Chef Michal Kovac ( Instagram A/c : chef.majk) a 32 years old chef from the Czech Republic work as a personal online cooking mentor. He had his own coaching business for the last 2 years and before that, for 14 years he used to work as a chef in fine dining restaurants in London & his home country. He also gained experience from Michelin star restaurants.
Q.) Plating is an art. How did you learn this art?
Chef Michal: In the restaurants, I learned it with experience, practice & feedback from other chefs. That is the only way you learn it properly.
Q.) What made you decide to become an online cooking mentor?
Chef Michal: I wanted to start my own business and not just listen to my chefs. I wanted to work on my dreams, not on others’ dreams.
Q.) Please share your work experience in Michelin star restaurants and how it helped you to make your career?
Chef Michal: These experiences have been life-changing for me. There is a different world, but mostly in the wrong way. You work 14+ hours a day without brakes. There is so much stress. You don’t eat much and you don’t even sleep in between days. But all this just helped me to become a great chef, now I can use my knowledge to teach others and also have fun with cooking. You have to love cooking to stay in these kinds of restaurants because the work there is too hard for most people.
Q.) If a person wants to be a chef, is it necessary to get trained in a Michelin star restaurant?
Chef Michal: Not for sure. Michelin star is just a reward from one company. But there are plenty of restaurants without any stars and they are amazing. You can learn to cook very well there if you choose the right one.
Q.) Which is the difficult part of plating?
Chef Michal: Most people think that the difficult part is the last-minute positioning of the food, but what I found with my clients is the real difficult part is to create a dish which makes sense for plating, preparing, and cooking the ingredients so they look nice on the plate. Because you cannot just cook whatever and then expect nice plating at the end. No one can do nice plating with bad-looking ingredients or a recipe that has the wrong components.
Q.) There are so many multicolor ingredients in your dish. How do you manage to balance them while plating?
Chef Michal: I always focus on the taste first, so I pick ingredients that taste better when combined. I make sure to use the best techniques to cook, keep the color & shape, etc. in perfect order. Then I just put them nicely on the plate. When you get experienced, everything becomes easy. But you need proper feedback on your food from someone better than you, that is the key to improvement.
Q.) What are Michelin star recipes and how is it different from normal recipes?
Chef Michal: The recipes in Michelin star restaurants and good fine dining restaurants are the same. Just one restaurant has some awards and the second one has none. But cooking techniques are very similar. In very good restaurants you see many different dishes and recipes because they want to be different from other average restaurants, they try an unusual combination of taste and plating so they can impress the guests.
Q.) Many people think cooking is an easy task to do. As a Michelin-trained chef, what do you think about it?
Chef Michal: Yes, cooking is not rocket science, you can learn it easily if you have passion and you invest the time to learn with good mentors. Problem is that people are learning from the wrong people and in bad restaurants which leads their career down. That is easy math.
Q.) Any advice for the upcoming chefs?
Chef Michal: Best what young chefs can do is to find a good restaurant with the food they like to cook and with good chefs inside and work there, “learn as much as you can.” Then move to another one and maybe another one. Experience can only make you perfect which comes through practice.
By : Rida Khan ( Aviation Author)
Instagram A/c : aviationauthor.ridakhan
