Whataa‚¬a„¢s cooking in the kitchen

Clayton Powell, executive chef at Athenee Palace Hilton Hotel, is in charge of a team of 47, and has a say on everything that goes into the food, from menu creation and ingredient selection to the presentation of the final product. Usually, he says, it’s the small things that count. Business Review had a chat about what ends up on your plate and how it gets there.

Otilia Haraga

“Fortunately for me, I have over 20 years of experience. So I have a lot of food in my head already,” says Powell. For an experienced chef, creating a menu can be compared to the work of a chemist who assumes that if he or she puts two types of chemicals together, it produces a certain reaction, without actually doing it.

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“You can actually taste the ingredients in your mind because you have an understanding of how they work,” says the chef. In order to do this, you have to have a memory of the taste.

“It is very easy to take a menu and take other people’s ideas and use them as your own but to be a bit more inventive. It is very good to create flavors in your mind, and once you’re convinced in your mind they’re going to work, you can actually do it,” he explains.

How does one become a chef at an international hotel? Powell attended a catering school in the United Kingdom for about three years in the 80s.

He has worked for the Hilton chain for approximately five years, starting in Amsterdam where he spent two years. He then transferred to Prague as operations sous-chef, overseeing all the major evening events. Next he was offered a position in Bucharest and decided to take it. That was close to two years ago.

“It is basically similar to any line of work: you learn the basics in school but it never materializes until you put it into practice and spend several years in the industry,” he says.

Most people pigeonhole chef work as one particular job but Powell says the role varies depending on whether it is based in a hotel, restaurant or catering company: the job and expectations are completely different.

The difference between a restaurant and a hotel is both in demand and scale. Both facilities are very much customer driven, but there are fewer demands on the chef financially in restaurants.

“In hotels, you really have to get the balance right between quality, creativity and costs. There is a lot more to take on board here. You normally do it with bigger teams. Not everything is within your hands, so you have to deal with it in a totally different way,” says Powell.

The work in the Hilton kitchen is divided between job-specific locations for both hygiene and functionality purposes.

There are separate parts of the kitchen: the main cooking area, a kitchen for cold preparation of foods, two different pastry kitchens, the butcher’s, the fish room and another kitchen on the other side of the building which serves the bistro and brasserie.

Currently, the team of 47 is split among several departments. There is a small staff in the canteen. Part of the staff is in the stewarding department which is responsible for cleanliness at the back-of-house, out of public areas.

The pastry department comprises about seven people. Ninety percent of the pastry products that are served within the hotel are produced by this team.

The other personnel are the cooks and supervisors for restaurants and banqueting. At the moment, three restaurants are operational. Last year there were four, including La Strada.

A typical workday for Powell starts with a meeting which all the heads of departments attend every weekday morning. A lot of the time is spent giving little pieces of guidance or advice to people.

“But when you put it all together, this is probably what you have done for the majority of the day. These silly little things like telling somebody to put the biscuits in a straight line on the plate…,” he says, adding that one major part of his job as executive chef is coaching people so that they can later re-apply the principles, otherwise you would be starting from zero every day.

In fact, of all the cooks, only four have ever worked abroad, so it is helpful for them to have somebody foreign who can show them a new approach to things.

The coaching process mostly takes place through the six-seven supervisors in different departments.

“I communicate with my team but I very rarely give the instructions directly to the individual, unless the supervisor is not there. Especially in an environment like the kitchen, you cannot afford to have inadequate supervisors: you need people who are respected and to whom other people will listen and take advice from,” he explains.

On a daily basis, an executive chef has to be in charge of such things as controlling costs and expenditure within the department and the quality of the products that come into the building. You have to be in line with the level of business. Ideally, the costs for any food operation shouldn’t go above 32 percent of the revenues, he explains.

“Sometimes, I am amazed when I go around the city and see restaurants with really low prices and I know that they can’t be making this 32 percent. I think for the business to be comfortable and efficient, they really should be within this 32 percent target. This is the minimum they should have,” says Powell.

In most other countries, the hotel will be purchasing from suppliers who generally deal with multiple hotels. If they are already dealing with anything from four to thirty Hiltons, they supply the same sort of products to all of these hotels, which takes a lot of legwork out of it.

“Here everything has to be sourced by us, as we are only buying for ourselves and you would actually be surprised… In a restaurant, you maybe serve eight or nine of a particular dish a day. Here we can be serving up to 300-400 portions a day. Trying to have the same quality, quantity and consistency is very difficult, so this will probably consume a lot of a chef’s time in a hotel,” says Powell.

Last year, for each of the Hilton’s restaurants, the menu was changed three times. But it is not just about menu creation. First, you have to go to the supply chain and make sure you have the products coming in not only next week when the menu begins but also in three months’ time.

“Most important for me is to ensure you have a synergy within the menus. Even if it looks as though I have 180-200 different dishes between the menus, I have to ensure that the principal ingredients such as the fish, the meats, are there. I try to use them as many times as possible in the overall menus so that I have control over the costs. So, if you limit the quantity of different items you have, that way you can limit the quantity of waste that you have,” he explains.

By contrast, in a restaurant, a chef would only have to worry about one menu and not about the synergies and the number of different items.

“But when you multiply it by five, you really have to have extensive control over it. And you have to be consistent in the pricing throughout the different outlets. Basically, you have to have the whole overview and keep in mind what was on the previous menus, what the client was asking for,” he adds.

For events like weddings, traditional Romanian dishes are required. Powell says he easily learned about Romanian cuisine from colleagues. “I think Romania kind of holds onto its Latin roots and tries to incorporate all Italian. The simplicity of it is very similar to Romanian food. I am talking here about the quantity of ingredients and the preparation itself, not the time it takes you to roll the cabbage for sarmale, for instance,” he says.

A common misapprehension about gastronomy is that the finest foods are the best foods. “For example in Romania people do not eat lentils anymore. For me, if lentils are nicely cooked, even if it is a peasant food, it is something I really enjoy.”

The same applies to ingredients. “You could ask a chef: ‘What is your favorite ingredient?’ And because it’s an interview, the chef would say, ‘My favorite ingredient is foie gras or truffles.’ At the end of the day, I think the onion has probably done more for cooking than anything. Something as simple as this, which people overlook… And you actually ask yourself what would the world be without it?”