Paul Rankin Quotes

In cooking I found my mentor in this great chef, Albert Roux. I think this is a very important thing in life, to find someone who can steer you because to find it all by yourself is quite a difficult and slow process. That's not to say you won't ever get there, but to find a great coach, a great mentor, someone to show you the way and to open a few windows and doors, is a wonderful thing in life.

It depends as there's many different types of chefs, some who cook for awards and others who cook to make their restaurant a great business. There are those who cook for a lifestyle, they'll have come through pubs and they like to have the connection to the farmers and the chickens and the natural produce. So for each chef it'll be slightly different.

One of the great awards from a chef's point of view are Michelin stars. The ultimate is three Michelin stars. For example, Gordon Ramsey has three Michelin stars. Having one Michelin star is a big deal, two is incredible and having three puts you in a bracket of maybe 30 chefs worldwide.

It really helps if you've got something like cycling, walking, running or swimming that can let your body release all that tension and keep your muscles fit.

There's a layer of satisfaction that I get from cooking that is more than the work itself. I think when you're too competitive sometimes you can lose the joy of what you do.

Being a sport star and a chef both require passion, commitment, work and natural ability.

You need good energy and you need to be fit because it's very tiring. A lot of the work is quite heavy and quite smelly. That's why girls drift out of the kitchen because they get fed up smelling like fish and vegetables and things like that.

I wrote a mad, passionate letter to the best restaurant in the UK, Le Gavroche in London, and asked if I could work for them. They gave me a job as a dishwasher (Colin laughs). For me that was a joy because I had a foot in the door of this world class restaurant. Just being around the buzz and the pots and pans and the wonderful food and all this produce that was coming in, that was the start of Paul Rankin the chef.

There are many different types of people that end up coming to me and saying 'Yeah I want to cook.' Some of them successful, some not. There's no one formula, but if I get someone coming through the backdoor who knows that they want to get into the cooking field, they feel this inside-out love for it, this attraction to it, that person is an awful lot easier to work with.

What often separates the good from the great is a layer of innate ability, a gift, so it's partly that. There's many people with great gifts who don't work hard enough, or perhaps take it for granted, and therefore they don't have the passion and the commitment for it.

The work element comes into it as well - how much you train and how much work you put into your craft, in the same way a carpenter would perhaps work under a great teacher, etc.

Some people who see cooking as a job. They got into cooking at some stage and they're sort of ticking along trying to get the money together to buy the car to impress the girlfriend and you know they're doing their job, but some of these people one day, all of a sudden it becomes wonderfully exciting to them. They find this love of what they're doing and they're away.

We [chefs] are competitive, although I think you need to be careful with competitiveness as it can become quite negative.