As cooking is a constant learning process, I can tell you from past experiences that there is nothing quite like having “pure confidence” in your cooking ability and expressing yourself onto a plate of food. One of the greatest parts of being a chef is you’ll have that amazing ability to put a smile on someone’s face whether it be a family BBQ, lunch in a casual restaurant or even an 8-course tasting menu in a fine dining restaurant. Where someone gets engaged or it’s a Grand mother’s 90th birthday “I couldn’t imagine those switched around, as a grandmother getting engaged at 90, each to their own I guess lol”!

  Making a guest’s day is one of the highlights of the job, just to give them a little positive boost, even though that might only be for a couple of hours, or to help them forget about their mortgage payment coming up, or the dreaded thought of telling the kids that they can’t go abroad this year on holiday! As the chef, we might have even cemented a little memory into our guests minds for years to come, with them relaying that special occasion with their loved ones, weather that be a tasting bomb sensation in their mouth, tasting something new, or just a simple memorable night, with amazing food and compassionate non cringy service.
 
  Over the years I have realised by trial and error, that we always have to respect Mother Nature when cooking a dish. I’m probably not the only one that’s rolled into work with one of those hangovers that clings onto you like a jealous ex! In which you go over a special in your mind on the way to work, thinking of what is starting to turn in your walk in, you then enter the walk in and see the items you thought what were there in your head on the way to work, have now been sold or put into the staff meal! So, you’re in the walk in, your head is beating rhythmically to the sound of the bearings in the soon to be dying walk in motor (that’s reminding you to put a service call in) and then, panic sets in, as there is fuck all to make a special out off.

  Also added to this recipe is the fact that the lovely Maitre D’ is asking what the special is at 10am in the fucking morning! And to top all that, the delivery doesn’t arrive till around 11am, when the restaurant opens at 12pm! God forbid if they are short of anything on your order, don’t you just love the look on FOH and BOH staff’s faces when you do a pre-shift and let them know that the sea bass hasn’t turned up today, due to delivery issues. Yet you always think in the back of your head, that they are looking at you saying in their head, yea right, your just the donut chef that forgot to place an order!
  Anyways, enough of my insecurities and anxiousness and back to the tasting! In this case, I used to get a proper coffee, normally a latte with an extra shot, look at what pairs well with each other, write those ingredients on a piece of paper and clipboard then sit down and conjure up some shit. After a few years, this just became 2nd nature to me as these times truly do train “the chef brain”. It’s a daunting process, think of it like the brain being in basic service for 3 months in the marines!

  Soon the day will come when your chef brain just seems to roll out ideas over and over, getting inspiration even when you least expect it, such as waking up or something as simple as looking at an object! That’s when you know you’ve got a solid chef brain and the confidence will always shine through. Now, you start to feel, act, walk and become a Solid Chef, Chef!
 
  Not always, will a newly created dish be a winner, but, those unfortunate dishes are GOLDEN, as they teach us the balancing of flavours and textures, as the great Albert Roux used to say “focus on the family of flavours”. These bad dishes were the ones that were just simply an atrociously appalling attempt, that needed to be thrown away and made invisible, kind of like Billy Batts in the movie Goodfellas, the scene where Billy was tossed into the trunk of a Cadillac and never to be seen again.
My style of making a bad dish invisible (not so violent though) was hurling the sauté pan off the stove in a subsequently fast pace into the awaiting laughing bus tub of dirty pans underneath the stove, just fast enough so fellow chefs & kitchen porters never saw my disaster. Then hopefully nobody witnesses me crawling into the nearest walk in, thoroughly pissed off, to verbally counsel myself with words you wouldn’t probably use at your mother in laws tea party! I still get proper pissed off when I screw up a dish, I guess it’s a combination of a few things, what I can think of are these points below! Please feel free to message us your reasons for getting angry at a crap dish? 
  1. I guess the main one for me is throwing away good food, not only the cost ££ but the effort mother nature and what the farmers did, to give that item to you. This probably stems from my parents making me eat everything green and slimy on the plate, or my sister making me eat cold porridge once! I grew up on a council estate in Basildon, so we didn’t get to choose what was on the daily menu lol.
  2. If the dish is that bad and definitely needs the bin, I still punish myself mentally inside saying over and over again, “all these years, how could I have let that happen”. This little “chef devil” in my head would call me a twat, for at least until the end of the shift lol.
  3. Embarrassment – especially if I was the sous or head chef. We aren’t supposed to screw up right! That’s just an insecurity fault, as we are all allowed to screw up, it’s how we learn. You’ll just find that you screw up a little less as the years go by. “We’re all Commis, we’re all still learning”. Marco Pierre White”.
 
  I really didn’t know how to properly cook till about ten years into my chef life and that’s including two years at college! I’m generally talking about simple stuff such as seasoning your dish at the beginning and checking it at the end. A properly seasoned dish, believe it or not is one of the best skills in cooking! As when you
come to garnish it, the dish will almost kind of sing to you when you are cooking it, you will then know that you’ve created something special! Throughout the shift, talk with your Head chef, sous, CDP and commis chefs for their opinion of the dish, in the 90’s we used to carry plastic spoons in our top pocket, those days with HACCP now are gone unfortunately lol.
  The taste of the end product is crucial, and as Gordon Ramsay says “taste, taste, taste”, and if your senior chefs get pissed off for you for asking too many times, then you are in the wrong kitchen buddy. Season “no pun intended” & polish up your CV and move on, there are thousands of kitchens and good chefs out there to help you grow!
 
  This is one of the reasons why I opened up my own business called, Broes Seasonings (www.Broesseasonings.com) in which I have created a few seasonings with my smoker, such as smoking chillies for eight hours in oak wood, then turning them into a chilli salt. This brings another element to a dish and highlights the family of flavours, Umami baby!

  Back to the tasting, you can also ask a server for their opinion, as believe it or not, they have taste buds too and are actually human lol, but this is a last resort, as you want an executive trained palate, which comes from your fellow brigade.
 
As the great Anthony Bourdain once said-If you’re a cheap tipper or rude to your server, you are dead to me. You are lower than whale feces!
© 2025 by Brad Roe.