About me

My Journey…

When I was quite young I had persuaded myself that I was born to become an academic, that I would change the world and achieve acclaim as a brilliant mathematician. Though I had some good reasons and justifications, what I mostly had was an enticing inner narrative that I clung to far longer than I should have. In the midst of chasing this narrative I had somehow stumbled upon the notion of learning to cook, as nothing more than a hobby of course, and would spend much of my free time teaching myself as much as I possibly could. That my “hobby” would become my obsession and my “destined path” would become a torturous prison cell was certainly a surprise to no one more than to myself and that I would drop out of my prestigious university to work full time in the closet of an underwhelming wine bar owned by a family friend was certainly not supposed to be in the script. Nearly a decade later of working my way up through the industry, eventually seeing the pinnacle of fine dining from the inside out, I’m still quite confused by how this narrative is supposed to piece together other than that it happened and that I’m actively living it. Though I abandoned mathematics and academia as a career, I never truly deleted the attitudes and problem solving strategies I had nurtured throughout my pursuit of them. They are certainly not common in the food industry, but if I’m being honest I really don’t care. When someone wants to know what’s really going on and how something actually works and how to achieve something truly novel, they come to me. Whether or not that’s just prideful boasting I’d have to let you decide. In this blog I plan on discussing and demonstrating what I believe to be the objective underpinnings of what goes on in the kitchen. I do not plan on speaking in vague mysticisms and nonsensical intuitions.