Please briefly introduce yourself, where are you based and your age?
I am the Executive Chef at The Twelve Apostles Hotel and Spa in Cape Town and this is my 10th year working at the hotel and yet it feels like I just started here the other day. I’m 33 years old – so yes, I spent the best part of my twenties working in this beautiful Hotel on the side of the Twelve Apostles Mountain range, which I consider to be one of the most beautiful places in South Africa if not the world.
What is your educational background in relation to your current position?
I attended a high school in Johannesburg that offered Hotel Keeping and Catering as a subject from standard six up until Matric. After finishing Matric, I was accepted at the Protea Hotels in-service Chef training programme, which was a four year course and allowed me to learn while I worked and also afforded me the opportunity to work in a different hotel every year. While doing my in-service training, I also attained a Diploma in Professional Cookery from Cape Technikon as well as a qualification in Professional Cookery from The HITB (Hotel Industries Training Board). I also attained a distinction in Food Preparation and Cooking from City and Guilds of London. The training I received definitely prepared me well for my current position as I had the great fortune to work in a different hotel every year for four years during my training and this allowed me to become more adaptable. As a result I am able to take on any role in any kitchen operation – see how they run and use this knowledge to create a better environment in my kitchen.
What ignited the love for preparing food and how long have you been in the industry
Since I was 10 years old, I told my parents that I was going to be a Chef. I think that growing up in a Portuguese household, you get taught from an early age to love the food you eat and I always loved to eat! I always wanted to be in the kitchen helping my mom and my grandmother cook up their famous family recipes, which always seemed to make the whole family happy when they sat down to eat! Some people eat to live, but Portuguese people (as with most Europeans) live to eat and enjoy life. Up until today, I still get excited and energised about cooking, whether it be the ‘French Toast’ I make for my kids for breakfast on a weekend or the food we prepare at the Hotel for a superb wedding banquet – I never get tired of preparing good, tasty, delicious and wholesome food that will ultimately make someone happy while they are eating it.
Officially, I have been working in kitchens for 15 years but if you count the years where I used to ditch school to go and work at Newmarket Race Course and the Vaal Racecourse on race days in their kitchens, you can add another five years to that!
Can you recall your early years in the kitchen, any blunders that you’re willing to share?
I laugh about it now, but when I was a trainee Chef and had been put onto graveyard duty to prepare all the breakfast buffet items for the morning, I once (and only once) accidentally cooked the scrambled eggs on a very high heat and had not added enough cream to the eggs. I then started cooking the sausages, bacon, etc and I did not get back to the scrambled eggs in time, which caused them to turn blue and unusable – the main challenge was that the Executive Chef got to work at 6am and saw the 200 ruined portions of scrambled eggs in the baine marie and went crazy – he even dropped the entire container on the floor causing the eggs to cascade out of the dish all over the kitchen and all over me too. After cooking other scrambled eggs and then having to clean the entire kitchen down with scrambled eggs in my hair and all over my uniform, I never ever messed up the scrambled eggs again.
Buffet or ala-carte menu, which one do you prefer and why?
I definitely prefer the exhilarating rush of a busy A la Carte service as when the hotel is fully booked and all your preparations are completed before hand, keeping up with the orders and not having any complaints ensures a soaring ‘high’ that only a fellow Chef would know or understand.
Frozen or fresh, which works best in your kitchen?
Freshest is always the best! The fresher your protein items are before they are cooked, the less you will have to try and make them taste good! It sounds like a bit of a cliché but the truth of the matter is that the ‘man above’ created some marvellous things for us to eat, which are already in most respects ‘perfect’ so as a Chef, I fundamentally want to try my best to represent that perfection and divinity in every dish that I cook. When using too many frozen foods, one tends to have to compensate for the lack of natural flavour by adding more seasoning and flavouring to it, which means that you end up with a dish that started out as one thing but has cleverly been disguised into something else – now where is the love in that?
What green initiatives do you employ in your kitchen?
We have recently put in a waste recycling programme, which is well on its way to making a definite difference. We remodelled our kitchen last year, at the same time as the total refurbishment on the Hotel and I ensured that the new dishwashers, ovens and extractor fans were the most energy efficient or the best at saving water. Our extraction system in the kitchen is also a one of a kind system in the Southern Hemisphere, which turns the smoke and fat in the air from cooking, into Ozone which is expelled into the atmosphere making the air leaving the kitchen cleaner than the air coming into the kitchen, Ozone is like bleach for air so we are trying to clean the worlds air one breath at a time…
Do you offer any mentorship guidance to aspirant chefs?
I have had some junior staff in the kitchen that have been taken from washing pots to becoming kitchen hands and eventually over a few years have either become an integral part of our kitchen operation here at the hotel, or moved on to work with other chefs to learn how to become the best at what they do and eventually get to run their own kitchens some day.
How do you handle criticism from unhappy guests?
If there is one thing that I’ve learnt in my career, it is that you can never please all the guests all the time. Everybody has different tastes and everybody has their own sense of what is good or bad.
The best way to cook for your guests is to know your guests and in the case of an unhappy guest, I am always happy to meet them and find out what they did not enjoy about their meal and take it on as a challenge to make them happy by preparing their food to their specific taste.
What a lot of Chefs don’t understand, is that the guest is the one paying the bill and he/she is the one who needs to be kept happy and looked after. As Chefs, we can try to educate our guests on new ingredients and preparation methods – but in the end we need to give the guests what they would like.
Are you a member of the South African Chefs Association?
I have been a member of the South African Chefs Association for 14 years, which has afforded me the opportunity to take part in many culinary competitions and food shows over the years. Being part of the Association also afforded me the opportunity to do the National trials for Team South Africa and ultimately got me onto the Training Squad, which is getting ready to participate in Luxembourg at the Culinary World Cup in November this year. I will then move onto the Culinary Olympics in Erfurt Germany in 2012, which seems far away but is just around the corner.
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I’m Muzi Mohale, based in Roodepoort (South Africa). Blogger with www.travelwires.com. Love Travelwires.com since I get to travel our beautiful country through blogging and get first hand tourism experience.
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