Six Countries, One Kitchen: What Travels and What Stays Behind

I started working in a kitchen in 1998, at sixteen. Since then I have cooked professionally in Turkey, Scotland, Australia, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the United States.

People assume that adds up to a collection — a bit of this cuisine, a bit of that one. It does not work like that. What you actually carry from each place is narrower and stranger than a set of recipes.

Here is what stayed.

Turkey: the base

Everything I do rests on what I learned in Istanbul, and almost none of it is about Turkish food specifically.

It is discipline. Hilton kitchens in the late nineties were hard, hierarchical places where you learned by repetition and by being corrected in front of people. That sounds unpleasant and some of it was. But it built a foundation that has held up in every kitchen since.

The other thing Turkey gave me is a sense of what a table is for. In Turkish cooking the meze table is not a course, it is a structure — lots of small things, shared, over time. Almost every menu I have written since has some version of that idea in it, whatever the cuisine.

Scotland: cold-weather cooking

A year at Hilton East Kilbride, outside Glasgow.

What I learned there was braising. Proper long, slow, wet cooking — the technique of cold countries, where you take a tough cut and give it three hours and it becomes something better than an expensive cut would have been.

Turkey has braises, but Scotland is where I understood the patience of it. That nothing about a braise can be hurried, and that trying is the only way to ruin one.

Australia: seafood, and everyone else’s food

Nearly four years — the Sydney Hilton opening, then Melbourne.

Australian kitchens in that period were the most mixed I have ever worked in. On any given shift I was standing next to cooks from China, Vietnam, Lebanon, Italy, Greece. You pick things up by proximity that you would never learn from a book.

But the real education was seafood. Australians treat fish with a lightness that I had not seen — less sauce, less interference, more trust in the product. That directly shaped how I cook Gulf fish now, twenty years later.

Greece: the formal side

In 2012 I did the Culinary Management program in Athens, run jointly by Institut Paul Bocuse and Hilton University.

This was the first time anyone had taught me the business of a kitchen rather than the craft of one — costing, yield, menu engineering, how a food cost percentage actually behaves when you change one dish.

It is the least romantic thing on this list and possibly the most useful. A chef who cannot read a P&L is a cook with a bigger hat.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi: precision under pressure

Hilton Al Ain as Executive Chef, then opening Rixos Premium in Dubai.

Gulf hospitality operates at a standard of finish that I had not encountered before. The expectation is that nothing is ever visibly imperfect — not a plate, not a buffet, not a staff uniform at 2am.

That is exhausting and it is also formative. You learn to see the details that guests notice without knowing they notice them.

Al Ain also gave me the most interesting project of my career to that point: relaunching a restaurant around healthy cooking, and becoming the first restaurant in the city certified under Abu Dhabi’s Weqaya programme. Cooking well within constraints is a different skill from cooking well without them, and it is the harder one.

Oman: scale

Five years running the culinary side of the new Muscat International Airport operation — more than twenty outlets, lounges, and a central production kitchen feeding all of it daily.

This is where I stopped being a chef who cooks and became a chef who builds systems. At that volume, your own hands are irrelevant. What matters is whether the process you designed produces the same result at 3am on a Tuesday, cooked by someone you have never met.

I also spent a lot of those five years training Omani cooks, most of whom had never worked in a professional kitchen. Teaching someone from zero forces you to articulate things you have done unconsciously for twenty years. I learned more about technique from explaining it than I ever did from performing it.

Florida: the return to the plate

Opening Grand Living in Venice, and since February 2024, Executive Chef at Boca Royale Golf & Country Club in Englewood.

A private club is a particular kind of operation. You are not cooking for strangers passing through — you are cooking for the same people, several times a week, for years. They know what they like. They notice when something changes. There is nowhere to hide.

After airport scale, that is a pleasure. It is the closest I have come in twenty years to the reason I started: making food for people whose faces you know.

What does not travel

Recipes, mostly.

Almost nothing I cooked in Istanbul works unaltered in Florida, and not because of ingredients. It is climate, expectation, what people eat at what time of day, what they consider a lot of food.

What travels is narrower: how to season, how to read a piece of protein, how to organise a service, how to tell whether a young cook is struggling or coasting. Technique and judgement move. Dishes do not.

And one more thing, which took me all six countries to understand: every kitchen you walk into already has a way of doing things. You can change it, but you cannot change it on your first week, and you cannot change it by explaining how it was done somewhere else.