Kyiv, Ukraine

I was born 1978. I’ve been working as a cook for 12 years. I think it’s my vocation. My parents were totally against this, but I chose this path all the same. I’ve made the whole way from a cook’s helper to a chef and worked as a cook, head cook, sous-chef and became a chef in the end. In other words, I know my job inside and out. Contrary to young cooks: they start working as cook apprentice, work for 5 years and think they are professionals. But one shall try to walk the whole path.

Just today I’ve turned 36. You’ve got on my birthday. I’ve been working in a restaurant business for 20 years. I dreamt of being a sailor and attended Young Sailor Club when I was a child. But I never studied, as I couldn’t find maritime college in Kiev. My father advised me to study for a cook. I entered training school, and I liked it a lot. I was the best among the students of my year, and right after I passed my exams I started working at a young pioneer camp. I was only 15 then. Young pioneer camp is a very good place to learn. We had to do everything by ourselves: from separating carcasses to baking.

I’m 29, and I’ve been a cook since 2000. But actually it would be more correct to say that since I was a child. When I was a child, our family somehow got two sacks of flavour. My mother doesn’t bake, so the flavor remained untouched for a long period of time. I was curious and started kind of testing it: kneaded dough and tried to bake something. At first, I didn’t manage well, but every time it was better and better. Then I started exchange recipes with my mother’s friends. At school, I ‘bought’ my marks at exams with cakes. I didn’t want to study, at that time I already knew that it was not for me. That’s why I baked a cake and brought it to a teacher, and got a good mark.

I’m 40 years old. I’m not a chef, I’m a professional amateur. This is how my friends call me for a fun. Anyway, I’m a culinary journalist. My everyday life is closely related to the media. I develop food culture. My motto is to cook by yourself, meaning that people should stop buying ready-to-eat and vapid food, and to cook healthy and tasty food at home instead. It doesn’t cost much. My culinary community iCook is devoted to this. For a professional amateur, experience and service record is the whole life. But if you try to find more or less exact date, when I started my culinary way, then this is when I was 6. At that time I started getting in my grandmother’s way in the kitchen. As a memory from that period I even have two notebooks with culinary notes and recipes, which I wrote down with my childish uneven writing.

Do you know, who is the most honest gastronomic critic in the world? A newborn baby who has been just fed with milk. This baby is happy with life and has got colossal emotional and physical power-up and is ready to tell the world about its pleasant mood. I think, I took in the desire to cook tasty and delicious dishes in my early childhood. Perhaps, it explains why I can't recall when ex

Actually, my attraction to culinary and creation of dishes wasn’t always that obvious. I accumulated experience, learnt new methods and got special education. As a child, I was a rather good painter. Nowadays, I create palettes of dishes and decorate them prior to serving. Food design is my passion for sure. It lies somewhere between thematic serving, table layout and performance. And such commonplace as eating tasty food becomes a fascinating experience. I adore bringing fantasies and bold solutions to life. But I love genuine fascination of the restaurant’s guest even more. These are they who motivate me the most.