The woman wanted fish for breakfast. She got fish for breakfast.

The chef has to be flexible. Dinner can be breakfast, breakfast dinner. The lunch hour is impossible to pin down. And comfort food takes on a whole new meaning.

Mitch Feinstein figures he wanted to be a cook since shortly after birth. He was a young kid when he started working at his father Harris’ restaurant, Theresa’s Coffee Shop, on Dorrance Street in Providence.

He accepted an entry-level position at the restaurant — washing dishes. And he saw how his father fed people and never forgot it.

“Dad always believed in the real stuff and there seems to be a resurgence in that nationally, in using homegrown.”

He remembers his father getting up at 4 a.m. to head for the farmers’ market for the freshest produce, then to a favored bakery, then to the restaurant.

“He always instilled in us that number one is always the customer. And he kept an immaculate kitchen.”

Mitch is 45 now and he keeps an immaculate kitchen. He carries the lessons from Dorrance Street with him. And he prepares food as few chefs ever will — knowing that the meals he prepares will be among the last some people will eat.

“It’s humbling,” he said. “It’s very humbling. Nothing in my career prepared me for this.”

He applied five months ago to be chef at the beautiful new facility of Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island on North Main Street in Providence.

“I believe I said, ‘If I’m not right for this job, no one is.’ ”

Since his graduation from Johnson & Wales in 1994, he has seen some kitchens. He was working at The Marriott in Providence a year ago when he and his wife, Wendy, had the kind of experience that can cause a couple to take stock. Wendy’s father, Ed Hadfield, was at the Philip Hulitar Inpatient Center in Providence, with terminal lung disease.

“Everyone else had left, and we were there when he took his last breath,” said Feinstein. “For lack of a better word, that was a gift.”

A few months later, he saw the ad for a different kind of chef. He talked it over with his wife. It seemed he was being moved in a new direction. He considers the possibility of divine intervention.

In the middle of the afternoon on a cold, gray autumn day, families visit patients in this place where the final days are marked with small accommodations of ever-changing needs. The Philip Hulitar Center is a part of the new facility which, for Feinstein, means coming back to where that special bedside gift was given to him and his wife last year.

Sitting near the coffee pot that is always on next to a tray of muffins or cookies, Feinstein points out the basics of his menu — mac-and-cheese, meat lasagna, baked haddock. It’s comfort food without the statistics and it’s served with extra effort to make it look good on the plate.

“People eat with their eyes first,” he said.

But sometimes it isn’t exactly what’s needed. Sometimes, there’s something a little bit different in a patient’s dinnertime memories.

“Sometimes, families will tell me ‘Grandpa likes such and such a dish.’ And I’ll try to accommodate them.”

It’s the way a chef has to work when cooking for people who know exactly what they want and when they want it.

It is, said Feinstein, a matter of being ready to cook any thing at any time.

bkerr@projo.com