elitechefs.net Blog

I would like to share with you a few facts pertaining to how I came to be here cooking in Malaysia, what I am doing, Why I am doing it and maybe what I will do next.
 

From the beginning: My mother was a very good cook. She had a limited repertoire but it was universally agreed that what she did, she did very very well. And if anyone disagreed with that there would be hell to pay. She liked to share recipes, and she taught me how to make apple pie when I was about ten years old. However, in her house, in her kitchen, nobody should attempt to make an apple pie or any other dish that happened to be in her repertoire unless it was less appealing than hers. Margaret was not happy to be challenged or upstaged. My sister Susan had just returned from Africa where she had learned to make Pizza and Spaghetti Bolognese from her American colleague circa 1979. She introduced these dishes to Margarets kitchen and… well it is enough to say that Margaret did not take a note of the recipes. I did though. My Sister Patty and I debated long and hard about the pronunciation of Pizza “’is it pizzzza or is it pitsa?” Whatever it was, it was unheard of in my neighbourhood, Terenure, Dublin Ireland. When I told my mates about pizza the very fact that it was spelled in one way and pronounced another unfamiliar way and non phonetically it was met with various responses befitting heresy or blasphemy. Other things worth mentioning was that Margaret was a trooper insofar as she worked to contribute to supporting us, she took in rent paying tenants to our home to contribute to the income and that she was a very hospitable person. When she gave something, she gave it with a good heart and didn’t look back.
 

So taking all of this into account, there was always good food in our house, there were always folks dropping by, sometimes staying an hour sometimes staying a year.
 

I began working as a cook when I was twelve years old. To qualify that – I worked in Fusciardis Italian Takeaway (Chip Shop) taking the eyes out of spuds and cleaning the rotisserie machine. When it got busy I would be there with the others filling bags of chips and tolerating drunkards. Tony Fusciardi is a really nice bloke and conducted business there until a year or so ago.
 

I was then packed off to the Irish countryside to spend time with my cousins, in the care of Auntie Nancy and Uncle Tony. Tony O’Connor was a huge man. When I say he was a huge man he was probably only 6ft but he was huge in that he was very awesome. He was jolly, strong and hardworking and he was and still is a very decent man who could set a young Dublin city boy straight in a very gentle, very firm way and at the same time with absolutely no grey areas as to which path was going to be taken. A gentleman he was, however unaccustomed he may have been to the pizza appreciating ways of Dublin teenagers in the early 80’s. Dinner was at 6p.m. and very predictably it consisted of huge pot of floury homegrown potatoes turned out onto a tray, accompanied by 85% fat bacon boiled with cabbage, virtually a soup. You could have as much butter as you liked and as many potatoes as you could grab before the battalion of hungry hay turning tanned brown cousins got them, but the bacon was in short supply. Irish farmers in the 80’s were generally poor. This did not sit too well with my comparatively delicate suburban upbringing. So I made and omelet later that night. I can tell you that for the amount of attention and notoriety that that particular omelet got it may as well have been a ten tier wedding cake balancing on top of an ice sculpture of St Patrick. I was the talk of the neighbourhood.
 

By the time I was fifteen years old I was cooking for my friends. Usually my favorite dishes like Shepherds pie, sherry trifle or … You have guessed, pizza. I had a very liberal upbringing being the fourth child. I was given a very free hand. At this time I was working in The American Connection at nights after school. It was my second cousins restaurant, something like TGIs, / Hard Rock, very cutting edge for 1984. This gave me some pocket money. So after spending my pocket money on the things that fifteen year old Dublin boys used to spend their pocket money on, my friends and I often found ourselves with an insatiable hunger. The kind of hunger that would cause you salivate discussing porridge, the kind of hunger that would cause you to make dough and pizza from scratch at 3.15 am. Sometimes we drove to the hills at night and cooked on an open fire. Not marshmallows, not toast, but big pork sausages, ribs that were marinated in cumin, coriander, yogurt and basil. I soon learned that by cooking for someone you could make them very content. In the right place, at the right time and with the right people, a good host can conjure a very special kind of peace, a very intimate and pure sense of satisfaction. An unspoken and perhaps unexplainable bond can be forged. When you are cooking for people who you care about or even for people that you have never met, if you are doing it because it is what you really want to do then it tastes better. Is this too obvious? I don’t think so.  When you have worked in the industry and actually seen a bad chef at work then you will agree that it is not too obvious.
 

I found that I was really enjoying cookery. I also found that other people thought that I was good at it and so I decided to travel and cook. So on June 6^th 1986 at 6p.m. at the age of 17, I boarded a plane one- way for Amsterdam to seek my fortune. For nearly two years I traveled from Holland to France, London, Greece, Egypt and Israel. Working as I went. Cooking my way along in everything from 5 star establishments to floating restaurants on the red sea. Partying on islands in the Nile and trenches in the Golan Heights. Then back to Dublin for seven years of training in the college of catering. I worked in a fine Deli and learned how to make the worlds best scones from the owner Mrs Pat Marron and how to make the worlds best Pate en Croute form the Chef,  Raymond. I then worked in a top class restaurant and learned how to be an a la carte slave and make good sauces. I then became head chef at the Hole in The Wall which is situated on the wall of the Phoenix park in Dubin. Very picturesque, with its deer, rabbit and fresh herbs and berries, all of which appeared on the menu. Though I racked my brain for years I could never come up with a good plan for squirrel…. or badger … just joking. But seriously, I really liked working here because it was a challenge for me to inject the menu with the ambiance and feel of the park. I had a cold smoker unit built and I enjoyed cold smoking turkeys and other game birds. I gleefully incorporated many of the local flora and fauna into the menu, gruesome as that may seem to veggies out there. I must have dome something right because I managed to get on to the Irish Panel of Chefs, although I never represented the country in cookery competitions.    
     
I landed in Hong Kong December 8th 1994 having been recruited by a Donegal man who charged me with the running of a kitchen in an Irish Pub and Restaurant. It was here that I had an induction of fire to Asia. The existing head chef in that restaurant had not even been told that he was being replaced when I arrived. He was a good chef with a good resume, hard working, reliable and relatively agreeable as chefs go. He wasn’t too happy to see me though. He paid lip service to my attempts to integrate peacefully with him. He was then fired by Mr Donegal and it took him two years to get a job because of his age. It was here that the passion, love and the good was taken out of me and my cuisine, drained like the blood from a stuck pig hanging by its hind leg. I was taught to sanitise and package my ideas and creativity, to hammer square pegs into round holes. Because the menu needed a certain component (in the opinion of the resident expert) I must make my creation fit that component / requirement whether I liked it or not. So I did. I submitted. I sold out my mojo, my chi, to false promises and eventually betrayal. I learned a lot, but perhaps not in the way that I had originally hoped. In fairness my boss, Clayton Parker was a good leader and over all a fair person. I worked for this same company in Bangkok and eventually I was stationed here in Malaysia as a General Manager. The economy died here in 1997 and 1998 so I went back to Dublin for nearly two years where I worked for the worlds biggest catering company and also set up a stock taking company on the side..
 

I was invited back here to K.L. to manage a factory in 2001. The package came with a lot of promises that never materialised. I eventually found myself unemployed. So I applied for job after job after job. At least five hundred jobs applied and not one interview. Less than ten replies. Despite all of this I knew that I was a good cook and I knew that I had picked up enough management skills from Mr Donegal and Co. to serve me well. I had also studied accounting part time in 1997 and I knew that this would help. So I established Elitechefs.  I vowed that I would only work with people that I liked and that I would respect my colleagues /employees. Elite Chefs has given me a good living and has been a great platform from which I have contributed to the building of Sandias Mexican Restaurant. After two years Elite Chefs is now doing very well.
 

At Elitechefs we perform best when budget is less of a consideration and when the client wants to eat well as a first priority. Then, I really look forward to conjuring a very special kind of peace. When I meet this kind of client the relationship becomes partially symbiotic. The money becomes somewhat secondary, it enables me to live, to buy the food that I like cooking, that they like eating.
 

I really want to expand on things a bit. I want to travel to the kampongs, to the surrounding countries and share the hospitality of folks in their home. Taste their mother’s signature dishes however rudimentary or grandiose it may be. That is less important, I just want to taste their best and then cook for them the best that I can with whatever resources we have at that time and place.  

Pat      

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Cooking for a living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.