From thepassto the plan.

A classic start.

I learned the classic way: French cuisine, from the bottom up. Chopping onions until it’s second nature. Making stocks, tasting sauces, station by station. At the bottom of a kitchen you don’t learn to cook first. You first learn that everything counts: the mise en place is ready before the first guest sits down. To this day, the most important idea I’ve ever learned.

Fifteen years, many kitchens.

After that I went through pretty much everything a kitchen can be: a long stretch in a really good Austrian kitchen, traditional in the best sense. Seafood restaurants. A burger joint. A Michelin-starred house. An Italian place. Every kitchen has its own tone, but one rule applies everywhere: a plate only leaves the pass when it’s right. Not roughly. Exactly.

Head chef: as simple as possible.

Then two years as head chef in a French bistro kitchen specialising in fish. The standard there: as simple as possible, not one bit more complicated than necessary. A good fish, a good side, a sauce that brings the two together. That’s still my benchmark today, in coaching too. A plan you don’t understand isn’t a good plan.

Executive chef: one system for many kitchens.

Then three, four years as executive chef for the entire Hofbräu chain. You don’t cook yourself any more; you build systems: recipes, processes, purchasing, teams, numbers. What works in one kitchen has to work in all of them, with different people on different days. That’s exactly what coaching is: a system that fits into your everyday life, not just into a textbook week.

What that world costs.

I also saw what that standard does to people. Shifts of fourteen, sometimes seventeen hours. Eating standing up, at eleven at night, at midnight. An industry that lives off enjoyment and forgets its own people along the way. I cooked to perfection for others and fed myself on the side. That’s not a complaint. It’s the starting point.

When you’ve cooked every menu before.

At some point in the kitchen there’s the moment when you open a new menu and think: I know this. The sauce, the garnish, the delivery problem on Friday. All cooked before, all solved before. It’s not a drama, more a quiet shrug in an apron. After fifteen years, that was my point where it stopped going anywhere. There was no single trigger. Maybe I was burnt out. Maybe I had just realised that I’d rather move people forward than dishes. A plate is done after ten minutes. A person isn’t. And that appealed to me more than the next menu.

Same craft, a different plate.

After fifteen years I left the kitchen and took the craft with me. First the training: fitness trainer licences A, B and C, personal trainer, certified nutrition coach. Reading studies instead of headlines. Understanding physiology instead of parroting trends. Today I do personal training, nutrition coaching and online coaching in Hamburg. I’ve now guided more than a hundred people through their transformation. The fitness world has a standard answer for busy days: deprivation. Broccoli, plastic boxes, bad mood. I had a different question.