I seem to have a lot of conversations recently with people who find themselves in the kitchen but without the means to cook anything.
As a cook myself they often ask me how to go about finding themselves a chef who can cook something for them. I ask them why they want to do that and they tell me they’ve got a great idea for a cuisine only they don’t usually have a recipe and, as mentioned, they never have a chef.
This is all happening more frequently since Google built a beautiful new kitchen in East London and it’s driving me a little nuts.
Cook something, learn how to cook something or get out of the kitchen. Standing around for six months trying to recruit a chef to cook a meal you don’t have a recipe for is barmy. Hoping that you’re going to outsell Jamie Oliver on the basis of your recipe-in-a-head is crazier still.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do something else - front of house, marketing, renting restaurants, anything except the job you’re not qualified to do which is to cook. I appreciate that you want to be a wealthy, celebrity chef but you know what the celebrity chefs all have in common? They know how to cook!
You may also be wondering whether you can convince a chef to bring his own ingredients and pans, cook the food and serve it all up on the basis that it’s going to be so brilliant he can take his pay once the customers have paid double the going rate for your nouveau cuisine. Ideally he’d even do it out of his own kitchen, that way you could keep the overheads down and then convince someone to lend you a restaurant once the food’s cooked.
Kind of makes you wonder why he wouldn’t do that himself though doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s that recipe in your head that you’ve not written down or trialled with anyone yet? Must be pretty tasty.
Trial your crazy recipe; throw it together as best you can and show that all-dough pizzas are the new black and you’ve got a different story. Use Twitter to line a queue of customers up outside that beat-up old caravan you borrowed to hack the meal together in and you might find someone ready to cook for you. Hell they’ll probably ask if they can do it for a cut of ownership.
Otherwise, get a job. You numpty.
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