Response to our Day at Studiokitchen

Our day at Studiokitchen with Chef Shola was very interesting and everyone there definitely learned something new. The restaurateur who stated that Shola is not a chef, rather a high-end cook is wrong. Many people automatically associate a chef with owning a restaurant, but that excludes people such as private chefs from the idea of a chef. Shola cooks professionally for a living, which is enough to qualify him as a chef, but he goes beyond just cooking. All of his experimentation with foods and techniques makes him a true chef because he is not simply cooking using other people’s recipes. To me, a chef is someone who can not only make amazing food based off recipes, but also create their own unique combinations and techniques.

I would love if Shola opened a restaurant because his food is delicious and well presented, but also there would be a few concerns. Shola’s Studiokitchen has such a relaxed atmosphere, and he took his time preparing and cooking for us, all while explaining and having an intellectual conversation with us. This atmosphere would be taken away if he opened a restaurant, due to the stressful nature of restaurant kitchens, which are constantly under pressure to get the food out to customers. Also, I wonder if some of Shola’s complex techniques would be efficient enough for a restaurant. The last concern would be that many of Shola’s dishes are very small, so he would either be forced to cook on a bigger scale or would have a restaurant with small dishes like Marigold Kitchen. All these concerns aside, I’m sure that Shola’s restaurant would be extremely popular, and he would come up with an interesting concept and tasty dishes to serve.                      

The way Shola plates and photographs his food is another thing that makes him stand out among other chefs. While he is cooking, he is also thinking about how the food on the plate will transfer to a photograph. Yesterday when he was plating the citrus and brie merengue dish, he scattered kumquats, drizzled an orange sauce around freely, and then dropped the merengue so parts of it would break and fly all over the plate. This really showed me how he thinks about different elements of the food and what he could add to make the dish more visually appealing. He has to have a separate train of thought from the actual cooking to consider what things, such as herbs for color, to add to the dish to enhance a photo. There is a whole separate career for people who want to pursue food photography, and Shola already has talent and expertise in this field.

            Nearly everything Shola did was interesting to me, and I was very impressed with how basic some of his ingredients were. He showed me that food does not have to be super fancy or complex to be delicious, it’s all about manipulating the ingredients to produce the amazing flavors you