Odesa chef Aleksey Shvets cooked his first lunch at 5, led a big restaurant project at 24 and now hosts a culinary school and the GastroLab video blog.
Let the names of flourishing cities
Caress the ear with their fleeting importance.
Not Rome the city lives amid the ages,
But man’s place in the universe.
Mandelstam, 1917
White clusters of acacia blossom, hot dirty sand, dazzling summer sun and a crowd of grubby boys running and jumping into the green waves of the endless Black Sea. I’m there among them, Lyosha Shvets. I’m 5, and I’m happy. Today I’ve jumped off the pier and cooked lunch for the first time.
It was a real lunch, just like the ones my mother cooked. Like an expert, I pierced the puffy sides of a scalding-hot potato with a tiny, half-burnt match, and I was happy. The potato steamed and smelled incredibly tempting.
Back then I couldn’t even imagine how many magnificent aromas, tastes and textures I would discover in the future. I was 5, and that was the first time I cooked on my own.
Sticky Odesa mud and gray clouds outside, and the smell of flour and butter in my mother’s kitchen. The clatter of a mixer, the foam of whisked eggs and the heat of an old oven. Three clumsy boys are trying to bake cookies, and I’m among them, Lyosha.
I’m 10, and I don’t want to solve equations with two unknowns, measure amperes or take square roots. In this world of enamelware and vanilla smells, I’m a straight-A student. I promise my mother I’ll never skip lessons again, but I know I’ll do it all the same. I promise to become the best chef, and I definitely will.
Then came college, with its exhausting studies, and afterwards exciting practice in a bar. It was a school of cooking skills and of life at the same time. I’m already 16, I’m Aleksey, a real cook. Only at night and only in one small bar so far, but I’m not going to leave my culinary path.
Then I went into the army. I had to get up early in the morning while it was still dark and wash in ice-cold water. I can still remember that thrilling taste of adrenaline. That was my “baptism by fire”: I cooked, and for army officers at that.
And I became more and more confident that the kitchen was my place of power. Do you know what I understood there? There are no small jobs, only people with a weak spirit, those who are unable to learn and gain new experience.
After the army, I came back to my small bar. I returned to peeling vegetables and washing dirty floors and ovens covered in soot. But I was never bored, and I never complained or suffered over it. Very soon my persistence and confidence paid off: within half a year I became a cook.
And then a strange thing happened. For the first time in my life I realized I was able to do something, and I really was. My ambitions and a bit of boyish courage made me look for a new job, a new level and new knowledge.
I was only 24 when I started a big and very cool project. Back then I thought nothing could be better. The historic center of my favorite city, the quiet whisper of hundred-year-old corridors and narrow vaulted arches. I gathered my team, worked on the menu and rushed toward new beginnings.
The crazy rhythm, the administrative routine and the obligations I had taken on left very little time for creativity in my life, the culinary creativity I had loved so much since childhood. So I made a hard but deliberate decision to leave the position of chef.
Today I, Aleksey, Lyosha Shvets, am the host and practicing chef of a culinary school. I enjoy running a video blog on the GastroLab channel, I travel the world in search of new knowledge and recipes, and I develop food styling with Sasha Slyadnyev, a world-famous photographer. I have time, and I want to fill my life only with the people, events and activities that will make it better. And I’m happy.
To the readers: all wishes can come true; you just need to understand that the foot that keeps walking always gets somewhere. There should be momentum in everything.
Don’t strive for money; strive for prospects, because work without prospects turns into routine.
As Janusz Leon Wisniewski says: “Only good jazz and sex can be better than cooking.”
