The kitchen is a notoriously difficult place to forge a successful career and Lebanese chef Ruby El-Chaer is not one to downplay the heated drama that takes place behind closed doors in restaurants around the world.
The 26-year-old chef, who received a double diploma in pastry and cuisine from the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school in London, is now the head chef at Kizmet in Dubai, known for its quirky mix and match menu.
“It’s not easy for people to listen or take orders from a woman, especially here. Especially as I’m younger than them and probably have less experience than the rest,” she told Arab News.
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“But, I’ve been appointed as the head chef for a reason, for my personality and my career, maybe because I fit in this market in a way that maybe other people don’t and I understand and know Arabic.”
“You need to have a shield to not take anything personally and you can only survive if you’re really, really passionate,” she added about the cut-throat industry.
And she’s nothing if not passionate, telling Arab News that food became something of an obsession as she was growing up in Lebanon.
“Food was an obsession in Ruby’s world, in Ruby’s head, it wasn’t something that was built over the years through my family or my culture. It was something I was interested in and I created an obsession in my family because Ruby was obsessed with food and loved cooking,” she said, adding that her family didn’t take the traditional route and encourage her to take on a career as a “lawyer or an engineer.”
So, she left the village of Beino, mastered the art of cooking in London and then hopped around Europe working with the crème de la crème of head chefs.
“I hope I am a role model for people,” she said, before revealing her hopes that more women from the region will enter the field.
“I think in our culture, we need a bit of a push to do that. Why? Because women are very special.”
“It’s not the best career a woman can be in,” she cautioned, “but if she’s really good and she’s passionate about it everything can be done in a woman’s way. It needs a bit of physical ability and a lot of sacrifice from your feminine side, you can’t dress up all the time, your nails can’t be on point all the time. There are a lot of things to sacrifice,” El-Chaer added.
And what sort of cuisine does this prodigious young chef want to explore in the kitchen?
“South East Asian cuisine,” she said. “It’s still something that I want to explore, I haven’t worked in it properly under a chef. It’s something that I think is far off the flavors I grew up with so it’s something that I want to explore.”
