Elmira Mamedova: The Secrets of a Successful Chef

— Gerda, I was ready for this question. Look, if a person cooks at home for himself or someone else, he is a cook, why not? He makes some preparations with food, some processes take place in his frying pan. Why then is he not a cook? Anyone can be a cook, the other question is what kind of cook and where.

— Let’s speculate. As in any profession, in the chef’s art there are people who initially realize that they want to do it, want to study the cuisine, want to be in it, want to “be boiling” in it. Someone, on the contrary, comes to the kitchen by chance, and then realizes that they can’t live without it. That’s how it was with me. I never let anyone near the stove, but I was always told that I could not cook, and I had a complex for a long time. Yes, my relatives and friends liked my kitchen, but I was always unsure of myself – how is it possible that I can be a cook? It seemed to me that they wanted to support me rather than tell me the truth. And the “Hell’s Kitchen” project helped me a lot. It gave me faith in myself, in the fact that I can do more than fry meat and cook for friends. 

With the advent of various cooking shows many people now imagine working in the kitchen as a fascinating process, where everything is easy and simple. And then they come, stand in the workshop, and the rose colored glasses come down. Then they turn around and leave with the words, “This is hell and I won’t be here.” The art of cooking is not about romance, it’s about hard work and swollen veins in your legs. It’s about procurement, it’s about recipe development, it’s about mistakes, it’s about experience, it’s about being first to come and the last to leave. So to become a chef, you have to completely rework yourself, reassemble yourself. It took me many years to do that.

— Ohhh, at the beginning of my journey as a chef I was very sensitive to everything. Of course, I took any criticism with hostility. In my opinion, that’s one of the disadvantages of novice chefs who think: “Oh, come on, don’t teach me, I know everything, I’m an artist, I see it that way”. No. Cooking is the base, chef art is the base. Without having a base, you can’t do anything.

I will never call myself a pastry chef because I’m not a pastry chef. I know a little bit of the basics and I can make 25 desserts, but I’m not a pastry chef. As far as meat, fish, and vegetables are concerned, I can call myself something or other, but an expert. Some people are now fixated on fusion, a cuisine that has no specific direction and consists of different traditions, and no longer understand how you can eat fish without pickled zucchini and grapefruit. There’s something good about it. But if we’re talking about cooking, you have to know the classics. You can rework it a little bit, add something of your own, but it’s still the foundation. Like a model airplane – you have a design that you can make adjustments to, but you can’t change the law of aerodynamics itself. 

At the moment, what’s important to me is feedback from guests. I’m working in our family café right now, it’s  small and open, and I see people. And I see that when it’s good, it’s good. As corny as that phrase sounds, it’s true. And that’s one of the advantages of an open kitchen, because the backlash is immediate. When you work in a closed kitchen, especially at the beginning of your journey, the most important thing is that you get a competent chef. There must be a symbiosis of desire, aspiration, persistence, labor and good mentoring. Then everything will work out.

— Gerda, thank you for your question. I have cooked all my life and I have loved it. I may have even had thoughts of trying my hand at cooking, but that is not what has influenced what I live and do now. So I want to start with one watershed moment that I can already feel comfortable talking about. 

— I had drugs in my life. And I went to work not to build a lightning fast career as a chef, but to separate myself from that stuff, to stop thinking only about where to get it, where to find it. I decided to hit the ground running, change my social circle, and go headlong into work to distract myself. So I ended up in the most hellish job of my life.

There was this restaurant in our town called Galera. At that time it was a very cool place, very popular, there were always a lot of people there. So I went there as a dishwasher. The labor was really hellish, but I was near the kitchen, so I watched the cooks work. I watched the perpetual motion of something boiling, something being cut, something being cooked, and I loved it. In addition, technological maps were posted everywhere in the kitchen, and I began to learn them by heart.

I helped the cooks in the kitchen once, then the second time, and the third time, but still I kept washing dishes. And it happened that there was a big banquet for a hundred and something people, but the cooks did not make any preparations in the evening in advance – young guys, beach, summer, how could they think about potatoes?

I just offered to help with the slicing, and the chef of the restaurant had nothing else to do but say, “You’re standing here tonight”. He put me next to him and that was my first experience.

Then he went to the manager and said: “I want to try Elka.” So I became an assistant cook, I worked there for three months, the season was over, I left. I left, but I already realized that now I wanted to go into the kitchen, I just wanted to “be boiling” in these processes. I saw an ad in the local paper that another café needed a cook, so I went there, then to another place, then another and so I ended up at Ritterburg, where I got a real chef-mentor. And that’s when I realized how important a chef is.

— I was very lucky. When I came to my first chef with a pimply, youthful maximalism, I thought, “Well, what else can you teach me?” But it turned out that I knew everything only in theory. I read and watched a lot, but I had only one percent practice, and I got a good teacher and mentor – Zhenya Soluyanov. A wonderful chef, an amazing guy. We worked with him for three years – two years before “Hell’s Kitchen” and another year after “Hell’s Kitchen”. If you take the path from dishwasher to the current state, I was able to make such a quantum leap with his help, among other things.

And, of course, it’s important to love what you do. It is not enough to say “I want to”, “I can”. I’ve had employees come to me just to do their hours. Restaurant owners did not understand why I fired the guys who came even with good references and left self-taught guys, who come into the kitchen, burn everything, but they grasp everything, understand everything. And you can always see when a person has a fire inside in addition to desire, you know? And you, as a chef, just need to put the right wood into this fire, and then there will be a good pioneer fire.

— A chef is a professional who is unequivocally about the kitchen. But he’s probably about 50 percent about the kitchen, or even less. I would say that the chef is the adjuster of all processes and he has an understanding of accounting, understanding of suppliers of quality goods, and in order for this understanding to appear, the chef has to go to the market himself, check, buy, poke his finger, smell, feel. 

Chef’s work is endless write-offs, accounting, processes, electrics, and equipment. Even when designing the future kitchen, the chef must put himself in the place of each cook, each employee of the kitchen. Will the person be comfortable with the inflow? In addition to all this, the chef must have engineering qualities, architectural qualities. The chef must know how to pick a good team, so that when one violin’s string breaks, the audience doesn’t realize that the orchestra is playing the remaining three. The chef finds the strengths of each person and sees that this person is good with meat and with fish, and this person makes salads very cool and does all the fine work with the decorations, and with this person will be easy on desserts. A competent chef does not have an inflated ego and will not self-assert himself at the expense of others. A good chef is a mentor, a friend, a father, and if you are lucky enough to meet just such a person in this position, then you fall in love with this hard work forever. 

— I know a lot of cool chefs who are universalists, but the very concept of “a universalist” exists only in Russia. And I really like the fact that in many restaurants in the capital they are starting to organize people exactly by position, and a person in his or her position works with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the thirst for profit in many employers sometimes takes its toll. As a rule, these are those employers who save money on equipment and staff. There are a lot of them. But I hope that in ten years there will be many times less of them, and it will be easier for those who will come for the cook’s shift.

— You know, I think there’s also a very big mistake many owners make. The owner, most often, looks at the whole mechanism of work of the restaurant from the position of the guest, but it is important to look from the position of the guest and from the position of those who cook for the guest. I was lucky enough to work in every position before I became a chef – I was a waiter, a partner, an administrator, and a dishwasher. 

I realize that a person in a particular position doesn’t have to do it in the morning and doesn’t have to do it in the evening. A person has to come in in the morning, open the cash register, wipe everything down, warm up the coffee machine, wipe down the appliances, wipe down the tables, fill the salt shakers. He should know the menu, should even know what the sauce is made of. Unfortunately, a lot of owners, having been in luxury, in a good establishment, try to make trained professionals out of girls and boys-students for a three-penny salary. It doesn’t work that way.

There must be competent managers and managers of the hall. Unfortunately, the opposite story happens – we save money on this, I’ll be the manager myself, I’ll be the hall manager, I’ll sit, I’ll supervise here, I’ll check there, and that’s it, we start to stumble. 

Why do we sometimes hear that a certain establishment is hyper-popular now? Because there are competent people in all positions, from the hostess to the dishwasher. It often happens that we save money here, fix it there, and the result is corresponding.

— Almost always. Restaurants first loudly declare themselves, and then do not hold the bar high. The quality drops because the chefs start to leave. The owners of the establishment recruit new chefs and you get such a cyclical circle, quite complicated one .

The kitchen, as well as any team, is a complex organism, and therefore every detail has to be polished with a file, to use a chisel somewhere, to lightly sand something, to varnish something. Therefore, with a competent approach, any product, not only a restaurant, will shine better than a ruby in a large imperial crown. 

And it is not necessary that you have Michelin cuisine. It can be an ordinary home café with checkered tablecloths, with spices or thyme on the table, with focaccia, pizza, homemade bread and familiar meatballs. A cozy one.

— Most of the time, yes.

— When a person comes to study or work somewhere in the kitchen, where he is not a chef, he is still a performer, you know? And here the main thing is to understand that you are a performer or a performer who absorbs knowledge and techniques: combinations of products, all the combinations, all the politics. And then, when you reach a certain level, you can already give out something of your own. And then there is a risk that what you put out may not work, and you have to adjust it. 

For example, when you write a novel, you show the first chapters of the book to the editor. It’s the same with dishes – while you’re making them, you work them out, work them out, and work them out from the initial sketch to the final touch. A guest swallows it in a second, but it took you six months to get to that stage. 

— The kitchen is an orchestra, but not a mono-performance in any way. The kitchen is really a team effort. Comfortable work at the output gives the result that the guest wants to get, and in a good way we all work for people. The coordinated work of people in the hall and kitchen gives a phenomenal fireworks display on the way out. When the chef at the morning meeting says that today we need to sell this, that and that, not because it has gone bad, but because it’s time to rebrand and replace products. When the waiter hears it, and when the bartender hears it, everyone smiles at each other, and the guest will always leave satisfied, and the work will bring only pleasure.

— I have a different attitude towards responsibility. I realized that working in a restaurant is always about responsibility, and collective responsibility. You are not only responsible for yourself, “I’ll give you a salad and that’s it”, at any position you realize that you are a team, you are the captain of the ship. 

Also, I never thought I knew anything about fuses and wire cross-sections. That is, the profession of chef, in addition to giving knowledge in cooking, gives you the opportunity to become an accountant, an electrician, a plumber, a little bit of everything.

And I’m going to repeat again Konstantin Ivlev’s phrase that first you make a name, you work for a name, then the name works for you. And that’s really true.

— Molecular cuisine – yes, wow, it’s some kind of higher level. But you have to realize that there is chemistry involved. Any way you look at it, there will be chemistry there, because without chemistry there will be no stabilization, no foam, no anything else.

I sometimes welcome the minimal use of molecular cuisine, for example, to serve a spectacular foam to a cappuccino or to a mushroom soup, you can oxygenate a hollandaise. But I don’t understand seaweed caviar because you add a concentrated cube of fish broth to it. If demi-glace goes with the dish, such a dish will cost at least a certain price, because normal demi-glace is boiled for twenty-four hours. And if a dish flavored with demi-glace costs like a normal average dish, it means that the sauce used there is powdered.

Personally, I am always impressed by the pure flavor of the product. But in order to understand what you like personally, of course, you need to try different cuisines.

— Oooh, what a question! I need to think about it. I’m more like a medium rare filet mignon with cranberry sauce. 

— Because if you don’t cook beef properly, it gets tough. If you approach it with heart, it’s very flavorful and very tender. Medium rare, because at this point I’m not stale yet, but already, shall we say, not “blood thirsty”.

— Treat people the way you’d like to be served. Switch places with your guests. Cook as if you were cooking for your nearest and dearest. I’ve had a lot of high-profile guests in my café. And when our administrators or managers fly into the kitchen and tell me that important guests have come, I always answer that I have important guests every day. Because every guest is important. And it doesn’t matter who has come today – the president of the country or your neighbor at the school desk, you must feed everyone equally well. Remember the quote? “True cooking is not for the timid. Take courage, try things, experiment. Don’t let anyone box you in. The only boundaries you have are your soul. It’s true: anyone can cook, but only the fearless achieve greatness.”