A bit of a disclaimer; sometimes I swear a bit...
Any way this is how not to do a food blog; I didn’t set out to just talk about food and I’m not much of a writer... Strangely here we are though, some time later and all I’ve written about is food and restaurants and I’m kind of happy with that.
It’s the simple things in life that make us happy and for me food and drink are at the root of that. Food provokes an emotional response and can bring people together and I guess that’s what I’ve always loved about cooking.
So a little about my past... A long time ago I was a teenage Chef working around Essex and Cambridge. I went to College as people do, to learn about Hospitality and Catering. As I’d been cooking a while I was already pretty sure of myself.
I was a fairly capable line chef in a restaurant at seventeen and learning all the time. By eighteen I wanted to move into the front of house you can read work on the bar from that… I basically loved it.
We aren’t talking the back story to Cocktail here but I loved the lifestyle, when you are young and all your mates work in the trade it can be a pretty interesting time. You become semi nocturnal...
I dropped out of college after my eighteenth birthday; there was no real surprise there. I didn’t really think there was that much more I could learn there and to be honest it was getting in the way of work.
Shortly before I turned nineteen I was offered the job that took me up North, I moved up to Yorkshire to be the Assistant Manager of a Pub. Seats for forty in the bar, another eighty in the Restaurant and my own digs upstairs...
Three years in and it was a different story. I was burnt out, I’d had enough. The mind wasn’t even willing anymore. I fully admit looking back this was pretty much my own fault. I was working seventy hour weeks, drinking every night.
Then there was the clubbing; in Leeds every Friday and Saturday night. Effectively staying awake for forty eight hours most weekends and when that’s your busiest time it’s not so smart. So rather than look at it sensibly and maybe calm down a bit; I quit.
I got a normal job (In property these days) and hung up the whites and apron for a while and that kind of brings us to where we are now.
Any way that’s me and why I love food, I love talking about food, I love cooking food and most of all I love eating food. Oh I almost forgot after a good few years in the North I moved to London!