The next generation of British Asian cuisine

What made you want to set up My Lahore Chef Academy?

So the reason behind it was when I studied in Bradford college. I did catering hospitality level one, level two, level three at that time, we had My Lahore already going on but it’s a very different method or different way of cooking. So the whole purpose behind it is to get a new generation of chef’s where they’ve got a bit of both worlds. So they get to get the academy side of the principles of basics from the college, but then you put into practice within the twist or like the appreciation twist, which spices in different ways, different methods of cooking the chicken. So that’s just to create more chefs to be you know, to come up in the ranks and get to know the different styles of cooking.

Why did you choose Bradford Academy?

Yeah, we have really good relationships with college because we’re just literally a stone’s throw away. We’ve always been in contact. This is not the only project that we do. So this was something that came up and we thought it was a perfect opportunity for us. More than anything in this day and age, you’ve got a very big shortage of chefs as it is. There’s no better way for students or chefs to go get that academic side and get the practical side, and then you’ve got somebody that’s pretty much ready to go.

The whole purpose behind the concept is that once they have completed their course, as long as they hit the criterias, that have been set between ourselves at Bradford College, we will guarantee them a job at the end of their course. Because they’ve gone through the whole thing.

The biggest issue you have in any business is that anybody that wants to take somebody on is your practical side. We’ve got engineering graduates that come to our place and ask for jobs as servers or chefs and I think, what’s your background, you’ve got a degree in x, y and z but we can’t get jobs because you don’t have the experience behind those we don’t have wherever nobody was offered, because nobody wants to spend that time in training.

How important is it to you to be nurturing the next generation of chefs?

The dynamics of food are changing, the concepts are changing, the old school kind of concepts are totally kind of fizzling out now. So you have to really need to kind of have a balance of both new techniques and old and this is the whole reason we want to teach this stuff to upcoming chefs.

Theory doesn’t mean anything over practical instruction to me. You need some time and you need imagination. For example, last time I made a dish, a stir fry. Normally you kind of get plain chicken, sliced onions and peppers, and it’s done but what I started doing, I started adding a bit of spicy sauce marinade the chicken before I sliced it.

Do you think that British Asian cuisine is underrepresented in formal chef training?

Yes. What we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be teaching how to bring traditional cuisine and British Asian cuisine together. On the practical side of stuff, the chefs will be cooking different dishes, they will see how the two cuisines fuse together.

What do you hope for the future of the academy?

I’ve always had a vision that I wanted to have a My Lahore Academy on its own where we can set up a purpose built kitchen just for the Academy side of stuff. My vision would be that we will have people coming on courses where the full time course can be like four or five days working in the central kitchen and then doing one day in college whereas at Bradford College students spend more time in the academy and then spend their summers in proper College.