‘Long hours, yelling and bad salary’ almost made Dutch chef quit his career

Tell us about your childhood. “At around 11 years old I knew I wanted to become a baker because my grandfather apprenticed in a bakery and though he ended up being a captain on a river boat, he kept baking bread and I liked eating it. Then I realised that bakers needed to wake up early. That didn’t sound like a lot of fun, so I became a cook instead.”

Describe your journey to becoming a chef. “When I was 14 years old, my mum got me a job in the only restaurant in our village [Loon op Zand, in the southern Netherlands]. I worked there on weekends and holidays washing dishes. Then I moved to serving ice cream, to making salads, then to the hot section. I learned from the chef-owner that working in a restaurant is a social thing; he created a family where we worked really hard, then after dinner on Sunday we drank beers together. I worked there for three years.

“Afterwards, I went to hotel school, De Rooi Pannen, in Tilburg. In my fourth year, I did two internships. I worked for a big hotel for five months and then I went to Amsterdam to a restaurant called Vermeer, which got its second Michelin star weeks after I arrived [in 2003].

“After I graduated I went back to work there for another two years. I was not sure if I wanted to be a cook, with the long hours, yelling and bad salary, so a year later I studied journalism to be a food writer and I was back working in the first restaurant on weekends again. A year later I was again wondering if this was what I wanted to do.”

How did you end up in Indonesia? “In 2006, a chef I knew at Vermeer, Stefan Zijta, suggested I visit him in Jakarta for a summer holiday. I stayed for a month and did some cooking and we travelled to Bali, and I decided I should work with him. I went home to pack and came back to Jakarta when I was 24 for what I thought would be one or two years.