I might have gone with “Fighter.” Because the undisputed queen of the Fenway restaurant scene has had to go to bat for herself a lot in life, both personally and professionally. She recently took a wildly accurate personality test, she says, one of those predictive-behavior indexes that corporations use to evaluate management style and assign an easy label. Somewhere around the third or fourth visit from the dim sum cart, she tells me-sort of. So as I wait for the former Top Chef contestant to join me at Hei La Moon, her favorite lunch spot in Chinatown, I wonder how the mercurial food-world personality would want me to see her. But more important, the first thing I learned about Faison that day was that she is very careful about the way she lets others present her to the world, even when she’s only playing pretend. I put them on my credit card and prayed the price tags stayed on. It was going to be fun! It was sure to be a hoot! Until, utterly unimpressed by the wardrobe a stylist had pulled for her shoot, she marched me around Saks to find spiffier threads. Faison, by this point known nationally as a fierce firebrand of a chef and most often found sporting a grease-stained cook’s coat, decided to pose, tongue firmly in cheek, in the garb of a genteel lady of leisure at high teatime. I had organized a cover shoot of Boston notables dressed up as the fantasy personas they wanted to embody for a day. Granted, I was a green, twentysomething editor and she was a TV celebrity. The first time I met Tiffani Faison, I found her totally intimidating.
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