Journey Begins

I’m a cook. My target is to become a chef and business owner in future or working in food industry one way or another. Now I’m trying to find the road to my goals to be fulfilled. This post will be long, but I find this meaningful way to express my competences what I’m going to become. 

            I started my career with intuition, and I will finish it as well with the same intuition. It all started when I sent applications to working agency which provided possibilities to worker have its chances to get employed with no before experiences with restaurant environment as an employee. I took my advantages over the change and started my career from deep-fat fryer frying hot chicken wings in iconic Siipiweikot chicken restaurant. I was first keen to know every aspect of bar type of restaurant which served food on a side. It felt good and I was part of doing something that I liked to do, and after couple of months I already knew that I must keep my phase on learning high. 

So next step naturally was to start to lurk for new on different companies. Not for a long , I got my chance to change my working environment to same kind of business as a swift manager to restaurant. Restaurant was Boneless, and I began to develop my skills as a supervisor. As a supervisor I was good to supervise and micromanaging the restaurant business and did great work to improve the performance of the restaurant. But on meanwhile I had several issues with my mental health, physical health, and relapsed lot of times with burnouts. Later in life I found keys to develop skills and mindset to survive and handle these kinds of situations which you will read and see on later in this blogpost.

After few burnouts, I was about to quit my career in restaurant business. I had all the reasons to do it, but my stupid ass chose to send application to Perho liiketalousopisto to learn new skills as a cook, and obviously I got in. Same time coronavirus started, and in the weird way it boosted my courage to stay on restaurant business. In Boneless we made corona time to success with good management on to keep supplying safely our products to the customers and keeping our stuff working full hours during the worst of times, which I’m proud to be part of. It still gives me shivers to my body when I think about the time, mostly good ones. Mostly it gave me guts, guts which most people will not understand when you really put yourself on the line. It was that matter of choice to keep fighting even I had problems with my health. Because somehow, I knew I had it in me the resilience. 

            After two years in street food business, I needed the one goal to conquer to myself; to go fine dining restaurant and be able to show everyday dominant performances. So, I went again, applied to one position to work in Turku at restaurant Nooa which was run by, now I can call good friend of mine, Sebastian Koski. He taught me about how to not be micromanaging until you get burnout, how to treat customers better, keep stuff individually making their skillset better, and most important how to keep positive attitude on work even though your outside problems would push you down. 

            My competences which I have gathered are various. So first one is how to keep positive attitude at any environment especially in work, I must thank Sebastian Koski from this one. Only one sentence helped me a lot it went something like this ‘Make every big or small, worse or good moment meaningful to yourself’. It’s much easier to handle the pressure when you know that the moment you are experiencing is part of your story. Second one is managing without managing, Sebastian Koski well played with this one as well, he showed with little pushes to employee to give them better inspiration to work on their own than micromanaging all the tiny details all the time. Give them freedom to act and they probably give you more to show, if they are really interested on subject, they will learn by themselves. Third one, is for myself, I know now how to keep high phase on learning new skillsets. It’s managing your time well enough to have all possibilities to make your own choices, learn new things outside work subject is free of choice big or small and live the life the way you want to learn from it. So, I chose to become student in Haaga-Helia to finalize already known parts of my skills and develop new ones.

            My goal is to be working on subjects in life which is motivating me naturally. Food industry, restaurant business and hospitality are those things which has problems to be solved every day and working on high level of that industry in some way or another is my goal. Next concrete available job position for me is sous-chef at Lonna restaurant next summer and the position seems to be reserved for me already. But still to achieve those dreams, I must develop more variety skills which I’m able to learn with best teachers in Finland, that’s my ladder. I hope that I get better on calculating business portfolios, well organized with management parts of business, better with communication, better with technological applications to use them every day, list can go all the way up to the sky. I’m in good position, these decisions which I made helps me to achieve present goals and future goals for myself. Thanks for reading my story and being part of my grind. Hopefully you do good decisions in your life as well!