It is in the kitchen where interesting things happen. The pleasant weekends a boy spent beside his mum, dad and granny while they were turning the spoon in the bowl, the jokes and smiles passed around and the little inventions that made a familiar meal a delicacy predicated his career choice very early in life.
To the amazement of his friends and family, Joro Ivanov enrolled in the Vocational School for Public Nutrition in Sofia. Not a school of repute. He was the only primary school graduate out of 800 to do so. And he made it on no kin’s example.
“I kept saying I did it off the top of my mind,” Ivanov said. “In fact, my inner feeling must have guided me into devoting myself to culinary arts. Only later did I understand why I liked it so much. Cooking is an incredible realm that one can hardly master.
“It is so encompassing that no one’s lifetime is enough to cook all the dishes that could possibly exist. And finding a new recipe is what can infatuate one to an extent that can bring you amazing professional satisfaction.”
This precise attitude prompted Ivanov to study culinary arts time and again: first at a French culinary college in New York, then in Maryland, and then at individual courses in France, Italy and Germany.
And next it was work. Six years in the US and another 12 years at La Truffe Noire, a Brussels restaurant with two Michelin stars.
Back to Bulgaria
Ivanov had made a multi-year geographic spin from loop-end to beginning with a permanent return to Sofia. Now he is a chef at the five-star Grand Hotel Sofia’s restaurant Shades of Red. What is more, he has the ambition to make Shades of Red the first restaurant in Bulgaria to earn a Michelin star. If the attempt is successful, Bulgaria will be the second Balkan country to enter this guide after Greece.
The aspiration to make Shades of Red a restaurant of European scale is just one facet of the professionalism-raising ambition that made Ivanov return home, apart from the purely personal nostalgia a foreigner feels for their homeland.
“Professionalism has become sort of an obsolete word these days,” Ivanov said. “I came back because I wish to aid the development of the cooking talent here. There are so many of them. However, because of the turbulence stemming from the painful transition, which did not follow the most successful path, people at all levels got somehow confused.”
Now that Bulgaria has entered the European Union, Ivanov hopes professional standards will take the sharp upturn.
The “go-professional” line of thought transpires into his involvement as chairperson in Euro-Toques Bulgaria, the local arm of the European Community of Chefs that, since inception, has been under the aegis of the European Commission. All its initiatives being geared toward setting and sustaining professional standards – alongside creating a class of gourmets in Bulgaria, Euro-Toques Bulgaria is now attempting professional stage leap-frogging with a project that has no parallel in Europe.
Culinary Mini-Europe
The concept of “Mini-Europe”, Ivanov says, foresees the creation of a Bulgaria-hosted Euro-Toques training centre. It will be segregated into departments, each with a focus on the cuisine specifics of an EU member state. Chefs would arrive to teach classes on the culinary history of each country, its main chefs and traditional recipes.
“This will also be an incredible opportunity to get in touch with elite cooks, who would come to share their experience and demonstrate techniques and vision,” he said.
This “professionals’ incubator” will create a new class of chefs that would be gradually shunning a perception that Ivanov grudges but says has taken deep roots in the country – that a vocation is not learned but stolen, as a Bulgarian proverb has it. In addition, this new approach toward the profession will pave the way to originality in the chefs’ style because once one starts “stealing” there is no return.
Mending the professional mosaic
“As his professional mosaic starts crumbling down, he begins piling up ‘foreign’ elements and starts imitating. He becomes a different person,” Ivanov said, adding that many Bulgarians who have tasted the result of such idiosyncratic know-how pile-up often remained displeased.
Only once this approach is reversed will Bulgaria obtain the chance to become a destination for culinary tourism. “With classy restaurants, foreigners will have every reason to plan a weekend trip to Bulgaria to taste something special in a particular restaurant,” he said.
As will give the impetus for internal culinary tourism once people stop regarding food “from its humorous aspect” but develop the taste of a connoisseur.
Space is still an odd word in Bulgaria
“It is one thing to have connoisseurs and another to instill the idea for connoisseurship in people, to develop their tastes,” Ivanov says in a shortcut explanation of the work Bulgarian chefs have to do with guests in future.
And it will take time. While European chefs have reached “space” and locals have recognised it, Bulgaria is yet to develop a palate for the novelty.
“Emil Minev (one of Bulgaria’s distinguished chefs) tried to show Bulgaria the space with some of his dishes. But it appears the time for true recognition is yet to come. You know a certain group of people are regarded as strange as they have outstripped their time,” Ivanov says.
There is still a long way to go on the work with chefs. He noted two phenomena – the prevailing “stealing method” and the need to share “one’s recipes”. He said, though, that two or three recipes can be kept secret as tribute of his excellence.
“Top professionals have nothing to be afraid of because even when using the same recipes they add something proprietary, that tinge of love that distinguishes theirs from the dish of others,” Ivanov said.
The chemistry of cooking
“Cooking is some sort of chemistry that might have a tangible explanation in time. For this reason, top professionals have nothing to be afraid of. A piece of work that passes through one’s hands, engages the entire thought process and involves all senses – that level of concentration results in something proprietary that no one can copy.”
“Professional egotism – as I call keeping one’s recipes a secret – is counter-productive,” Ivanov said, especially when it comes to cooks sharing the same kitchen. The chef must entrust his recipes to achieve consistency in dishes’ taste and feel. Once tabled, people that follow the recipe understand why the recipe is like this and why it should take as long to be cooked. “This is what I call good and productive,” he said.
In return, colleagues must bend their generally strong individuality to not sway, even if inadvertently, from the strict set of ingredients and techniques for a particular dish.
As is the case with the grouse, among the hallmarks of the autumn game menu of the Shades of Red. If the cooking process becomes flawed, so does the quality of meat.
Team up for the gold
And Ivanov has got the ambition to set the restaurant’s team proficiency to both the Michelin Red Guide and the Bocuse d’Or test. The latter, a world cuisine contest, which engendered at the initiative of Paul Bocuse and carried out once every two years in Lyon, gathers the world’s top 40 chefs to evaluate the qualities of dishes prepared by teams from all over the world. If the team of Ivanov succeeds to prepare on time, Bulgaria will have its first-ever appearance at the contest in January 2009.
Ivanov participated in Bocuse d’Or twice in the mid-1990s while at the US college.
“The adrenalin at the contest is very high because apart from the jury of the world’s cooking elite, many arrive as observers and take a close look at colleagues’ work,” he said.
To the team from Shades of Red, this would be an excellent example for what a concerted effort can do. This is one of the prerequisites of not only raising but also sustaining quality of Shades of Red food over time.
While Bocuse d’Or is a one-time effort, to earn a Michelin star means top quality from each staff member every single day. And the team needs to have the disposition that Michelin is tantamount to top standards, Ivanov said.
“There are very valuable people and it is time to bring them together, to delegate responsibilities, fine-tune the dishes to cook them in the best possible way,” Ivanov said. “A good cook needs to be able to develop the people around him.”
Whatever happens in the Shades of Red kitchen is in Ivanov’s mind. And his mind is all honed on development.
