KEY POINTS:
I've got soft hands these days. As a young chef, I had really tough hands and burn marks all up my wrists, from sliding trays in and out of ovens, but I haven't really cooked on the line for two or three years.
I miss cooking. The only
time I actually cook professionally is if I need to show my staff something on a new menu, and I cook at home very rarely. The problem with cooking at home is you have to do all the purchasing and prepping and chopping yourself, then clean up it's not nearly as much fun as cooking in a professional kitchen. If I do cook myself dinner it'll be something like scrambled eggs but to be honest I'd rather go out. I must admit a slight weakness for my local takeaways.
There are always exceptions. I recently made a nine-course seafood degustation menu at home, for a woman. I was going right over the top; we had scallops and crab and crayfish and all sorts of other things. We got through two bottles of champagne, one bottle of white, one of red, spirits ... it lasted all afternoon and evening.
Smoking: what a total waste of time. And money. I tried it when I was 5 years old. My dad smoked, and one day I asked for a cigarette. He said "take it, have a big puff." I coughed and vomited for about half an hour, and that was my last cigarette.
When every other teenager was going out and having fun, I was forced to work in the family business, washing dishes. My parents moved to New Zealand from Israel when I was a child, and bought a restaurant. Not long after that the city council introduced new hygiene laws that meant businesses saved on their rates if they had a qualified chef in the kitchen, so my parents sent me off to tech to learn to cook at age 18.
I was planning to be a scientist. I had always been into physics, and I thought I'd spend my career in a white coat somewhere, but I'm so glad it turned out this way. I've had much more fun.
For my first three weeks as an apprentice at the Sheraton, as it was then, I used to go home crying to my parents at night: "I don't want to go back there." I was working on the hotline by myself, totally overwhelmed by the pace of it. Now, I'm very conscious of never wanting to discourage my young chefs. You survive in this business only if you have a passion for food.
In Auckland, you can do anything you want, but you can't do it at any time of the day or night, like you can in London or New York. Haircut at midnight? Sure. Slowly, that's becoming the case here as well, thanks to immigration. Asians are great for our country; they're hard working, they'll open late at night and early in the morning. That's why you always see chefs eating at Chinese restaurants when they finish work.
I don't ever want New Zealand to lose its clean, green, slow-paced nature, but it's great to see how immigration is changing us for the better.
Young cooks have to make mistakes. They've got to burn themselves, burn the food, oversalt it, undercook it; that's the only way to learn. But the number one rule in my kitchen is: if you wouldn't eat it yourself, you're not going to serve it.
Working at The Ivy in London in the late 1990s was incredible; fresh, local, seasonal food. We would do 500 covers a day you'd go home for a few hours' sleep and then wake up early, excited about the next day's work. We were cooking for the Queen, for Posh Spice, for George Michael during my first week I got to eat dinner in the restaurant, and Madonna and Michael Jordan were sitting at the next table. The following day, they came back for lunch.
At the Ivy I was hired as chef de partie, quite a senior job, but during my first week I was told to just wash lettuce, all day long. I stood there, washing the lettuce, not saying anything, not complaining, and eventually they said "Right, you can stay." I'd passed the test. A lot of other chefs would just walk out before the first day was finished, but if you survived that first period, you were made.
As soon as you walk in the door at my family's house, the fridge door is open and someone's asking what you want to eat. Food is a big part of our lives. My first memory is being a little boy in Israel, around at my grandmother's house. She would make huge feasts for 20 or 30 people, and us kids would sit at our own little table. One day, my grandmother let me help her do the cooking; we made little ravioli full of minced meat. From then on, I was hooked.
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