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Like many in my profession, I started cooking at
home on days when no one was around the house to cook for my sister and
me. I would work to get the cooking done
and my sister, who is a few years older than me, would do the dishes because
she was really bad at operating a stove! Even though I liked being in the
kitchen, I never saw it future as a career option.
When I moved to Australia in 1998, I started working
in a restaurant as a waiter and then everything started to fall into place. While employed as a waiter for the first year
and a half, during that time I realized I wanted to learn from the cooks and
soon was consumed with wanting to know every single detail about how to prepare
things and each ingredient. The dilemma was
that I 1) had a job as a waiter, 2) was working on my degree in Civil
Engineering at University and 3) was in general, a pretty busy young
fellow. Despite all that, I decided to
take on a new adventure and went to Culinary School.
Right away, I was able to move some shifts to work in the kitchen of the
restaurant where I had been a waiter for the past year and a half. As the restaurant was Sardinian cuisine, I
learned to embrace a completely different way of cooking and the associated
culture. Some of my earliest memories
here were making desserts, salads, cold starters, and best of all, Suckling Pig. My time in the kitchen started with one day
of week, moved to a few days a week and then within six months I had arrived on
the doorstep of my new life and was cooking full time in the kitchen.
Over the next four years in Australia, I was lucky to meet some amazing people
in the industry: Michelin Starred chefs, celebrity chefs and top restauranteurs
from around the world.
After some time, I decided to try my fortunes in America. During my time in Florida, I managed a
restaurant while working full time as a chef at another. While on a trip home to Bogota for the
holidays, I realized my home country was undergoing a sort of culinary revolution. Without hesitation I returned home to
Colombia start the next chapter of my life.
I was ready to bring my worldly experience home and
worked as a chef for two years. At that
point, I knew I was ready to take on the challenge of restaurant
ownership. Drawing back to my early
days in the kitchen in Australia, I built a menu based on my roots in
Mediterranean cuisine and was proud to say my wine list was 75% European wines,
an almost unheard of concept in Colombia.
In response to my ever-growing business's catering requests, I moved
into full time catering, a career that afforded me the excitement of mobility
and even more creativity.
After seven years in Colombia, my search for a new
adventure has begun again. It's starting
in San Francisco, California, where diverse culture meets a wide variety of
fresh ingredients, allowing for imaginative takes on solid cooking
concepts. I look forward to the next
stage in this journey!