I have always been in love with 12 Bar blues music, and through a fair deal of tortured notes and bad composition I eventually managed to feel the music. It just came to me one day after what seemed like forever of sounds akin to cats fighting. I can close my eyes and the rhythm and beats flow out of me with a natural feeling…Cooking came in a very similar fashion.

I learnt to cook basic food when I was young, a student with a budget reserved mainly for liquid refreshment, so I had to get creative. Noodles seasoned with soy, garlic and ginger and maybe some grilled chicken breast. This was the average meal and I had to learn to taste flavours and make do with what I had.

My first experience in a kitchen I was almost thrown into, I had zero experience other than a concept of what the food should be for the restaurant I was catering for. It was almost an accident… I researched chefs like Marco Pierre White and Albert Roux and tried to create cheated copies of their masterpieces.

I was in way over my head but somehow through passion and determination, I taught myself to cook pretty damn good food. After that, I went through a learning phase in some great kitchens, where technique, passion and mathematics collided to form a concept of cooking not just as something profound, but also a business.

Learning how to cook incredible and complicated fine dining plated artworks became a passion. I excelled at intricate details and the attention to every detail. To the point that I almost lost the concept of the lineage of food. This is where something special happened and I grew a greater appreciation, almost after cooking as a professional career.

I take the basic concept of something and learn the history, the secrets and try to master them as best I can. Take sourdough bread and yeast fermentation as an example. It a simple concept or free addition, that goes on the table of a restaurant before a meal, but I want to make it perfect.

Food is no longer about making something worthy of a magazine cover. The taste, tradition and effort is the important meaning for me. Finding ingredients to work with and create food that is desirable and appreciated by those who eat it is what I am after.