elitechefs.net Blog

These days when a vacancy is advertised for a chef, all sorts of folks show up for interview. Some are chefs, some saw Jamie Oliver on the television the night before, some are people who have worked in a kitchen for a while and know how to wash dishes, pots and peel vegetables and some are people with almost no kitchen experience who somehow take to it like a duck to water. I recently hired a guy to wash dishes and do general cleaning. I was stuck one day and needed help making pies so I showed him how to do it. Within a week this guy was correcting me and telling me how to do it more efficiently than the method that I had shown him. Good Man! Optimism goes a very long way.
In Ireland in the late eighties when I returned and went to look for a job as a commis chef I soon learned that there was a strict ranking or pecking order to be observed. This pecking order did not take into account previous experience. When you commenced your first year of college you were a first year chef. Apparently any experience prior to that did not stand for years of ranking or apprenticeship but may enhance your credibility. Having accepted this situation I commenced work as a first year chef having at least three years good solid experience behind me. That meant five more years before I could call myself a chef in the eyes of the Irish kitchen hierarchy. One of my college instructors told me that he had a similar experience in France. He went there as a qualified and certified chef and was put to work as a first year commis because they didn’t think that he was up to their high standard. Maybe he wasn’t.
For my first year of my apprenticeship I cycled to work every day. It was a one hour cycle or a three hour bus ride. So I chose the bike. By the time I was in my second year I bought a motorcycle with a loan guaranteed by my mother. It was like a new world had been opened to me. I could go anywhere, no sweating on a bicycle, no waiting in a bus queue and then there was the speed… Ahh!
Even with this new lease of life it was still relative drudgery tackling the often inclement Irish weather. I can recall so many times driving home in the dark with the rain beating down. As any motorcyclists or former motorcyclists reading this will know, when the rain gets very heavy it is difficult to see through the visor on the helmet, especially in the dark. You sometimes must make a decision to have reduced visibility with your visor down or to open your visor, have fractionally better visibility but then suffer the icy cold rain beating off your face and your eyelids. It was probably about the same level of safety or danger either way. Then there is the decision on if it is better to stop and put your rain gear on or to continue and hope that it is a shower that will pass. So you hold off and the rain continues to pour down, and then you decide to put them on so you look for a place to stop by which time you are wet through to the skin and your hands have become so cold that it is difficult to move your fingers and navigate buttons and zippers. Sometimes in the worst part of the winter my hands got so cold and wrinkled that a blister or rash similar to a burn used to form and take days to heal. I had two pairs of leather gloves and leather boots so that each day one pair could be used while the others were drying. I used to spend hours waxing and waterproofing my leathers, in vain. In retrospect I think that for about three years I was actually working for the motorcycle. On 80 pounds per week I was paying my accommodation and food, the bank loan, the repairs, paying for leathers, tyres and then paying for the second motorcycle when the first one was stolen form outside the college. Back then motorcycle insurance was available only from one company and it was third party only, no fire or theft coverage. A car would have been out of the question, financially.     
At this time I was attending day release classes in The Dublin College of Catering in Cathal Bruagh Street in Dublin. I met my first mentor there, my instructor for practical Patrick Carey. Patrick and I still keep in contact to this day. One of my instructors for theory was Mr Hegarty. He could not be described as a jolly man, by any stretch of the imagination. He told us many tales of his adventures, including one where he claimed to have been sent in “undercover” to a hotel to identify why they were losing money n the food. He worked there posing as a kitchen porter etc.. A veritable James Bond of the culinary petty theft world. A less inspiring man I have never met. As there was no degree programme or even diploma programme for the culinary arts in Ireland at that time you had to settle for a certificate from City and Guilds of London. Prestigious as it was, a certificate limited a person in how far they could climb the career ladder in life, as was pointed out to me by another instructor at the college, Mr Linnane. So I approached Mr Hegarty, by appointment, who was also the college vice principal (or some senior position) and asked him for some career guidance. I explained that after finishing my culinary studies I wanted to do a degree in some discipline that would compliment my culinary skill. He basically said don’t bother.
Some years later when I was nearing the end of my advanced courses, one of the assignments that Mr Hegarty gave the class in his capacity as our theory instructor was to do a book review of the book Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He gave us a month to complete the task. So I managed to read the book in a week. It is not exactly light reading. I didn’t make much sense of it so I read it again. I still could not fathom any subtle messages nor reap any nuggets of guidance from this book (other than the whole quality concept) that I could identify as being specifically pertinent to the career of a chef. So, being the diligent soul that I am I read it again and finally put together a nicely bound review of the book that I compiled on my computer at work. This contained all of the messages from the book that I thought were worth mentioning, especially the concept of quality, and I had also outlined how I may apply them to my life and career.
I was the only one who had read the book three times, some had not read it at all, I was the only one who had taken the effort to do the review on a computer (chefs in the early nineties generally didn’t have computers or were not computer literate), I was the only one who had bound the review and finally I was the only one who he failed. I remember his words, “McHugh, fail. I asked for a book review” that was all. I think that part of the reason was valid. He asked for a book review – period. Not a book review that relates the lessons of the book and the concept of quality to my life. I had some suspicions that he disliked me for other reasons. I was making a lot of money at that time. He knew my salary because I was asked how much I earned at the interview for the course, he knew my aspirations, he knew that I was a member of the Panel Chefs of Ireland, If I am not mistaken I was the youngest member ever at that time. Finally he knew of my friendship with Pat Carey, who was probably the shining light of the college and had won the Toque dÓr award a few years prior, one of the most prestigious awards in the world that a chef can win. Maybe he had some conflicts with Pat, I don’t know. Maybe my review was not philosophical enough. I must salute him for his many personal accolades and achievements, he is a very clever man indeed. Perhaps it was not a good review in his opinion, nothing personal – end of story
The whole Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance incident with Mr Hegarty taught me a lesson though. Not necessarily about philosophy, metaphysics of quality or chautauquas as may have been the objective intended. It taught me to listen to the question and answer the question that you are asked, not any other question.     

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      

Dear Bloggers,

My name is Patrick. I am a chef. Before embarking on this blog I have considered a few thoughts carefully. Firstly I have asked myself if I will have the time and commitment to maintain it. After all I am a busy chef who, if I subscribe to the stereotype, is supposed to be getting up at 6 a.m. to go to the market and insult some fishmonger for failing to get me some exotic morsel or other. After which I am to be chained to the range until midnight from where I must create astonishing gastronomic marvels causing the gourmands and Chains Des Rotisseurs to weep with joy, while I am intermittently cutting off extremities or branding myself on the char grill for the sake of art while simultaneously verbally abusing anyone within earshot and swigging a glass of Rioja. Well, I will see if I can squeeze a blog or two into the schedule.  Another consideration was the fear that like so many other blogs this would end up just floating in hyperspace, hitless, never to be read by anyone but myself. I have been inspired by http://masak-masak.blogspot.com/ . This together with the fact that I have not yet come across any other blog that comes close to encompassing what it is I would like to blog about. So, what is it that I want to blog about?
 At the risk of seeming samish or comparable to Kitchen Confidential or any other such publication, I had hoped that this would be a place to take the lid off things a bit. Perhaps, let the cat out of the bag, or even let it out of the bag and put it among the pigeons. For this I would need the participation of other chefs, or people who have had a level of exposure to the hotel and catering industry, and ideally that is what a blog is about. Participation right?
 Apart from this, I would like to share my passions with anyone who will listen. For the purposes of this blog, the passions to which I refer are, breads and recipes from the heart.