Alexander Sushko / Azimut Hotel Olympic

The hero of our next interview is the chef of the Azimut Olympic Hotel . We talked about the difference between regular restaurants and hotel restaurants, the creative path of the chef and delicious food.

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into this profession.

From early childhood I watched my mother cook, but I didn’t think that I would go into this profession. Even when at the age of 15 I went to study to become a cook, I thought that the profession would be a passable one, for part-time work during my student years. I didn’t even expect that I would be so drawn in, I would get a taste for it and realize that it was mine.

How did you get to AZIMUT Hotel Olympic and what achievements in your work are you most proud of?

For a long time I worked in one place where I fed the first people of the state. I could not advertise my work, my labor, my results. After a while, I realized that something needed to change, and I began to look for a job that could help me be fully realized. Of course, there are different chefs - there are banquet chefs, there are those who work only in restaurants or canteens, some are closer to the catering direction, and everywhere there are different approaches. Sometimes people also ask me what my favorite type of work or cuisine is, and I always answer that I am comprehensively developed as a chef - I don’t have a role, and this is my strong point. I am completely universal, and I want to develop as comprehensively as possible, not just in one direction. I am glad that AZIMUT Olympic provided me with such an opportunity, because working in a hotel is exactly the case when you develop in all directions. We prepare both lunches and buffets, we have a wonderful restaurant in the hotel, which operates in a la carte format, and recently we have been actively developing our catering business.

But maybe there is still some direction in which it is emotionally more pleasant to work? Something that is more for the soul, and not for development.

Probably, today's shooting was more for the soul :)

Which of your achievements are you most proud of?

I worked in many famous restaurants at different times, and saw almost all eras of development of the restaurant industry in Moscow. In the late 90s, I worked at the Yellow Sea restaurant, which was known throughout Moscow. He was the best then, but now no one knows him. It was a whole era. participated in the opening of the Turandot restaurant and the first Tanuki restaurant in Moscow. I remember the first time I fed the president at the opening of Turandot in 2005, for me it was a real achievement of a lifetime. I even kept the receipt for what he ordered. If only I knew that in the coming years I would feed him five hundred more times... Now I’m even amused by my reaction in 2005.

Tell us more about the concept of what you do at AZIMUT Hotel Olympic. Are there any features that characterize your work, and why do you do it this way and not otherwise?

At AZIMUT Olympic we look for an individual approach to everyone, that is, we listen to what our guests want from us. If a person asks for something simple, then we don’t overload, we give him this simple thing. If a person asks for something glamorous or aesthetic, then here we meet. We prioritize flexibility and loyalty, we want to please every guest.

Still, the specifics of the hotel are quite large volumes and a buffet line. How difficult is it to work with? How to maintain quality? How to hit the mark and please a variety of guests?

A lot depends on the team. No matter how cool and famous a chef is, he is nothing without his team. Chef talents are quite strongly connected with psychology: you need to be able to understand people and select a team. This is the key to the result. Because the chef is like a zero. If you add one to it, that is, a working unit, then it immediately turns into a ten, and without staff it remains a zero. Many people believe that a chef must work for five cooks. I think this is wrong, a chef should be able to recruit five people who will work for ten, place them in their places and fully reveal the talents of the people who come to work for him.

Then is there any difference at all between the work of chefs in a hotel and a restaurant?

Yes, of course there is. In a restaurant there is more creative work, that is, there the chef must constantly stand on the serving table and control what he releases. Nowadays, many popular restaurants don’t even offer banquet menus. They don't have anything like that, and they don't need it.

And the hotel has a work uniformmore versatile. There are banquets, buffets, a la carte and everything else, that is, you need to be equally developed in all these directions. A restaurant for a hotel chef is just one of the departments where he must maintain a decent level, but it is far from the last and not the main department that brings profit to the hotel.

What is the main one?

The main ones are, of course, events and conferences. For the conference, several coffee breaks and lunch are ordered for large numbers of people: for 300, for 500 people in the form of a buffet, naturally, all the profit comes from there. For hotels, restaurants are more of an image story.

Do you draw your guests' attention to anything specific about the food? For example, on creative presentation, quality, or how to eat something correctly.

First of all, I draw the attention of our restaurant guests to the seasonality of products. I try not to miss seasonal products, even though the hotel sometimes looks more like a large factory. It is quite difficult to introduce something in it, some dishes that have literally come into season, but will not last more than two weeks. However, I try to introduce promotions into our restaurant that give us the opportunity to work with seasonal products. Seasonality is very important for every chef.

What type of cuisine does room service belong to?

Almost every hotel has room service. This is one of the formats that exists in addition to the main restaurant, with its own laws and rules. There, classic food is a priority, because when a person orders room service, he doesn’t want unnecessary emotions. We don’t know what mood the guest is in or what’s in his soul, maybe he’s terribly tired, and we’re throwing fireworks at him. The menu should be classic, there should be more recognizable dishes so that the guest is not deceived in his expectations.

I believe that guests should be surprised in a restaurant, and in room service the most important thing is taste.

Are there any dishes in your repertoire that stand out to you?

I usually see such dishes as a whole menu or separate promotions, but I don’t separate them from the main menu. For example, our hotel has a great promotion with foxes. I can't wait until the season starts and guests will come to us again for our famous promo. And there are some promotions that are not successful. But we try to either remake them right away or change them to a completely different concept. We usually do not compare dishes with each other, but immediately evaluate the entire menu or promotion.

I’m more about what kind of dish you personally like, which you may have prepared many years ago, and you remember it. Do you ever introduce a dish simply because you like it? Or are you more guest-centric?

I always listen to guests and follow trends. Nowadays a lot of attention is paid to healthy eating and veganism, and more such dishes are starting to appear. Even though I would never order a vegetable dish when I go to a restaurant, I understand that this is what many people come for. Naturally, we work for the guests. Also, avocado dishes have recently become very popular in Moscow. Of course, all this leaves an imprint on our menu. Almost every third dish here includes avocado. We always monitor what people eat. Because our final visitor is a guest, it is for him that we work, and not in order to stroke our ego and prepare something that only we will like.

Do you prefer cooking classics or experimenting?

We prepare basically everything: both experiments and classics. Lately I like to take classic, sometimes even forgotten, long-out-of-fashion recipes and completely modernize them, giving them new life. For example, the “Shishka” that I prepared today is the good old “Potato” cake. Although the base is a regular potato cake, by adding pine needle extract and making an original presentation, you can update and change the dish beyond recognition. Sometimes a guest may be surprised to learn what served as the basis for the dish that was brought to him. Scallop carpaccio has a similar story. Since ancient times, people in Rus' have eaten radishes with honey as a preventative measure against colds. With the help of imagination, ingenuity and some experience, you can make such interesting interpretations.

Is it difficult to come up with such dishes? Where can you get inspiration from, besides old recipes?

You can watch your colleagues, go to fashionable Moscow restaurants. I saw an idea somewhere, adopted something somewhere. I, of course, oppose copying and stealing dishes from colleagues,;but when you look at what people are doing, your own head starts to work faster. Inspiration can be found in completely different places. Sometimes you can find an old book and learn something from it, and sometimes you can scroll through Instagram and not even see anything, but it still comes out of the blue. Every chef is no longer looking for new dishes, but for inspiration; if he constantly finds it somewhere, then dishes will appear.

Do you pay a lot of attention to the presentation of other chefs, or are you more interested in the taste?

It all depends on the concept of the establishment. Now, for example, such a type of restaurant as gastro-bistro is very popular in Moscow. That is, where simplicity is the key to success, where the emphasis is on taste. Now I’m also trying to move away from surprise to simplicity, because the public is tired of being surprised, they just want to eat delicious food. I believe that the cuisine of the future is three or four ingredients with unusual flavor combinations, properly prepared products and simple serving.

How relevant is food pairing to you?

My food pairing stops at the basics: red wine should be drunk with meat, white wine should be drunk with fish. And in the restaurant we have waiters who can recommend a drink, and managers who also participate in tastings and can match the drink to my dishes. For my part, I don't really focus on drinks.

Speaking about the technical side, what do you use most often?

We move with the times, because new technologies appear, and sometimes they can change the taste of any dish beyond recognition. We try to use sous vide, siphons, smokers, molecular chip things to complement some dish. Molecular cuisine as a separate phenomenon has already outlived its usefulness, but some molecular decors that can be used to decorate and decorate dishes are very often liked by guests at buffets. We try to use all the best practices to please any guest, so we use all the latest know-how: molecular cuisine, fusion, and even sushi and roll techniques.

Pan-Asian cuisine is now experiencing a rebirth. When this trend appeared in the late 90s, such cuisine was more for rich people. In those days it was very expensive, but then, when sushi moved into the middle class, this boom boomed very quickly. Nowadays sushi no longer surprises anyone, but in many restaurants the cuisine seems to be being revived in a deeper form or in the form of super Japanese classics, where the emphasis is on the quality of the products. For example, on the roof of the AZIMUT Hotel Smolenskaya there is a restaurant “Sakhalin” with a similar concept, there are also fashionable establishments where they take Japanese dishes and make interpretations with other cuisines, for example, Hawaiian. Poke has become very fashionable now; it also has its origins in sashimi. Either deep classics or modern interesting interpretations are what give Japanese cuisine a rebirth.

Do you often use interpretations of international cuisines in your work?

Certainly. I have a good knowledge base on different cuisines of the world, which I actively use in practice.

Any favorites?

I started working in pan-Asian cuisine. For many chefs and chefs, there is a clear division between European cuisine and Pan-Asian cuisine, because they are very different. There are completely different products, different cooking technologies. For many chefs who have worked in European cuisine all their lives, Pan-Asian cuisine is such a dark forest that even when they try to enter it, Pan-Asian cuisine simply does not accept them. To understand Pan-Asian cuisine, you need to go into Pan-Asian cuisine with a blank slate from the very beginning and work on it, and then study European cuisine, which is more familiar to everyone. If you learn in this sequence, it will be easy, and a person will understand what the dishes should be. When a person goes to Japanese cuisine from European cuisine, he often does not succeed so effectively. But, of course, there are exceptions; talented people are everywhere.

What have you come up with that would be super unusual for you?

For example, I used to always think that pumpkin always goes with spicy, sweet flavors, and that acid wasn’t even close. I recently tried to add it, and it turned out quite interesting. Sometimes old products that didn’t seem to be friendly with acids give very interesting results.

If it's not a secret, what format of acid was it?

When I say acidity, I mean overall acidity. It can be absolutely anything, there is no bad or good acidity. In my case it was balsamic vinegar; it went very well in pumpkin soup. I neverI didn’t expect to see him there, but it turned out very interesting.

How do you approach choosing dishes?

This primarily depends on the concept of the establishment. If this is, for example, a gastro-bistro format, then craft and homemade variations of tableware are more suitable. If this is a pretentious presidential-style buffet, then a craft theme will no longer work; a more elegant one is needed. It all depends on the format of the event. I try to have several collections of dishes in my inventory. The only thing I am sure of is that different collections of dishes cannot be mixed, because then it turns out to be a “traffic light,” as I call it.

Why? Some people use an eclectic style quite successfully.

Yes, you can make all-colored tableware with a kid's theme or a cozy home theme, but a fine dining dish will never pair with a craft plate in earthy tones and natural textures. Craft and craft go well together in different colors and different models, but elegance and craft are more difficult to combine.

What is the most difficult thing about your work?

Paperwork, it pushes away inspiration somewhere else. Sometimes you can get so carried away by this, working with programs and all sorts of documents, that later, when you need to come up with or update some kind of menu, it can take you a whole week to come to your senses. There won't be any interesting thoughts. Paperwork kills inspiration and ideas.

What's the most enjoyable thing about work?

I like to surprise both guests and colleagues. If you see that you managed to surprise a colleague who has already seen everything, then you understand that you will definitely surprise the guest.

If you were one hundred percent sure, what other profession would you like to master?

I don’t really trust people who become chefs but are looking at another profession. That is, he works, but at the same time wants to be a sales manager in an online store. It seems to me that this is incompatible, because the world of cuisine is huge. I myself have been in the kitchen world for more than 20 years and am constantly looking for something, constantly learning something - often from myself, and, most importantly, from my colleagues. I enjoy learning from my subordinates and employees. And I still understand that I haven’t even half explored this huge world. And if a person comes to this profession and looks at another in parallel, I understand that he is not fulfilled in our profession.

And if we talk about me, as a child I wanted to be anyone, but the deeper I immersed myself in this profession, the more I was sucked into it, and there was no way out of it. I will no longer be able to switch to any other profession, because I saw myself in cooking. But maybe I could try myself as a food blogger :)