Читать книгу Made in Italy: Food and Stories - Giorgio Locatelli - Страница 6

‘Pass the prawns…the prawns…where are they…are they ready!’ I had been helping with the cooking in my uncle’s restaurant since I was five years old, but now, at sixteen, and a few months into my first real job, I used to get picked on all the time by the head chef. Now he wanted the prawns and they weren’t ready. The water in the pan was almost boiling. It needed to be boiling, before I put in the prawns, but I panicked and put them in anyway. He saw it and shouted at me, ‘You will never be a chef, Locatelli. You are an idiot,’ and he sent me to clean the French beans.

I couldn’t forget those words: ‘You will never be a chef.’ By the end of the day, I wanted to cry like a baby. I went home and my grandmother was waiting. ‘What does he know?’ she said. ‘Who is he?’ ‘He is The Chef!’ I told her. I would have run away, but as always my grandmother put everything into perspective, and she told me I had to go back and show him. So I went back. And I did show him.