Chef, Ganbare!
Before I walk into work and at the start of service, I make sure to say this to myself and my station partners. More than a simple good luck, this phrase has now become my mental reset—a cue for me to focus all of my attention towards delivering the best service I can. For the next few hours, all the distractions of the world take a back seat as I face tonight’s service head on, shoulder’s back, and sanding tall. Chef, Ganbare is a remainder to myself of why I am here, what I stand for, and a proclamation that we are going to crush it!
Drawing inspiration from this phrase, Chef, Ganbare! is a blog documenting my journey of self discovery and growth into what type of chef and person I want to be. For the longest time, I’ve always thought of food and cooking in a much more abstract and philosophical sense, seeing it as a way to express yourself and communicating with the world. But, every food blog online always seemed to only view food from a shallow point of view. Restaurant reviews stopped at nothing more then whether they like the place and recipes spent more time talking about the methodology then the why. After being so unsatisfied at all these shallow views on food, I decided that if no one else was going to do it then at the very least I can present my own views in the hope of reaching out and finding people who think like me.
This doesn’t come easy. When I first started cooking, I was always afraid to express my feelings towards food. Bold statements such as “this is my cooking philosophy” and “this is what I want to do” felt beyond me for fear of sounding too contrived or pretentious. But, the deciding factor that made me commit to this was the hope that by putting pen to paper, I can use this space as an opportunity to think through and provide structure to a bunch of loose thoughts and disconnected ideas that would otherwise be floating around in my head. Hopefully by writing each piece one at a time I can begin to place each idea into a more structured narrative so that by the end I can confidently explain who I am and why I cook the way I do. After all, they say you can’t truly know something yourself unless you are able to explain it to another.
Each post on this website is a small vignette of the crazy in my head. There is no rhyme or reason to each post nor is there a connection between each of them. They are simply ideas that I find interesting and want to explore that in some way I believe will help me become a better person and be better at expressing myself.
Thank you for stopping by. In an ideal world, this blog will be a lasting documentation of my journey of self development, and hopefully you’ll find something of value along the way.
Chef, Ganbare!