For People With Autism, Can Restaurant Kitchens Be a Haven?

For three Halloweens in a row, Joseph Valentino was Emeril Lagasse.

He wasn’t the only kid in New Jersey who idolized chefs and wanted to be one when he grew up. For Mr. Valentino, though, the dream seemed especially hard to reach. Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, he still hadn’t spoken by age 5, when he first dressed as Emeril.

Today, at 27, he is a cook at Point Seven restaurant in Manhattan, working the cold food, pastry and raw bar stations, sometimes all at once. He says the path he took to get there was strewn with rejection. There were interviews that went nowhere, jobs in kitchens where he never felt welcome, deep periods of depression.

“I viewed myself as a liability,” he said.

His career is one of the inspirations for a new program, Chefs on the Spectrum, meant to train and place people with autism in fine-dining jobs.

Mr. Valentino and the owner of Point Seven, the chef Franklin Becker, introduced the initiative Tuesday night during a $2,500-a-head fund-raiser for the nonprofit organization Autism Speaks at Cipriani Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.