The renowned chef April Bloomfield recounts how she worked her way to the top of her field.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.
1 Chef April Bloomfield is British.
2 She had always wanted to work in the cooking business.
3 She discovered nature and animals on a school trip.
4 At one stage, she was doing two jobs at the same time.
5 She's an upper-class girl.
6 A Girl and her Beef is the title of her book.
7 The roast dinner at The Spotted Pig was a disaster.
When I grew up in Birmingham, we lived on the suburbs so right by the kind of green belt, so it was very lush green, lots of parks. I didn’t get into my chosen profession which I wanted to do which is, you know, I wanted to join the police force, I wanted to, you know, walk the beat, help people, you know, chase down criminals so unfortunately I didn’t get to do that, but instead to fall back on I went to cooking school.
When I was about ten or eleven I had an opportunity to go to a farm through a project for inner-city children. It was a farm in Devon, it was amazing. I got to see cows and sheep and I got, you know, I basically got to learn how to respect the countryside. It was something that kind of, you know, resonated and I, I kind of had that all the way through.
I had a job in London at the Bruckenbery and I was a sub-chef help and I really had this amazing dream to work in The River Café in London, so I applied for a job and I did two weeks’ trial there where basically, you know, end up working for free. So I would go and do one job, then go into The River Café, and I just remember the feeling of coming home and just being thoroughly exhausted and just feeling like I’d accomplished something, you know, working class, I’m a working girl, not that kind of working girl, but I’m a working girl.
If you forget where you come from I think your foundations become very shaky, and I’ve always made a point to never deny my, my past and that’s the reason why I kind of wrote A Girl and Her Pig. I did try a roast dinner at The Spotted Pig my first year. I think it was on New Year’s Day, you know, it was disaster, nobody ordered it, so I never did it again, but I do it in a different way, you know. I do it with whole suckling pigs at The Bresslin and, you know, lots of big ribs of beef and roasted duck. Yes, like a snowboard, isn’t it, just keep the momentum going. You keep learning and absorbing and just working hard, I think.
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