We spoke to celebrity chef Kiran Jethwa about how to make it in the restaurant business
Since graduating from Manchester University with a BSc in Hospitality Management, Kiran Jethwa has enjoyed spells as an international rugby player, chef, and TV cooking adventurer. I got in touch with Kiran to ask what was going on in his world now, and how the culinary life was treating him.
You were born in Kenya, studied in the UK and have travelled all over the world. Where do you consider home? Definitely Kenya. I was born here, raised here and now I have four businesses here. I’m very much rooted in Kenya.
How did you make it as a chef? How did you pursue your goal? As part of my degree I did a year in Florida working in the kitchens, doing an apprenticeship under a chef there. I realised I wanted to concentrate on cooking, so I carried on with my degree and apprenticeships at the same time. I was working in kitchens and from there I just carried on working in kitchens all over the world. I moved around a lot and worked under lots of different chefs, worked in lots of restaurants with different styles and cuisine – I increased my culinary repertoire. Travelling helps massively, seeing how people use the same ingredients in different ways. From there, it’s putting in the hours – there’s no shortcut. It’s a very demanding industry and if you don’t put in the hours you’re never going to make it, that’s one of the fundamentals. Keep pushing.
Have your travel experiences influenced your cooking? A major influence on my cooking is Indian food – my father is Indian and I absolutely love spice and come from a very foodie family. Then of course there are the classics that you get to know by training to become a chef, like Italian and French. The thing about Indian food is it can be quite heavy on ingredients, whereas you take Italian, and might have only three, and it’s still fantastic. I try and bridge that gap by keeping flavours as free and clean as possible but try and bring in some spices to elevate dishes.
What advice would you give to students on a budget who want to eat well at home? I think pasta is a fantastic vehicle. There’s so much variety of pasta available to people at such reasonable prices and you can throw just two or three things into a nice pasta dish and really turn it into something special. Some smoked haddock, asparagus, dill and cream cheese – none of the ingredients are particularly expensive and you can have a very quick, easy, cost-effective dish. You can always have a nice glass of wine with it too.
Have the hours let up a bit now, or are you still finding yourself living in the kitchen? When I’m in Nairobi, my time goes in to my restaurants – you wouldn’t find me cooking every night but I’m around the restaurant making sure things are running as they should be. Whenever specials are happening, or we’re changing menu I spend a lot of time in the kitchen developing dishes and still cook an awful lot. My time outside of Nairobi is generally for TV and a lot of that is cooking. In terms of hours letting up, not a chance – it’s getting worse to be honest with you!
In your TV show, Tales of the Bush Larder, you get up to some pretty insane things. What’s the craziest thing you’ve done in pursuit of ingredients? We’ve done three series of the show and been across Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa. Wading into Lake Baringo in Kenya – that was fairly stupid. It’s full of crocs and hippos and these guys go fishing waist-deep in the water there. I was saying how stupid it was and they were saying ‘no no, we know that croc over there, we know that hippo.’ I just went and did it and thought about it later. When you’re dealing with people who do something every day, you just have to trust them and follow their lead – I’m not going to gain anybody’s respect without throwing myself in and levelling the playing field.
Do you have more TV adventures planned? I’m in the middle of filming a new series for NatGeo which isBush Larder on steroids. We’ve done some insane, insane, insane things. It’s going to make Bush Larderlook like child’s play. I’m off to Mozambique again tomorrow for an episode based around free diving and spear fishing – we’ll be diving 30+ metres with no assisted breathing, just one breath. It’s extremely difficult, dangerous and challenging and not the sort of thing you can mess around with. I was recently in Nepal for the same show harvesting honey with these maniac ‘honey hunter’ guys – they basically dangle of 200 feet cliffs with no safety lines to take honey from the biggest and most extraordinarily aggressive honey-bee in the world. I went off and did it with one of the guys and it was just complete madness.
How did you get into TV in the first place? I didn’t want to make TV for the sake of it. For me it was more about wanting to tell compelling stories. I produce my own stuff so we’re in control of what we do and how we tell the stories, and we saw an opportunity to do that in a way that hadn’t been done before, particularly in this part of the world. What you see is what you get, we let people see life in this part of the world by using food as a vehicle.
Are there similar challenges in setting up your restaurant, 7 Seafood and Grill, and working on your shows? There’s a lot of synergy between TV and restaurant work. I think the biggest one is that you go into a restaurant, sit down, enjoy your meal and walk out having no idea of the bloody chaos going on behind the scenes – it’s the same with TV.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a chef and own their own restaurant? It’s a great dream to have. You’ve got to work for as many chefs as you can whose style or food interests you, so you understand different cuisines or approaches to food, how different chefs run their kitchen, and gain as much experience as you can. Get a lot of experience on other people’s bill until you are confident you can do it for yourself – working in a kitchen, running a kitchen and owning a restaurant are very different things. One thing I say to all young chefs and guys I’m training is write every single thing down, even if it’s the smallest thing. You see so much in kitchens that you forget if you don’t write it down. It’s a very small but key piece of advice. Make sure you remember to take care of the boring stuff as well as the cool stuff.
If you had to cook a meal for yourself at home, what would you go for? Roast chicken. When you’re a chef and end up eating restaurant food all the time, just having a simple roast with all the trimmings is quite a treat.
Do you go near junk food? No, I’m not a massive junk food guy, I don’t enjoy it. The closest I’ll get to junk food is pizza, but I don’t consider a really well made pizza junk food. I definitely don’t eat all the other stuff: burgers, fried chicken, things like that.
Thanks Kiran!
Interview by James Ashford.
Click here for the original article!
