He returned to Hawke's Bay but was soon off again, working beside award-winning chefs in London.
His unique insight into Japanese cuisine made him hot property and he was offered a position in Morocco as chef de cuisine at Mandarin Oriental Marrakech
Again, it was not a good experience.
"It turned to custard. I spent about two years waiting for this hotel to open and it turned out to be a big flop.
"The people that put me in touch with the Mandarin Group called me up and said a Russian restaurateur was opening a place in London and he would like to meet with you."
Arkady Novikov is one of Russia's most famous and successful restaurateurs.
"He originally had 50 restaurants in Moscow and wanted to open its first international somewhere in the world. He chose London and took a massive site in Mayfair."
The pair met, Jeff cooked for him and the 25-year-old was given the job of designing the kitchens, hiring and training staff for the £20 million project.
"We had very similar thinking. His mind is almost very Japanese - very straight, very black and white and very focused on quality."
He started work "at full throttle".
"When I first took over the restaurant, it was just a concrete shell. The owner had the idea of what he wanted - a market inside the restaurant and Asian food, then I had to fill in the blanks.
"The kitchen was to provide Chinese and Japanese food plus have a market in the restaurant.
"It sounds easy but when you've got Michelin-starred restaurants surrounding you, you have to do something pretty serious, so the design of it was really super important. That is really what enables us to keep ahead of the game and now."
He hired and trained 74 staff under "huge" pressure, added to by the language barrier with the owner.
"It was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. The owner was telling me 'no, that's not right, that is not what I want - I want this'. It was flat out, it was nuts.
"I was starting at about seven in the morning and finishing at about three in the morning. I had my first day off after four months. It was crazy, one of the hardest things I have ever done.
"I went through the first three months being told I was going to be fired every day," he says laughing, "and somehow managed to pull things together".
"It could have been a lot better. If I went back, with the experience I have, there are a few things I'd do different."
The root of the problem was not understanding what the owner wanted, he said.
"The other restaurant was run by another head chef and another team. We employed more than 330 staff in total and nobody understood what he wanted, so it was just an absolute nightmare.
"The Italian restaurant delayed its opening - they weren't ready and the boss wasn't happy - and within the first six weeks the head chef was fired."
After Jeff's restaurant opened, he "finally understood" what the owner wanted "and it started coming together pretty well".
"The owner was super, super focused on taste and I had never seen his restaurants - it was not easy to understand what he wanted - but I finally clicked and started making things in line with this thinking.
"The guy's genius. What he made me do, I thought was impossible. I really, really thought it was impossible.
"With somebody driving you like that it is just incredible. He taught me how to cook again. He taught me what people really want to eat, how to make food commercial - loads of stuff."
An influential restaurant critic gave Novikov Restaurant a positive review and within three days turnover doubled.
"At that stage, we had about 26 chefs and things just expanded more and more. Today, we employ 55 chefs and have about 250 dishes on the menu. We are open in three countries - Moscow, Dubai and London. We are in Miami this year and then New York."
Jeff uses his expertise for the new restaurants - "every very crucial detail of getting the place open and in going on in training the chefs how to cook".
He has achieved plenty and he's not yet 30. Novikov is the largest grossing standalone restaurant in Europe, with a gross turnover of more than £38 million in 2015. It won the prestigious Best Restaurant 2015 in the London LifeStyle Awards, beating out some of the most famous chefs and restaurants in the world and Jeff and the restaurant featured in Celebrity Master Chef 2015 on UK TV.
He said he has thought of returning to Hawke's Bay "a few times" to open a restaurant.
"Something small and manageable, but I think I have a few more things over here to do first."
His mum says he Skypes weekly and gives updates on his young family. When he's in Hawke's Bay, his cooking skills are in hot demand from the extended family.
"If I hesitate they say 'You can come on this day'," he says laughing.
He admires the quality of Hawke's Bay food and speaks nostalgically of hunting and fishing with his father.
He said his future is about making quality food available to more people, food like the kingfish that come into Hawke's Bay this time of year.
"In clean waters you can spear a kingfish in a particular way, kill it quickly, bleed it and put it on ice on the boat.
"You can cut it up raw and get the pure essence of the fish - that's the ultimate."
