Naomi Pomeroy is a chef and owner of Beast restaurant and Expatriate bar. She also appeared on Season 3 of Top Chef Masters. She lives in Portland, OR with her husband, Kyle Linden Webster, co-owner of Expatriate, and her 13-year-old daughter, August.

Describe your job and a typical day for you.

That's funny! There is no typical day. I get to work around 9 a.m. and I do anything from cooking and menu making to emailing and being human resource manager for the staff. I work until around midnight. That's typically four days a week—two weekdays and a Friday and Saturday. It's the schedule of a chef. 

This fall it will be different for me because I plan on spending more time at home and changing my schedule from what it's been like in the past. It's all really new and I'm not sure what it's going to look like exactly, but I'm going to try to get my job done every day between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Then I'll go home and make dinner and spend time with my daughter. 

Up until a few years ago, you were a single mom. How was it juggling your career while parenting solo?

I've been married for a year now, but was with my partner two years before that. I was a single mom when my daughter was between the ages of five and 10. The choices I had to make in those first moments I found myself as a single mom were really hard ones—and they never stopped being hard. Up until that point I was co-owner of three restaurants with my ex-husband, but those restaurants closed and he moved to Seattle.

I interviewed at a food import company to be a sales rep. It would have been a position where I could have worked while my daughter was in school. But I would have been miserable. At the end of the day, I chose what I hope a lot of people choose—and that's the decision to be happy, which ultimately, made me a better mom. I had to put on my own oxygen mask first. I had to feel good about what I was doing in my career, which honestly, wasn't or isn't being with my daughter all the time.

And so I continued on as a chef. It wasn't always easy. In the beginning I was working 100 hour weeks and there aren't a lot of working mom chefs. But it has led me to be able to raise a daughter who sees in me that she can do whatever she wants and be successful at it.

How do you handle child care?

Right now I have a full-time nanny, but as of September I won't have one. Like I mentioned, I'm making a conscious decision to spend more time with my daughter. We'll see how it goes. Interview me again next year!

But before being able to afford a nanny, there were a tough couple of years where I relied solely on my friends to hang out with my daughter. As a single mom, I had to build a community around me that I could turn to for support.

Could you share a work mom meltdown?

It has been very difficult, as a chef, to not be the person who cooks my child's food every night.

When have you been most daring?

I think the moment I decided not to take a desk job and open a restaurant. At that time in my life I was a failure. My story was a train wreck. The three restaurants I co-owned had failed and had just closed. My marriage fell apart and my divorce was on the front page of the newspaper. I had failed financially. So to take that chance again and do it on my own, while parenting, seemed crazy. But it was all worth it.

If you could interview anyone to gain insight into the work life balance, who would it be?

I always say the same person because she's so amazing to me. Her name is Aung San Suu Kyi and she's the democratic leader of Burma. She was under house arrest for 10 years because of her political beliefs. Now she represents freedom for an entire country—and she's done all of that as a mom.

If you could describe your life in one word, what would it be?

Exciting.