NOTES

A weekly running (a restaurant) commentary
nobody asked for.

Sunday, 18 October 2026

I thought there were only three types of chefs.

The first is the “executive chef”. These chefs love to cook, and they’ll put some foam thing on some jelly thing and call it “Devil’s Paradise” and when you eat it you have no idea what’s happening to your mouth, but you know your wallet is going to suffer for it.

These chefs are motivated by unrealistic artistry, slight lunacy, and insufferable pride. They are honest to goodness talented but you kind of hate them because they’re better than you.

The second type of chef are the guys who are actually making your food at your favourite restaurants. These guys became chefs because they had to, and by the time they’re thirty-three they’ve already been working in the kitchens for three hundred years.

These chefs are motivated purely by their unified loathing of the aforementioned executive chef, and all they want is to do it right so you wouldn’t return your steak complaining it’s well done. Somehow, nobody bothers to do any marketing of these chefs, but they’re the real deal and they’re actually really good, and you wish you had one at home.

The third type of chef is the best chef; statistically it’s going to be your mother/wife, but occasionally it’s your dad/husband.

These chefs only want you to eat well and always think you’re too skinny. They’ll make you fish soup with twenty fish that they strongly suggest they caught with their bare hands, and even though you don’t really like fish and you don’t really like soup, it’s the best damn thing you’ve ever had, and it’s the only way they can properly express their affection for you, and it makes you homesick even if and especially when you’re at home.

So if you, like me, have the peculiar fortune of one day meeting a nice guy, and he’s a career chef, and he’s tragically convinced he’s in love with you, and he makes an astonishingly good cheese wonton, because why not, and maybe because you slightly mentioned like once (and definitely separately) that you liked cheese and you liked wontons, and also he’s just the right amount of deranged, you would realise rather quickly that you’ve met in real life what you had previously wrongly thought was a creature only of myths: a combination of all three chefs in one hot body.

Then you’d also, like me, be left with no other choice, but to engage your relentless powers of persuasion and embarrassing feminine advances, to lure him into… sharing himself with the world.

This is all to say: I didn’t name the restaurant.

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