Little Mozart of the Fryolator Keeps Getting Younger and Younger

Possums, some people just don’t know when to stop.

Take, for instance, Ryan Scott, the Little Mozart of the Fryolator, who, as we detailed, described how his father allowed him to work as a line cook for several weeks as an 11-year-old. As Ryan put it, “At 11, I jumped on the line with my father, and my dad fired two people after the first two or three weeks because I outcooked them at 11.”

As our friend, Miss Upton Sinclairol, explained, if such a thing did actually happen, it was likely a gross violation of California’s child-labor laws that might well have resulted in fines of up to $10,000 and criminal prosecution. It seemed a bit of a sticky situation, for, in his bit of braggadocio, Ryan had, it appeared, either fibbed or exposed his father as a lawbreaker.

Our opinion tended toward the former option, because other statements from Ryan in a newspaper interview suggested that the grade schooler who “cook[ed] his family crazy concoctions, like sloppy chili melts and herb experiments from the garden,” which his family would then eat out of support for him, could not also be such a competent cook, and on a restaurant line, no less, that he was the equivalent of two adult line cooks.

Now, in one of his most recent interviews, Ryan is, as he might have put it on this week’s episode, going bigger, and possibly going from the Little Mozart to the Little Munchausen of the Fryolator. To wit:

“I started at a really young age, my parents had a restaurant [this is presumably the Chubby’s restaurant franchise that, per the newspaper account, Ryan’s family ‘briefly owned’ while he was in elementary school] and I started cooking there at age 8. My parents have always encouraged and supported me, they pushed me and never discouraged me even when I made some not so delicious food.”

Ah, let’s see. So he was working in the restaurant when he was eight, rather than when he was 11 (which would make the child-labor law violations even more egregious, while seeming also to implicate his mother) and he was not competent because he made “some not so delicious food.” That seems like a blending of both our theories. At any rate, that’s quite the hat trick (or some such sports metaphor; we’re not sports fans either).

As any self-avowed “metrosexual” should know, even if you can’t keep yourself straight, you do have to keep your story that way. We look forward to the next iteration of the story, wherein Ryan will delight us with tales of how, while still in the womb, he would poach pears in amniotic fluid.