NEW YORK – For three Halloweens in a row, Mr Joseph Valentino was Emeril Lagasse.

He was not the only kid in New Jersey who idolised 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 had not spoken by age five, when he first dressed as American chef-restaurateur Lagasse.

Today, at 27, he is a cook at Point Seven restaurant in New York City, 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 programme, Chefs on the Spectrum, meant to train and place people with autism in fine-dining jobs.

Mr Valentino and the owner of Point Seven, chef Franklin Becker, recently introduced the initiative at a fund-raiser for the non-profit organisation Autism Speaks at Cipriani Wall Street in lower Manhattan.

Becker, who is on the group’s board, pitched his Chefs on the Spectrum idea to the rest of the board as a way to help address two problems at the same time: the shortage of skilled labour in restaurants and a high unemployment rate among adults with autism. 

Professional kitchens have long been known as havens for people with neurological and developmental disabilities. Celebrity chefs who describe themselves as dyslexic include Marco Pierre White, Jamie Oliver and Marc Murphy. Cooks who say they have some form of attention deficit can seem to outnumber those without.

But people on the autism spectrum have an exceedingly low profile in the business, whether because they have not been diagnosed or choose not to disclose it.

“I still haven’t met anybody with autism in the kitchen,” said Mr Valentino, who cooked in cafeterias and catering kitchens before going to work...