Journey Far Away from Home
I think my story started since I decided to left home, get out from my comfort zone and leaving comfortable life that shaped me from age of 18th years of my life. My home is always have been in Jakarta, Indonesia. But at the age of 18th, I decided to move to Australia to live with my brother to study cooking. That was the time I was starting to be on the journey to find my identity, really. Also if I looked back; I was nothing but a brave crazy little stubborn girl that is not very smart but always super confident.
Long-short story; my Mom’s plan to provide me the best education back at home to helped me to become a doctor/dentist was failed, so I attended commerce/business foundation course to get into one of the best University in Australia — but, I managed to fail again, therefore, by accident I decided to study cooking in Australia and become a chef now.
I know its super weird, it doesn’t make sense, however, it’s very real. They said this is called the reality of life.
As much as I know I faced so many difficulties, I know in my dictionary I would ever give up. I would push through, keep going, and keep on trying until I find the right door for me.
Currently, I found myself already become a chef for around 7 years now. I found this job is VERY HARD but I ended up, like it.
Throughout all of my career, I’ve been experiencing work in a simple until complicated restaurants, work from unrecognised places until a renowned place, work from regular long hours until never-ending long hours, work with unimportant people till work alongside very important people.
From day one this career has been an extreme roller coaster ride, but it’s worth the sweats, blood, and tears.
I mean my experience working in this industry it cannot be avoided working with long hours, receiving under-paid wages, experienced unfair/abusive treatments, and I did encounter some physical injuries. Also, I can’t deny that I do experience those regular bad patterns which could sometimes affect my physical & mental health. But from time to time, I do see improvements in my capacity, career and better changes in this industry. And somewhat, if you want to see the changes that will happen in the future, you need to include yourself to be a change. You gotta learn to speak even people would like it or not. You gotta learn work in your capacity; saying yes to what you can do and saying no to something that you can’t do or even something you see ridiculous. As you know — communicating with ‘chefs’ it is not an easy task; it is actually pretty hard.
However, I think most importantly, cooking at various places help me to find myself. The style of cooking I am interested in, the kind of mentor & team members I would like to work with, and the kind of restaurant culture that I want to be at. Especially, with the way how to treat people I want to be treated. Let’s say 7 years it is very long, but I can’t become an open person and develop in what I do as much as I am not if I wasn’t going through those crazy experiences.
Also, by being a chef for these period of time I found that I have creativity in cooking my own food — in the way I create my recipes; the way I chose my ingredients, the way I cook it, and the way I plate it up. This sort of thing, I’ll find it based in my imagination through places I work(ed/ing) with, ingredients I tasted & touched, people who mentor me & inspirational chefs I worked with, cooking books I read and French cooking college I went study from. Although I always follow basic cooking technique (and I always love it!) I always like to I present my food differently. Also, I learnt to be more honest with they way I cook - I know there are a lot of great Chefs out there and I am always happy to learn from them, but I won’t use their standard meter as comparison or limit; as I think cooking is also more about self-expression & creativity of each cook’s.
If I look back, I don’t know what will my life be without cooking. Working as a chef it’s not the best occupation that I could have, but it does prevent me from failing. If I didn’t choose cooking 7 years ago, I imagine I honestly don’t know what will I do with my life.
Cooking in the professional kitchen is hard, but so far it helps to keep me going. And sometimes, you just need to find that ‘one reason’ to keep you moving forward.
Kish.