Training Ground

In 1994 I applied to the Waikato Polytech professional cookery course, the top chef school in New Zealand. I was still only sixteen, two years below the entry age, but I wrote a letter explaining how becoming a cook was my life’s passion, and after two interviews they agreed to take me on.

The tutors were a battle-hardened group of older chefs from Michelin-starred kitchens in France, Germany, Switzerland and England. On the first day they rounded up all of the students in a theatre and proceeded to tell us we were nothing, we knew nothing, that at the end of the two years’ full-time study — if we made it that far — we would be lucky if we could call ourselves cooks, let alone chefs. One of the French tutors stood on the lectern and screamed at us: ‘Merde, merde! You are all merde!’