The Bumpy Road From Dishwasher to Chef de Cuisine

Daniel Lugovtsov: My name is Daniel Lugovtsov. I grew up in Miami and kind of branched out to Nashville, moving up to New York. New York is where I made my name working at some high-end Michelin-star restaurants and then landed back in Miami to learn about the restaurant business dynamic, working for one of Star Restaurant Group’s main operations. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: The road map to Chef de Cuisine is quite a bumpy one. For me, I started as a front-of-house person. One time, I made a mistake, and they just threw me back in the kitchen, washing dishes. And then I became a Line Cook.  

And when you enter that sous chef role, like most people, myself, we become very egotistical. You can tell yourself, “I’m a Sous Chef. I have that power. I have that drive. I have this responsibility.” But you have this responsibility, and you don’t understand it until you get it, and you get hit with it very hard, very early. 

And I had a lot of struggle with that, especially since I became a Sous Chef at 21. So I had many cooks under me who were quite a bit older, and I had to battle with them. But I ended up hitting that, going, jumping over that wall to kind of earn that respect, but also kind of set myself into a disciplined manner for everybody to respect me.  

From there, I went back to being a Chef de Partie at certain restaurants, because I believe that when you work at regular restaurants versus high-end fine dining at Michelin, it’s very different. So it’s more about cooking than X, Y, but once you have that experience, a lot of people reach out to you to drive up to go like, hey, I want you as the head chef, or I want you as the executive chef, and so on.  

Daniel Lugovtsov: For the average market being $50,000, absolutely not! That’s quite obscure. In New York, I was a Sous Chef at a three-Michelin restaurant around that period. So, to me, for a Head Chef position in Miami, of all places, which is very expensive, almost more expensive than New York, it’s definitely not fair, especially with the responsibilities you’re taking on. It’s kind of undercutting the little guy. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: I believe it’s the lack of confidence, and it’s also how you approach the situation. So it’s the same thing, like, I would think of it as trying to negotiate with a line cook or one of your staff members. 

If you say, "Hey, I want you to do X, Y, Z," and you come at them in an aggressive or disrespectful tone, they won’t really do it. They wouldn’t care to do it. But if you come trying to find a way to manipulate it, not in a bad way, but in a manner where you can kind of hit that sweet spot for them, where they’re like, okay, chef, yes, I’ll do that. While also respecting them, they’ll get that.  

In the sense of talking to someone above you or your employer, it’s a lot about confidence, and it’s about coming up with solutions to a problem, essentially, before you present them, because essentially that’s what they want to see.  

And I’ve seen some Sous Chefs that I’ve dealt with in the past, but essentially it’s like, "Hey, I’ve been doing X, Y, Z since then, I’ve seen the numbers have gone up. The staff morale has gone up. I’ve brought this guy and this guy, and I believe they play a crucial role in this restaurant, just like myself, etc."

But if you bring up supporting your statement of facts to give you that little rise to the climax hey this is what I want boom then potentially it’s more of like okay let me put this under advisement with my seniors and so forth and potentially sometimes like 50 out of 50 you will get exactly what you asked for or sometimes they’ll like meet you like oh instead of 10,000 we can do 8,000 or etc. So maybe kind of highball, like, you know, instead of you wanting 10,000, say 20,000, so if they meet you halfway, you’re happy. Kind of a maneuver to play. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: I actually don’t have a degree in culinary arts. Yeah, no, at my age, I was really interested in thinking about considering going into culinary arts. I think I was looking at Le Cordon Bleu and Johnson & Wales, but I was also working in kitchens at the time, and I was also put off by how expensive it was. I was working at the Fountains Bleu, actually. It’s where I met my mentor from England. He’s Michelin-experienced all over from France to London as well. And he was like Don’t do that. Stay in the kitchens. Go straight to the kitchen. So I started straight off at 18.  

I would say 18 is when I started, in real fine-dining kitchens. 16 was when I actually started in the kitchen, and I would kind of skip school to work here for a day, skip school to go work there. Fountains Bleu is where I kind of ended up and met my mentor, who kind of really shaped me forthe  type of chef 

Daniel Lugovtsov: I would tell you a hundred percent at Per Se, which is a three-Michelin-star restaurant by Thomas Keller, where I was an AM Sue for some time. And whenever we would have a stage come by, we literally, it would be like some kid from CIA or ICE. Most of the people from ICE are actually quite good, but as a CIA, you have entitled kids who are rich and whose parents send them there. And they come in and like, okay, Chef, what can I do? And they have this really cocky, confident attitude. 

Which is great, but sometimes it’s like too much and overwhelming. So, the second you give them a project, they’re like, what? Give me something harder. It’s like, okay, you can go. Or then it’s like, hey, you’re gonna do this. Make me a French omelet. And the second they grab a pan, and they do something wrong, I just say, " You can go home. You’re not gonna work here. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: I would say it’s kind of like the swagger you kind of have when you walk into an interview. When I was in high school, we had a culinary arts program. Entered cheating the system, so I got culinary arts one, two, three, four, all within the same year. And as soon as I walked in, the chef teacher, the chef of the class, stopped me. He’s like, Do you already cook? Because I just had this like, I don’t know, like ambiance or something like that. It’s a lot of that. And I had zero experience whatsoever.  

I just kind of grew up cooking with my family and taking care of my brother and sister. Realistically, when I sit down at Cook’s in Miami, which, to be fair, this is with all due respect, the Cook’s in Miami is a very hard target to reach out to compared to places like New York or California. Or if you go to London or France, the chefs there, the cooks are all like, I want to learn, I want to drive. In Miami, it’s kind of difficult.

When I speak with them, first I see how they speak, essentially. Are they very sporadic? Are they frantic? Or are they calm? And are they reserved? And then when I ask them questions, they kind of take a moment to think about it, because they want to make sure they articulate what they say precisely.  

But then they execute it very well. And then I just go into personal questions like, how do they feel when they’re under pressure? How do they feel about respect and hierarchy and all of these things? Read the recipe. And then essentially, I typically don’t hire straight off the bat. I started this dodge program. 

In Florida, because of some of the laws in our company, we would hire people just based on the word of mouth. And then when we hire this person, the next day, I figure out they actually suck. And I can’t get rid of them because they’re like, you know, the whole legal issue in HR. So we figured out a way where it was like, let’s have a stage. So essentially, we hired them at minimum wage, tried them out, and discussed with them beforehand, like, hey, you’re going to do a stage, just minimum wage. If you work out, we’re going to change the minimum, your hourly rate that we discussed, and change your job code to line cook. That way, we can actually see whether we’re wasting our time, and we have a promising candidate we can mold into a chef, a head chef, or something. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: Someone who’s very jumpy. That’s just like, you know, kind of looks like he just needs a job. Someone with less than two years of minimum experience, and it also depends on that experience. If they work at places like TGI Fridays or McDonald’s, obviously that’s a no. If they work at some local restaurants or a mom-and-pop restaurant, definitely yes. 

If they’re not clean-shaven, if they’re very kind of dirty, again, it’s also about just a general swagger. I’ve met a couple of people in the past three months. I’ve hired some people who had that swagger, that confidence. They walk in, and it’s like, when it gets busy, I’m your guy. I can do this without being overconfident or cocky. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: Okay, a good chef is to me more like a line cook. Because you know the difference between a cook and a chef is a cook cooks and the chef leads. 

The chef is the captain of the boat. It’s like there’s a famous chef on Instagram with a huge mustache and glasses that says not everyone is a chef. You are a cook, and you’re a chef. 

 Like they really shape them, they teach them, they tell them what they’re doing wrong, what they’re doing right, how they would do this, how they would approach this. Hey, next time I would do this instead of this. Hey, you overreacted this way. You need to stay calm because these guys are trusting you to lead them, and you can’t overreact like that.  

And these are conversations I would have with my sous chefs who are in leadership roles as well as lead line cooks that I am trying to mold into Sous Chefs, where it’s like, you know, this is all fun and games, and you have people back there giggling and laughing, but you just avoid that. Focus on yourself, lead them, because you’re going to be leading them one day. And that’s really about mentorship. A great chef,an excellent chef, really mentors people to take over his spot or the next generation wave of chefs. 

Daniel Lugovtsov : So my mentor, his name is Neil O’Connell. He’s from Birmingham, England. He mainly grew up in Leeds, but he worked with his mentor, a chef named Michael Kane. He’s a Michelin-star chef amputee with one arm. He’s left-handed. His mentor was the famous chef who committed suicide after he lost his third star. So when he told me that, I was like, Wow, so starstruck about who my mentor is.  

And my mentor and I worked at Scarpetta, which is a fine dining restaurant by Scott Conant, before Michael White, I believe, took over it. And we walked into the Scarpella one day, we had a bad service one night, like stupid, like so stupid. I made mistakes, my partner made mistakes, and then the next day we were all expected to be like heated during line-up. He’s gonna say, What are you guys doing? This is not fair to me and disrespectful. But instead, he just stood there quietly, very poised, very calm. And along the lines, I don’t know if I’m quoting exactly, but he was just mentioning  

So essentially, from that, we all took that you know mistakes are mistakes, we always learn from them, but not to let them hold and linger down on your past, to avoid stopping you from going to your future. So if you make a mistake, mistakes happen 

They just, you know, it’s like water. It’s gonna go away. And to me, that was like, you know, this really is just cooking. Like it’s so simple, it’s just cooking. That’s all it is. But the symphony is the beautiful part of it. And when everybody just works together, and you hear the plates go down and it’s fire, it’s just like a symphony to my ear. That’s day I knew, I was like, yeah, I love this. 

Daniel Lugovtsov: That’s a really hard question for me, specifically because I come from high-end restaurants where I have so many brothers, I grew up with, from line cooks to sous chefs at Michelin star restaurants. My best friend runs a two-Michelin-star restaurant, Asuka. 

Another best friend, his name is Vince. He’s the executive sous chef of Per Se. And then my other friend, Sam, was the executive chef of Clover Hill, and he’s actually leaving because they’re closing, but he’s going back to London to be with his wife. 

Working in these restaurants, there are a lot of harsh critiques. I would say realistically, it is just that working at those restaurants is very hard because you have that stress, and you have that ambition to do everything so well because it has to be well. It’s very stressful. Everything has to be three stars. Everything has to be perfect. All the scallops have to be cooked the same, even if they’re different sizes. You want to make sure they’re all the same, not different sizes. All your fish have to be at the same time.  

I would say it’s like that mentorship role, we did have it, but there was also, you know, certain times, this sous chef or this sous chef in particular would kind of hound you and like say, what the fuck are you doing? Why is this happening? And you would just kind of belittle. So, to me, I’ve seen it dwindle down, but it’s really that old school.

I grew up in that environment. My mentor was the same way. He was ruthless. There were times when he literally grabbed me by the shirt and was like, What the hell is this? Why is this in my kitchen? Why are you putting this in my kitchen? I should have shown up two hours early every day to have a coffee with the chef and get up early to prepare my place early. Then I clock in. 

A lot of times, it’s kind of saddening that I don’t see that anymore with most cooks, because that to me was ambition. I wake up two hours early, and I go up to my Chef. Hey, I want to be better. Give me a project. Okay, make me a French omelet. It took me two weeks to learn how to make a French omelet properly, where it’s not overcooked, it’s not too undercooked, it’s perfectly having that nice little glaze on the outside, but it’s also soft and seasoned on the inside. 

I don’t see that ambition anymore. I just see a bunch of kids watching Food Network or some cooking competition shows and say that’s what I want, and then they enter the actual kitchen, and they expect all of this like a hot type of audience, but then they get hit with the reality. It’s not YouTube anymore. It’s not Food Network 

Daniel Lugovtsov: You need to always stay true to your craft and always remember where you came from. 

Remember, you were here once, too. So always lead and mentor with that in mind. That like, now, you’re a head chef, but you were a dishwasher a while ago. So don’t think you’re hot shit and think you need to get the respect from everyone. Everyone is equal in the same way.