Conquering Fear Through Flames

1: The Heat of the Kitchen 

In the world of flavour and flames, I found my sanctuary. A place where fear couldn't touch me, and failure wasn’t an option.  

It all began in my childhood; the struggle of my parent's broken marriage was like a bitter aftertaste. My mom fought hard, working two jobs to dress us and put food on the table, while my dad battled his demons in the form of drugs. Abusing anything he could get his hands on.  

My only saving grace, and the only place where I could really escape, was my grandparent's restaurant. A little bistro on the shore of one of the beaches in my hometown. I would spend hours on end in a corner of the kitchen just watching Grandma and my aunt work. The heat, the smells, the chaos, the mood, and the excitement in general. All of this created the perfect place for a 12-year-old to escape his problems at home. Most of my time was spent there in this corner watching them, talking about my day and my problems. I felt heard, which wasn’t the case anywhere else, or at least that's what I thought. 

It wasn’t long before I picked up a knife and Grandpa taught me how to prep fish. Sea bass was the first one that he ever taught me; how to scale it, how to clean it, how to filet it. To this day I carry those memories with me. No one ever thought of me as capable of doing anything before, so the trust to not ruin a beautiful 3kg fish is something that’s burned deep into my memory. It was inevitable. This was my calling. I soon came to understand that the qualities of the kitchen could not easily be bought or attained without working hard. 

TV chefs came to my attention early on. I would spend hours watching anything Gordon Ramsey related. Hell's Kitchen was love at first sight. The control that Gordon commanded over his brigade, the anger, and the pursuit for perfection was something that really appealed to me. This was only intensified by watching the contestants grow and improve each episode. I was hooked. Food had always excited me. Coming from a country like Portugal, where you're raised eating good food, cooked with fresh ingredients every day, it’s only natural. I wanted to be this person on the telly turning everyday ingredients into extraordinary dishes. It was mind-blowing to me. Thinking back, I think I saw the profession as a way to gain control over my own life. 

2: The Culinary Sanctuary 

My mother, brother, and I ended up moving to the town where my dad was going through rehab. My support net was gone and for a while, I felt a bit lost. I rediscovered my comfort in the food channel. I would spend hours just watching all these shows which led to me cooking more and more at home, trying to replicate all those amazing dishes. I loved this show called Chopped where three contestants would get a mystery box of random ingredients that they needed to turn into dishes. It wasn’t long until I gained enough knowledge to know what the chefs were going to do with their ingredients. I would imagine what I'd cook and then root for the chef who cooked the most similar dish.  

There was a culinary college in the town where I lived and, very much against my mother's wishes, I ended up enrolling. I wanted to be a chef, no matter what.  

This school was amazing. Everyone was like me, we all wanted the same objectives. We had the same ambitions. It was honestly some of the best years of my life.  

The collage was mental. Besides some "regular” subjects like Portuguese, English, and Math we also had cooking classes, where we would learn everything from the basics upwards. They had chefs who had experience in the industry teaching the classes. The students were so competitive in everything that we did. Be it peeling potatoes, scrubbing floors or even washing dishes. I thrived in this environment, the pressure that we put on each other made us better, faster, and more skilled. 

Our summer Holidays were spent doing internships, in my first year I ended up at a five-star Resort in the Algarve. The shouting, the pressure, the expectation, the heat of a 50-degree kitchen was exciting. The hustle to do well and get that compliment from the chef during service was what I worked so hard for. The times I would be told off would make me so upset and disappointed in myself that I would channel all those feelings into doing better, into being better. Disappointment wasn’t an option in the world I was living in. After all, I was easily replaceable for the next intern in line, so I had to fight for my place to be there. 

From then onwards anything short of perfect wasn’t good enough for me. I was, and still am, my worst critic. The fear of failing blinded me to the point where I could never say no to working extra hours and never took any sick days.

I never gave myself permission to love anyone or anything more than my job. This is who I was, this is who I wanted to be, and I didn’t even realize the damage I was doing to the way I interacted with people or how I handled my relationships. Cooking was Life, simple as that. 

3: Love Turned Toxic 

After I graduated, I got an invite to go to work in England from one of my classmates. I didn’t look back. I’d just had enough of my situation at home and needed an escape. After rehab, my dad started drinking. My mum was constantly working to keep the house and our studies going. My dad had been cheating on her and I just couldn’t deal with all the drama erupting around me anymore.  

For years I performed my big brotherly duties of protecting my little brother from this environment and trying to keep my family from falling apart, but I’d had had enough. I needed to go, to get away from everything, to go be a chef in England, where these issues couldn’t reach me. 

It was a shock! Impulsively, I decided to fly to England with £250 in my pocket. After all, the Hotel that I was going to work at provided accommodation. It was horrible. The food wasn’t great, far from what I'd been cooking thus far and definitely not to the standard I saw myself working at after school. The head chef was something else. You could tell the guy had a tonne of knowledge that was sourly wasted in that place. 

Peter was complacent. After 40 years in the industry, the man was falling apart. His wife divorced him, he could only see his kids on certain days of the week, and he had a massive fixation on Poker, I ended up learning a lot from Peter, way more than I thought I was going to.  

Even in a place like this, my work ethic got the better out of me. Even after developing a cyst in my back, I refused to stop working, to go to the doctors. That cost me dearly. Ignoring the pain that I endured every day, it got to the point where it almost paralyzed me. I had to have emergency surgery and was out of action for 3 months, in bed, with a hole in my back all the way to my spine. 

 One would think “he's learned his lesson now; he's going to look after himself better from now on”. To that, I would like to quote the 45th US president: “Wrong!” 

If anything, I doubled down. You see, after a year in England, I found out about this thing called the AA Rosette, which is awarded to certain establishments for culinary excellence. So, I applied to a bunch of places and took the first offer that came up. 

I ended up in a 1 Rosette hotel in the Woodstock area, near Oxford. I was still not fully recovered from my surgery, but I grew restless at home with nothing to do, and this was too good of an opportunity to pass.  

I had to start from the bottom, as a demi-Chef de Partie, which didn’t matter too much to me because I have a superpower. The ability to throw myself into work like no one else. A personality and mind that thrives under pressure. Dangling between a mental breakdown and an unexplainable fear of failure presented itself. It fuelled me to improve at a ridiculous rate. 

It didn’t take long for me to get some recognition along with a promotion to Chef de Partie. This was highly due to my sous chef at the time noticing the hard work and resilience that I was showing. He introduced me to one of the biggest loves of my life, Pastry. 

He had many years of experience as a pastry chef from all walks of life. Rosette, Michelin, you name it, he’d had done it all. Everything he taught me was magic. The perfectionism and attention to detail that I had to have to make even the least intricate component of a dish was mind-blowing and very scientific. When he decided to move elsewhere, to pursue a better opportunity, he invited me to go with him. I felt a great sense of accomplishment and pride that he'd consider me capable enough to give me an impressive recommendation. Once again, without looking back, I handed in my notice and went to work at another 2 Rosette Hotel. A bit of a “Crazy” place. The staff was more eccentric and laid back, but the standard of food was magnificent, and the expectation was way higher. I fit in perfectly with that bunch of weirdos. We’d pull 16–18-hour shifts, go home, and play video games for the rest of the night showing up the next day ready for work. I worked every section in that place. They really put me through the wringer but ended up settling me in pastry after the existing pastry chef left. This was a huge responsibility; as a pastry chef, I had a massively increased workload. Afternoon teas for 100+ people, prepping all desserts and tasting menu elements for around 150 more. During the weekends it was a massive wedding venue so catering for all desserts, ice cream, and anything sweet-related was handled by me and only me. I worked through exhaustion and self-doubt. I gave anything and everything I had until I couldn't give any more. I burned myself out at the age of 20. The realization that I couldn’t keep going, couldn’t keep up the pace and standard that was needed nearly killed me inside. The expectation that I had placed on myself was impossible to carry.  

I started to abuse marijuana after work. It made me numb to my thoughts of giving up and of failure, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror without thinking that I had turned out like my father, whom I despised for everything he, and his addictions, put my family through. 

In the end, I turned out more like my dad than I wanted to admit. 

4: Facing the Flames 

It's funny how life works out sometimes. Amidst all these feelings and my drug struggle, the same friend who brought me over to the UK texted me. If I'm being honest, I don’t think he realizes how deep of a hole I was in at the time, but me and Fred have always been there for each other in our times of need. We were cut from the same cloth. We’d spend our days off together so I wouldn’t be surprised if he noticed something was up with me. He was working in this pub in the Cotswolds that needed an extra chef. They paid well and, according to him, it was easy work. 

So, I reluctantly swallowed my pride and took the job. It shouldn’t have been so hard for me to do so, but the thought that I had failed and couldn’t cut it kept playing in the back of my head. 

This place was different. It was like a family. Everyone was there for each other not only at work but also at a personal level. 

The food was simple, but everything was made fresh in-house. It was exciting and refreshing to stop putting much strain on myself or my declining mental health. 

Me and Fred ended up sharing a small studio apartment in the village where the pub was located. It was affordable, we would spend our time after work playing video games, watching whatever was new on Netflix or any new anime that came out. On more intimate evenings we would talk about our inner demons, and we would in a way therapize each other on what might be the root of our struggles. 

During that time, I did a lot of self-reflection. I struggled with the way my mind worked and the reason why it was like that. I tried to understand my unhealthy relationship with work and how it was affecting my life outside it. I had a couple of therapy sessions to help me understand where these feelings were coming from, and how to accept them instead of trying to drown them out.  

5: The Perfect Blend 

With a new understanding of my own psyche, I embarked on a journey to find my balance. I immersed myself in the art of cooking, not as a way of controlling my world, but to better understand myself.  

Each mistake ended up becoming a spice that added flavour to my experience.  

I realized that the real magic in the kitchen, and in life, comes from embracing imperfections and turning them into something beautiful. 

It brought me back to my childhood, that I spent in my grandad’s restaurant, a raw and unapologetic establishment. A restaurant that served simple food to feed the belly and the soul. That was what I wanted to do now.  

Fred did a good job of keeping my antisocial personality at bay. He would constantly drag me out of the house and even encouraged me to throw myself out there onto the dating scene. 

When me and Courtney first matched on Tinder, I was a bit apprehensive. My last relationship had ended nearly4 years before and hadn’t ended well, mostly because of my crippling addiction to work. 

There was something about this woman that made me feel whole when I talked to her. The moment I walked into that Costa Coffee for our first date it was, what most people would describe as, love at first sight.  

This girl was smart, beautiful, and had a wicked sense of dark humour that was just as bad as mine. She was an open book and didn’t pull any punches. Strangely, we put all our trauma and issues on the table on that first date, it was a judgment-free zone from the get-go.  

The conversation just kept flowing and the time flew by us until we had to reluctantly say goodbye. My awkward ass missed the trick when she went in for a kiss goodbye, which I awkwardly, accidentally avoided as I went for a hug. What a long bus ride home I had after that.  

It's now been 4 years and this woman is my rock. She really broke my walls from the inside out, she made me want to be a better person and gave me something besides my job and my craft to make me feel fulfilled. We’ve had our bumps here and there. Living through a worldwide pandemic was very challenging for us, given the circumstances of my job. The pandemic started 3 months before the first lockdown happened and I wasn’t about to spend God knows how long without seeing her, so we decided she'd move in with me and Fred into our new 2-bed apartment. If we survived that crazy year together, without killing each other, it was meant to be. 

6: A Recipe For Accountability and Trust  

For two years now I've been working at this brand-new hotel closer to where me and Courtney decided to live. In a year, I rose through the ranks at a rapid pace and had a pretty stable work-life balance until my promotion to sous chef.  

This new promotion caused me to disregard any efforts that I've made that far. It gave me a way of justifying why I was spending more time at work instead of home, and why I was bringing my work issues home to my fiancée. 

We're going through a bit of a rough patch at work. After Covid it’s been challenging to find competent staff, the situation with Brexit doesn’t help either. Somehow deep down I feel like I'm not doing enough, I feel like I'm failing, and the thought of being incapable or unworthy pops in my head constantly, without a break. 

But 2 days ago, when I started to write my insecurities on this story that strangers will read, I realized that it's okay to feel like that as long as I come home to reflect and see the bigger picture. 

If I take the time to work on myself and to spend time with the ones that I love, then I’ll be okay. It's not my fault and I don’t have any control over most of it right now, but I have people that give me enough security in life that I don’t need to be constantly in control and that I am hugely thankful for. 

Life is lived one day at a time, and sometimes we might fall into old habits, but we must work on them by holding ourselves accountable and trusting the people around us.