The Right Man in an Unlikely Place

“Another one who won’t make it,” I thought one afternoon at Peixe em Lisboa when Akis Konstantinidis told me he wanted to change his life and become a cook. As I don’t like to shoot down enthusiasms and I’m terrible at giving advice, I hid my doubts and confined myself to drawing his attention to the hardness of that profession, the lack of regular hours, the uncertainty of customer responses. I mentioned that we were in the midst of a crisis, how depressing it is to see an empty restaurant and not know why, how easy it is for team members to miss a day or fall short and compromise the efforts of a cook, all the possible problems with suppliers, licensing, bureaucracy and so many of the things that take away from the pleasure of cooking for someone who thinks that a restaurant is all about that.