Chef means boss and in France you get an office chef and you get a chef on a building site, etc. So I'm a chef de cuisine, chef of the kitchen, and that means that I'm in charge of a team.

In cooking I found my mentor in this great chef, Albert Roux. I think this is a very important thing in life, to find someone who can steer you because to find it all by yourself is quite a difficult and slow process. That's not to say you won't ever get there, but to find a great coach, a great mentor, someone to show you the way and to open a few windows and doors, is a wonderful thing in life.

Chef means boss and in France you get an office chef and you get a chef on a building site, etc. So I'm a chef de cuisine, chef of the kitchen, and that means that I'm in charge of a team.

There's a layer of satisfaction that I get from cooking that is more than the work itself. I think when you're too competitive sometimes you can lose the joy of what you do.

There are many different types of people that end up coming to me and saying 'Yeah I want to cook.' Some of them successful, some not. There's no one formula, but if I get someone coming through the backdoor who knows that they want to get into the cooking field, they feel this inside-out love for it, this attraction to it, that person is an awful lot easier to work with.

You had to work tremendously hard. You had to have that commitment to training, you had to have that innate ability. It's similar in my profession as well. You can have the ability, but without the work, passion and the commitment, you won't really get there.

Sometimes I think you can lose the joy in what you do. It becomes a sense of 'I've got to beat him, I've got to beat him,' and you lose your own sense of joy.