The kitchen in Kuwait used to be described as the woman’s own world. Then the name of the chef at a large hotel or a well-known restaurant became a Kuwaiti man’s name. In a 2019 Kuwait News Agency report, two of them described how it started.
Before it was a profession
The Kuwaiti man’s relationship with cooking is not new. Machboos, biryani and mutabbaq are cooked on desert trips and at winter camps, and at the chalet in summer, among friends.
And talk of the kinds of fish — zubaidi, meed, sobour and hammour — and how each is prepared is familiar conversation in the diwaniya. The difference is that all of that stayed a hobby.
Ziad Hammadeh: it started with buying the ingredients
Chef Ziad Hammadeh, at the time of the report responsible for the Kuwaiti menu at one of the hotels, learned from a relative who ran a home cooking business.
And his role at first was not at the pot: he bought the supplies for the meals and picked the best of them, and managed the venture’s accounts. Then he took to tasting chicken machboos and mutabbaq in homes and restaurants and asking what made them good, until he opened his own restaurant.
When he moved to the hotel he was working around thirteen hours a day, rotated through all of its sections, and travelled to several countries for training courses. He said his dream was to found an academy teaching culinary arts and restaurant management.
Ahmad Al-Badr: the mockery became fuel
Chef Ahmad Al-Badr, who owns a chain of restaurants, found his passion young at school carnivals and festivals. He says his parents encouraged him and his siblings to learn “a craft and a trade of the hands”.
And he recalled that someone found his profession strange and mocked it at the start of his career, and that the mockery itself was what kept him going.
He urged young Kuwaitis passionate about crafts — carpentry, mechanics, sewing — to hone their talents with reading and training, and to believe in what their hands make.
The thread joining them
Both said the same thing when asked why the hobby turned into a profession: the encouragement of family and friends. Both were passionate about cooking from childhood, and both went on refining the skill afterwards.
Photo: a cooking pot over an open fire. By Lily15, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: a Kuwait News Agency report, 1 February 2019.
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