Island Profile: Kyle — Whatever name she goes by, she’s first and foremost a chef

Although Kyle has a number of distinguishing characteristics, first among them might be the fact that she has only one name — like Cher or Bono. When she was married to Tommy Ritzler, she was referred to here on the Island, mistakenly as it turns out, as Kyle Ritzler. Wrong, she says. It’s just Kyle, changed legally, years ago. What does it say on her driver’s license? On her bank account? Kyle. When questioned further, she says Kyle was actually her last name. What was her first name? No comment.

She grew up in Lindenhurst, an only child, and had “a pretty normal childhood,” she said in a recent interview. But one day during high school, when she was 15 years old, “Somebody stopped me on the street and said ‘Hey, can we take your picture? I said, ‘I guess so,’” and they did. Almost overnight, quite literally, she was launched into the modeling world.

Enter Kyle — one word.

She had an agent, Zoli, “One of the best in New York. I was on the runway, I was on the cover of magazines, it was fun. I did some TV commercials. It was a nice life, and not as scary as I think most mothers think. And I was fortunate, I really never had to starve myself, it was easy for me.” Laughing, she added, “Now I have to starve myself.”

“I got to travel all over the world, Paris and Italy, London, Tokyo and it was a great, great time of my life.” She lived in Japan for some of those years and learned quite a bit of the language. But by the time she was 28, the scene had begun to pale. “When you’re 28, you’re done, you’re old. You’re out to pasture” in the modeling world. “But it was such an empty career for me. You had no end product at the end of the day and I noticed that all my friends were all getting married to overweight older men, so I began to wonder, ‘What am I going to do with myself?’”

So she looked into a number of schools. She went to visit the Culinary Institute of America, near Poughkeepsie, New York, and it was love at first sight. “By the end of the day, it was like, this is what I’m doing. It was that quick of a change of life. I went up there in March and in May I was enrolled full time.”

Clearly, she has no trouble with decision making.

Part of the program was an internship at a restaurant and the options extended across the globe. With her Japanese background, she wanted to hone her skills with Asian cuisine, so she chose Guam. “The food there was a little bit of Thai, a little bit of Indonesian. My apartment was on the beach. I used to walk down the beach to go to work. It was great, a great time. The weather was fabulous and it was nice for me to be there.”

After graduating in 1994, she moved to Florida, became the chef at the Bon Adventure spa and “was having the time of my life. When I wasn’t working, I could take yoga, go swimming.” Management wanted her “to interact with the guests, for them to feel they had access to me. There was this group of women there that spa jump, from the Red Door in California, to the Doral in Florida, and they told the general manager at the Doral that the food was much better at Bon Adventure.” And so the phone rang. It was the Doral.

“So I went there, interviewed with them. I had to cook for them. They offered me a job that I couldn’t refuse. That was really the best. I mean, they’ve all been great, I’ve been very fortunate. But there I had access to all facilities, a state of the art kitchen, with air conditioning! The equipment and staff? It was a dream come true for any chef. That was a really great time for me but I knew I couldn’t stay in Florida. I’m from New York. I knew I didn’t want to buy a house there, or stay there. I wanted to come back to New York. It was time.”

She had married Shelter Islander Tom Ritzler, one of the chefs at Bon Adventure, the year before. They came to the Island in 1998, not to stay, but just “as a landing pad.”

“But you know, while you make plans, life plans itself,” she said. Jobs followed on the Island and in Bridgehampton and in 2000, “We bought this building, built in 1863, an illegal two-family dwelling in the business zone, with the intention of making it into a restaurant. We didn’t know what kind but we were going to do something.”

They opened in 2002 as the Shelter Island Bake Shop, went on the following year to open the restaurant, and although the restaurant thrived, the marriage did not. For a time, they ran it together, although separated, but in time Tom wanted out. “It was kind of like odd to me because I didn’t grow up here. I thought he’d want to keep it and I was fine with that, but when he didn’t want it, I was like, well, then I’ll run it.”

She leased it for a time but when her tenants left, “I started revamping it in 2009. That November, repainting, through March, I was here working and planning and gearing up to open and I opened on April 1, 2010. It was going really great, I was making great food and then I fell down the stairs and broke both my arms. I couldn’t do anything for eight weeks. Thank God, I had this fantastic crew. I couldn’t turn a door knob. They did everything.”

Then, four days after her casts came off, she was back in the hospital with an emergency appendectomy. “It was a rough year. I was back at ground zero. Then last year, I just started all over again.” It’s been hard but, she feels, it’s been worth it. “Its stressful, it’s not an easy job, but the beauty is that people in this business love it. If you don’t love it, you shouldn’t be in it, because it requires love, it’s like a baby.”

Living now in Greenport, with a “significant other,” Kyle seems settled. And happy. “I feel so fortunate. I love what I do. I don’t know many people who wake up everyday and can’t wait to get to work. I love it when the seasons change and I get to play with different foods, different produce, it’s great. I get to be creative and I get to make people happy. It’s a great thing.”

She’ll be opening this spring.