not just to manage a kitchen and a staff, but to also be hands-on with the cooking, something not afforded to many executive chefs. Such a lesson will be one she takes with her on the next step in her career.

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“(Chefs) Always joke that the higher you get, the less you cook. But, the huge win about this property specifically is I can have fun with food, I can create whatever menus I want; there’re no restrictions on what’s expected. A lot of executive chefs, they don’t get that flexibility.”

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Now, Silva will take that flexibility onto the next step of her journey, which will focus on her own catering that will likely take her from Ocala and to bigger places, albeit not New York.

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“I did grow my career very quickly and successfully, but it wasn’t because I knew the right people or hung out with the right crowd. I learned how to find myself, stand up and show what I can do.”