“God is everywhere and in everything” my father used to say, and if he was right -I took a long look at my burning charcoals inside my Josper- then God must be also present in the hellish flames inside my restaurant’s kitchen, right? My cook levelled the blaze inside the black belly of the beast with his long rod and then closed its door with a bang. He’s such a happy chap, I like him. God is in fire too. That was my father’s believe. And coincidentally, also a Zoroastrian’s. Following up on both their rationale, if a chef makes a living by altering the condition of an ingredient using one of the God’s forms then my only logical conclusion is that the chef must be one of God’s apostles, right? An apostle of fire. By life’s twisted sense of humor I became one of them apostles and from my position I tried to serve God and my boss to the best of my capabilities like all the others like me who served their own bosses and God before me. 18 months ago I accepted the challenge of starting the project of a champagne/tapa bar and 6 months later I’ve joined a steakhouse & seafood restaurant, both located in the same famous 5 Stars hotel. It was a privilege and an honour to be invited to take part to both projects but as you might suspect (actually, whom am I kidding? You fucking know it) in this industry nothing is all pink, glory, sweet and easy. It is mostly built on frustration, dreams, sweat, lack of logic and common sense, greed, long standing hours, planning, fighting food cost/ income factor ratio, sleepless nights, long shifts, and of course, cherry on top, lots and lots of soul eroding battles held with food or equipment suppliers, managers, staff, our delicate all-knowing customers and eventually with the investors too. From the position that I held, that of a headchef, for 18 long months I had to deal with all of them seven days a week and forced to find solutions of compromise that were acceptable to everybody. If I was too popular with my staff I was the enemy of my investor and when I was popular with my boss my staff hated me or suspected me of betrayal. And in between all, my GM hated me 24/7 no matter what my actions were and that was quite funny to me because I always knew what to expect of him. He was highly predictable and I actually liked that. I hated him too so that mutual non-respect made us quite a pair.

To begin with, my first challenge as a headchef was to deal with my first disonant reality: the newly opened tapa bar held 50 seats, a bar packed with over 400 labels of wine and champagne and one tiny rather narrow room which could hardly house (tightly) maximum 5 Vespas, equipped with a large bar sink and nothing else. That was pompously named as “THE KITCHEN”. My ex wife’s shoes storage room was slightly larger than that “kitchen” space. When I entered that closet I was shocked. “This place is a tapa bar”– they said to me – “so cook tapas”… My answer was: “you mean spread some butter on a piece of bread, I hope that’s what you mean”. “No, chef, more than that. Tapas. All sorts of them”… and to underline their commitment to their mission they fitted in that tiny room one refrigerator, one Termomix, one freezer, a tiny induction portable cooktop and a two doors professional cold kitchen table for the preps. Nothing else. No evacuation for the fumes and no other basic normal kitchen tools nor equipment. A Medieval kitchen was better equipped. At one point we were sharing recipes with the hotel’s firemen because they would get triggered by the fire sensors located right above the induction cooktop. Everyday, twice or thrice a day. I’m not an easy guy to scare so I took this challenge personally. It amused me, actually. I’ll make this shithole work I said to myself. To me it was an unbelievable challenge so I started to create a tapa menu based on my grim reality and soon enough the place opened to the public. Two weeks later after the opening I was informed that my boss had yet another vision about this place: “it’s not longer a tapa bar. From now on it’s a restaurant” and my two sous chefs, my comis and I stared at each other with our jaws dropped. So again, I redesigned the menu in order to make it happen, to mimic a regular goddam restaurant based on my whatever my kitchen was capable of and to my utter complete surprise it worked. My tapa bar/restaurant started to gain the attention of a group of whales (special customers) which pretty fast they became our regulars. In that tiny bat cave we produced bloody miracles, we handled parties of up to 75 pax feeding them with all sorts of tiny chic foods and warm appetisers and only us and God know how we managed make these work. We were bloody magicians. You have no idea what I had to put up with to mask our minuses and create the illusion to the world that we’re a real restaurant. I would leave my colleagues to chop, cut, boil, infuse, blend or to plate so I can make conversations with every customer to make him feel so special. Funny story, one day, at a table occupied by four ladies, one of them interrupted me amused and gracefully asked me “are you aware that you’ve answered to all of us in four languages?”  She was right. They were four, each one came from another country and I didn’t realise that I was answering politely to all of their questions in their own native languages. To me it was just talking. To them was a pleasant surprise. That made a difference. My food was custom tailored to my best of my abilities (identity-wise) to each person that ate in my restaurant and my conversations and special attention offered to each and one of them completed their experience and convinced them that we were a proper place to come back to. And most of them became our regulars. American movie stars, politicians, millionaires, mistresses, artists, lawyers and gangsters, they all returned (except for some of the latter who got arrested after they left my place). All of them were fed and got drunk beyond any reason with our fine champagne, some on my expenses just to make my place more popular, and some movie stars were tucked in bed personally by me after I dragged them through the fine 5 Stars hotel long hallways late in the night. When my comis got pregnant we were utterly destroyed. We knew that at one point her now sizeable belly will be squeezing all the air out of our kitchen hence suffocating the entire kitchen brigade and it was a prophecy. The clock was ticking. Because of her at one point we were working in a line like birds on a wire and nobody could over pass her large special cargo. We were so protective with her and her kid was already our honorary chef. In her last month of work she would have to leave the kitchen so we could deliver our food… The steakhouse’s cooking space wasn’t peachy either when my boss signed the lease but when I took over this place at least I’ve finally dealt with a resemblance of a proper kitchen. The kitchen equipment inherited along with the lease was outdated, overly worked and used, it was utter shit, the workflow space was crippled and crammed but at least for the first time after one year of struggles we would all start to feel proud chefs again. Although compared to the first kitchen this one was one of Versailles’s ballrooms the lack of space problem followed us when we moved on to the new location because now we were serving two restaurants with 100 seats from within one small kitchen designed to serve only 50 but the difference was that this time it allowed us to accommodate three to four pregnant ladies. Despite the new challenge to serve 100 from within the tight space and with 1/4 of tools in less than 6 months under my magic hat the steakhouse rose up in ranks from the bottom list of all the steakhouses in my town straight to the second place under Marriott and I could only imagine where we would’ve been if my boss had believed in the modern marketing tools. For 18 months I was a magician and Houdini was nothing compared to me, and I believe that I could’ve done much better and I could’ve avoided at least half of the problems if both concepts were formulated more clearly, if somebody actually listened to what I had to say, if strategies were implemented in a cleverer fashion and if the profit expectations were more realistic. Allow me to further explain myself.

a restaurant’s first mistake: CONFUSION

Prior to my position as an Executive Chef I have never been in charge over a large kitchen so my past experience in this regard wasn’t that impressive but at the end of the day I’m a highly trained chef by an institution that the majority of chefs that I have met and introduced myself immediately googled its name to find out exactly what Le Cordon Bleu stands for. LCB had trained me well so they hired a killer. It’s kind of important for a restaurant, don’t you think? I have always excelled in knowledge about cooking, in techniques, in the art of spice mixing, in consulting menus, plating composition and at adjusting tastes. When I’ve updated my CV and I remembered all the places (documented and undocumented) consulted by me over the years my jaw dropped. They were quite of a sizeable bunch in both Spain, or Morocco. I must admit that I have the eyes and the taste buds for this job. I’m a sniper, I’m part of an elite and what was even more surprising was when I’ve found out that among my elite group I was (and still am) considered an Ace by my colleagues. It took Akhil and my gang from LCB three years and several bottles of red wine to confess this little secret of theirs. They looked at me with great respect. They’ve all, and most of my French trainers too, noticed in me something else and rather unique within my trade: a crazy passion. What they never understood, hence their confusion, is that my passion wasn’t about food. I never cared about food. Fuck food. All I truly care is about people. I simply love them and I believe I understand them like very few of us can. Indeed I’m different but that’s a trait that you can’t buy nor train by strong will no matter how hard you try, I guess it is a gift. When I stepped in for the first time in my champagne bar “I’ve listened to the room and it spoke back to me” clear and loud, and its message was totally disobedient to any of my boss’s plans. Hard to explain. Champagne is the epitome of luxury, celebration, success, power, sensuality, conquer, sophistication, it is the nectar of gods, right? Hope you agree. Well, that room the way it presented itself was vibing big exactly the opposite, it was a mortal’s den, definitely not Mount Olympus. Instead of “champagne, caviar and oysters” it was screaming from the top of its lungs a more democratic “cigar room, medium priced wine and charcuterie to everybody”. My boss was dreaming of selling “L’etat c’est moi” and the reality was a rather revolutionary “Liberte, egalite, fraternite”. Those two opposite animals of the same hospitality spectrum were engaged in the battle of illusions for some of us but not for me… Luxury, exactly like a Siberian Tiger, does not explain itself. It never does. Period. You meet them both and you immediately get the heebie-jeebies up and down your spine. Those two encounters either make your wallet shake or you straightly shit your pants. I believe Luxury is even worst than a tiger because when you encounter it you immediately shit your pants and your wallet shakes simultaneously. Hey, watcha’ gonna do, she’s younger than you and a strong 10, you’re a shitty 6 old fart but you wanna fuck her so pay, asshole, go big and dig deep, player! Thanks to my cheap and rather eclectic furniture/china/cutlery setup displayed in my champagne bar anybody that walked into my place immediately got confused, and how could I blame them? You can’t fake luxury and definitely you can’t fool a person that had experienced luxury at least once in his lifetime. Luxury is a whore’s glitter, you can’t just wash it away from your memory no matter how hard you scrub. My boss was faking it and I had to hide the truth with a top hat and lots of magic tricks. “Burger, salmon, pasta?” “No, champagne, caviar and oysters” … If I’d get a nickel for every time I’ve had this conversation in the last 18 months I’d be rich now. If you read this, my advice to you is to be clear about your identity, avoid unnecessary confusions about your concept; use the proper furniture, the right cutlery, the right glasses, the right china and the right setup because the visual is the first and most powerful language when you engage your customer. It’ll speak tons about your place before you say something and if there is a doesn’t-matter-how-tiny of a distortion within your band width’s message displayed to your customer, like any of the errors described above, he’ll pick it up right away and, congrats, you’ve just opened the gates of mistrust between you two. If you’re targeting cheap bastards, furnish your restaurant with cheap or fairly priced shit and be thrifty with your cost/income ratio. If you’re targeting rich playboys, then splash around la creme de la creme, go Gatsby on their asses and be bold when you ask your price for your services. Can’t mix those two distinct animals in the same cage unless it’s intentional, I mean by design because this is your concept. Otherwise it’s the ultimate Faux Pas! A restaurant is a brittle construction heavily based on perception. If you fully control the way people perceive your business you’re on the path to success. Remember this: people rarely buy your products. What they often buy is your passion invested in your products and a well established and implemented concept is the purest showcase of your passion.

second mistake: FOOD for thought

Like everything else around us, Food is also a language. Speak Mandarin in China, Castilian in Spain or in South America, Arabic in Arab countries, Italian in Italy, Greek in Greece and English or French everywhere else. Play safe, seek for the common grounds. Don’t mix them chaotically because only few of us can or speak Esperanto. What do I mean is you should pay super attention to the details of your menu’s length or composition, taste approach, key ingredients, techniques used, spices or type of fusion. Be smart and keep it simple. Remember nature’s greatest secret: 10% are top predators, 1% are an elite (by chance or through hard work); the rest of us are just nature’s laboratory guinea pigs. Same general rule applies to chefs. 1% will be stellar, 10% super good and the rest will die covered by anonymity. Striving to gain fast visibility by creating “special signature dishes” without the knowledge to back you up is one of the most common fallacies I’ve encountered. Like I said, food is language, ingredients are your words and the dish is your message sent to your customer. Most of the messages that I get as a dining guest are “go fuck yourself, I’m such a great chef, I’m a genius” instead of the much nicer and simpler “I love you” or “I care about you”. Using spices just to give “a taste” to food, any taste (the more exotic and the weirder, the better for I am original) instead of using the spices to control the taste (which is a completely different philosophy) is the most common stupid thing to do as a chef. To combine crazy ingredients just to create unicorns that you’ve never encountered in your life for the sake of your pride as a chef is another stupid thing. To completely ignore the classics and everything else discovered in the past and to spread yourself all over the place by “inventing” new artificial combos against all common senses before you reach the peak of your career it is either the epitome of ignorance or plain geniality. I’d bet all my money on ignorance. But that’s only me. As a chef be humble. Don’t rub your nipples while staring in your mirror because in 99% of the time you’re most probably living in your own version of a distorted Alice’s in Wonderland reality. In my life I’ve met hundreds of self proclaimed kitchen superstars that to my utter surprise and against their uber confidence displayed in public they gave me either the shits with their special creations or the worst dining experiences. Be fucking humble, open your ears and your eyes, learn and be always prepared to accept that any day is an excellent day to learn how ignorant you really are. Do yourself a favor and allow to be schooled by anybody ’cause you never know what tiny obscure secrets they might reveal to you. Crossing your arms on your chest in a photo isn’t confidence in your skills, they’re rather the display of fear of getting caught on how little you know, yelling or cussing in service isn’t authority, is poor upbringing and insecurity, handcuffing your sous chefs and silencing their voices isn’t the way to rule over a kitchen, it’s a terrible loss of ideas. Don’t be a tyrant. Again, learning to be fucking humble is your gateway to better your skills as a chef.

third mistake in a restaurant: lady in kitchen, whore in public and a cook in bed

Hire the best and most expensive professional and let him do his job or hire the cheapest and the most unprepared and tell him what to do. Warren Buffet said it, not me. Both ways do work but don’t you ever dare to try mix those two in a hybrid. Investing in a restaurant doesn’t give you the ultimate authority over taste, that unless you’re truly gifted or a professional in this regard. If you’re neither one of those two feel free to share your vision and invite your head chef to create, to do his thing. If you’re lecturing him about cuisine then at least one of you two has a problem; he’s either paid too much or you’re an idiot destined to fail. As an investor, always keep in mind that your personal food preferences aren’t necessarily also the majority’s. If you insist on pushing your taste to the public you also must embrace the consequences and don’t blame your chefs if your idea doesn’t work. Accept that the general public might like your food less spicy (as in less hot as fire), or other foods than you, accept that since 17th century onwards “sauce au poivre” has been ALWAYS COOKED with CREAM so do your research before you decide to school a professional simply because you have a personal hate against cream, or if you desire a special in-the-house-made vaa-vaa-voom fucking unique desert here’s a crazy idea: hire a professional pastry chef to train your staff on pastry techniques and buy them the fucking bare minimum pastry tools like a stupid mixer, for instance. There is a reason behind each amazing Michelin Star’s signature desert and that reason isn’t your cheap shortcuts nor Youtube. It’s exclusively hard work, years of research & development, trial and error, well paid knowledge and lots and lots of money thrown into the drain. These are just a few of the fictitious situations one head chef might encounter in his relationship with his boss from the top of my head. I can only speculate, I don’t know for sure, never dealt with them. Anyfuck, all that I’m sayin’ is that as an investor if you like to eat but you’re shit in a kitchen don’t try to be the chef, abstain yourself and let the professional you’re paying to do the work for you. Don’t micromanage. Hire people and let them handle the situations. If you’re using them only to decorate your organization with pompous jobs or just to move around bottles of wine from one customer to another then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Speaking of decorations, I don’t wanna stare at your butt crack up on a ladder while you decorate my restaurant with one string of lights or when you spread around those two creepy cloth gnomes and your weird plastic bush stained with a pair of plastic globes for Christmas. I’ve seen shady brothels better prepared on such occasion. Keep your staff decently happy. Pay them decently and try to motivate them with incentives. Speak nicely. You catch more flies with honey than with shit. Respect them and you’ll be surprised how much they’ll do for you for free as their way to show their gratitude. Always keep your word! A promise is a promise. Share your vision as clearly as possible to ease the head chef’s mission to fulfil it. Listen, speak, learn to trust in your people and listen carefully to what they have to say. Perhaps they’re right so don’t dismiss their opinions. Avoid people that are noticing a problem and yet they keep their mouths shut, avoid the yes-men and cherish the ones that are also bold enough to contradict you while offering you an alternative and possible solution. They might not be right on the money all the time but at least they care about your business and they might also trigger in you the constructive process of critical thinking which, again, might lead to an unexpected and better outcome. Be always honest. Since you’re the boss and you’re asking 150% out of your employees the bare minimum decent thing to do is to pay them 100% of their salaries. I know, what a crazy concept, huh? What would you say if I work 55-65% of the time we agreed on, I concoct 55-65% of a recipe, I plate only 55-65% of a dish, I prepare 55-65% of a salad or I cook for and serve only 55-65% of your guests, huh? 55-65%, that’s my number for a 200% job as a head chef. Not cool, ya habibi, not cool at all. I’m not your partner to share the losses nor the winnings so pay me fairly for my promptly delivered services. Marketing is not a bedtime story, marketing is one of the most needed tools in this industry so invest in it. Marketing is dealing with perception and perception is a key factor in hospitality industry. Ignore it and others will steal away your customers.

fourth mistake: fishing great whites in a kaiak or we need a bigger boat

A professional kitchen needs tools to be called one. Professional, not cheap toys’r’us kind of tools. A gazillion of them, and since you cannot afford to purchase everything all at once you must strategize your acquisitions in accordance to your menu in development and to (and for) your customer target. It’s a steakhouse and seafood place, right? So top of the list is a grill and a heated plancha, next in your line is an oven and you go down the list one by one ’till you reach the fucking spoons and from there further downwards to the least impressive brush. Make sure you’ll be opening the best equipped steakhouse and seafood restaurant and always bare in your mind that the nucleus of your place and the reason it is called a restaurant it is its bloody kitchen not the tables nor the expensive materials used to decorate the customer area. The most shocking discovery was when I have realised that most of the restaurants are streaming their biggest chunk of their budget towards the table area leaving the minimum required amount for the kitchen equipment. It’s bloody bonkers. I won’t be crying for my investor when he’ll mention other collateral investments or expenses as the reason for me not having the tool that I require. The gas/mileage ratio of your Bentley its not my concern, your last voyage cost around the best Michelin stars restaurants in this world is not my concern, I actually don’t give a flying fuck that you’ve decided to invest in parallel in other ventures apart of my restaurant and for this reason you’re short right now. It was your idea, it’s your responsibility. Remember that photo that you’ve sent me with that one special Spanish Michelin Star dish? You wanted to inspire me. The food was “meh” in my opinion, I’m a Chef of Spanish Cuisine, I know their repertoire… but the thing that flabbergasted me for weeks was this tiny and yet highly upsetting detail: you’ve literally missed the elephant in your room. No, really, how on earth did you miss the fucking DALI’s two-kneed elephant statue that was holding the plate that you took the photo of?!! You never mentioned a single word about it. The plates you’ve bought for my place were as cheap as fuck and yet you dared to compare my place with theirs. Plating is 50% of a dish’s value. They were serving their food on Churchills, on Villeroy&Boch, on Mauviel, on custom luxurious china plates and special artsy fartsy plate holders whilst I was dealing with your cheap by the dozen crap and yet my food was still au pair taste-wise. Is it fair? Hell, no. Don’t recycle your shitty tools thrown away by your other chefs hoping to save a buck with me. Show me some respect, ya prick. If you’re asking for excellence in 2024 then I need tools that will deliver your dream at 2024 highest standards, shiny new, the best tools and precisely the ones that I’ve asked for not some cheap knockoffs otherwise stop bitching about you being short of cash or readjust your fucking expectations and leave me do the job that I’m paid for within your realistic budget. Breaking even, retrieving your investment or cashing out profits in less than 12 months to 24 months from a high end luxury restaurant?! You must be abusing a substance! Share it with me because you make me wanna waste myself hearing your demands. Only Escobar could pull those kind of numbers that fast. Be ready to ask exclusively things that you could only afford otherwise shut the fuck up or get into another business. The higher you’re aiming the bigger you should be prepared to spend. Excellence comes with a price tag so your only job is to sit with your hands deep down into your pockets and on your lips all I wanna hear is: “ok, when?”

I’d say more about it but since all the above are figments of my imagination and purely coincidental why would I continue? I’ll stop right here because I have better things to do than to imagine this highly disturbed fictional reality… or is it?

Bucharest