Little Chef

A fourteen year old  boy in America has launched a massive career as a chef.

Apparently he didn’t like the food his mother cooked, when he was eleven years old, and so he made his way to a bookshop, bought a huge book about French cooking, and proceeded to teach himself to cook.

After learning, he started a pop up restaurant.  I’m not even sure what a pop up restaurant is, I presume it’s a temporary type affair like those “pop up shops” that used to be called “stalls”?

How would that work in a restaurant environment?  Does he have pop up cookers and ovens and sinks?  Am I a complete moron? 

I think we can safely say that when it comes to cooking that yes, I am.

I don’t think I want to know what a pop up restaurant is.  It’ll just annoy and irritate me.

Anyway, he’s launching himself into the world in a Beverly Hills restaurant this Thursday night with a $160 a head twelve course dinner for forty people.  It’s sold out.

Fair play to him, seriously.  I couldn’t cook a two course dinner for six people without a fuss and drama and probably a fire. And possibly a little flood.

But I have a couple of questions.

This is a child.  He has been cooking for three years.  His signature food is described as “progressive American” and he will be serving sunchoke confit with dehydrated grapefruit, followed by smoked sturgeon and beef with wild mushrooms, celery root, coffee and black vinegar at Thursday’s shindig.

Can a child not just learn to cook without all this labelling and nonsense?  When did people stop having celery (something that couldn’t happen too soon for me, incidentally) and start eating celery root?  Why is coffee now a dinner ingredient?

Also, what happened to children?  This child was probably born in 1998, or 1999 if he’s had this year’s birthday already.

As a child who was born a full twenty five years before him, I’d like to give him some information.

If you were born in Ireland in 1973 and didn’t like your mother’s cooking, you:-

·         Kept your big mouth shut about it.  Those were the days when the wooden spoon was not used to confit your sunchoke. 

By the way,  having googled it, I can now confirm that a sunchoke is an archaic name for an artichoke. 

Go ahead lads, make the thing as complicated as possible.  “Artichoke jam with dried up grapefruit” just wouldn’t have the same ring, would it?

·         Ate your bloody dinner anyway.  These were before the days when children ruled the house with an iron fist.  Refusing to eat your dinner because you didn’t like it was tantamount, in our house, to slapping your mother in the face.  Which was never acceptable, even if she hit you first. 

·         Thought of the poor children in Africa “who wouldn’t be getting shepherd’s pie or stew for quite a while, let me tell you” as the grown ups chanted at us in the seventies and eighties.

 I don’t know why they put it like that.  It gave us the distinct impression that there was a simple delay on the delivery of stew and meat pies to Africa. 

I remember once having a discussion with my brother on the logistics of posting a box of roast chickens to Africa, when we were about six and seven.  I had, as I still do, a great fondness for roast chicken, and I thought it might be a treat for them, after all the stew and shepherd’s pie. 

Like most things in my life, I never actually got around to organising it.  I was me from a very young age.

·         Passed it to your brother or sister’s plate and gave them a swift stab of your fork in their leg if they tried to kick up a fuss about it.  That same brother still does this to me every Christmas day, actually, with his Brussels sprouts. Happily I’m a huge fan and stabbing is never necessary.

What you never ever did, if you were a child of the seventies, is announce that your mother was henceforth to be banished from the kitchen and that you’d do the bloody cooking yourself.  At the age of eleven.

Can you imagine?

This child is now selling out dinners at $160 dollars a head. At fourteen.  So there might be something to be said for letting the little pup take over, I suppose.

But guess what his family did, when he made his big decision? 

They put a test kitchen in his bedroom, consisting of a couple of tables, some gas burners, and all the utensils he needed to perfect his art.

Gas burners, knives and tables to lay it all out to eliminate delays in reaching your weapon, in other words.

There is absolutely no way this could have been done in our house without resulting in tears, and visits to both hospitals and juvenile detention centres.

I’m trying to imagine my parent’s faces if I’d asked for a personal kitchen in my room when I was a teenager.  I can actually hear my Dad’s voice

“You can have a kitchen wherever you like, when you pay for it, like we did.  Now feck off”

And that's if he was in a good mood.  I won't go into what he would have said in a bad mood.  In fairness, even I'm not thick enough to have asked him for a personal kitchen when he was in a bad mood.

After this child's sister moved out to go to college, the prodigy moved into her room and his room was transformed into a full working kitchen, from which he runs the mysterious pop up restaurant.

He remains in school, via the Internet.  Not even a private tutor, the poor little sod.  Must be a lonely way to be educated.

I think this story is one of the ones I’ve read recently that most shows the difference between children thirty years ago, and children today.

And I'm not criticising that.  I know it's great that kids have more confidence, and a better chance of making the best of themselves now.  I'm merely pointing out the changes that have occurred in one generation.

I wonder how many of our generation could have been hotshot chefs, or bakers, or whatever else, if only we’d had mothers who listened to “you’re hopeless, I’ll do it myself” nonsense from their offspring?

I’m telling you, there’s no way that childs mother is Irish.  No self respecting Irish Mammy would go along with that.