My story begins with the Riga market. My father often went to the barbecue, the cottage, and a lot of laps wound around the meat stalls in search of tidbits in Soviet times was just do napryazhenka with good meat. Then we experimented on everyone, on top of meat are hard and not tasty but it just fueled us.

My dad simple Soviet scientist. He studied instrument making space for the Institute for Space Medicine. When approaching the Olympics of ’68, which is in Mexico, our team is trained in the North Caucasus, and the father with the help of various devices designed to adapt the system to a competitor with the horse to the conditions of high mountains, because the athletes during a training session felt the same thing and astronauts: anoxia, stress, in general, were in place with low oxygen in the air.

At the same time, the pope made a senior in cooking. It was his first serious experience in a large meat gastronomy: a child and he wars and sausage for the first time in my life tried, when canceled the card. Then he gave out coupons at the farm on 50 kg of mutton, which he then had to learn to carve. Teachers were local residents, for whom this ritual was passed on a little-if not through the generations.

In the 80s, the father of a large space moved on to more mundane things: he organized a cooperative and began to produce various food products: meat, horseradish and mustard. So far, it does.

Immediately after high school in ’91, I immediately began studying gastronomy restaurant business. Visited all the powers, which were well developed skotovodchestvo. The meat I examined more than anything else.

“I feel sorry for vegetarians. For me, a piece of meat just do not compare the taste to anything else. I’m single, but firmly believe: that my future wife must first appreciate what I cook and meat as well. Otherwise why would she me: I am no longer what is love and forgive my sins, “laughs Michael.

I love to cook, I enjoy the process of cooking and of course tasting cooked. I love when people say “How delicious!” I hear it’s much nicer than what I’m successful businessman, or that I have a beautiful car.

In Saint-Tropez, where I rented a house there, I myself went to the market, choosing meat and cooked it for his friends. So even on vacation, I am preparing myself: of course, when I go to a restaurant then to fully enjoy the atmosphere and food I can not, I’m scanning every corner, watch, assess the situation on its professional look.

To be a successful restaurateur, you must live in this business, the business must understand and above all love, but does not refer to it as a fashion application. There Oligarchs are equally easy to deal with oil, retail, metals, banks, etc. But restaurateurs who are engaged in oil and restaurants, and other such not.

By the way, for the same reason and can not capture this business. You can pick up an oil rig: it is developing its oil and will be moving independently from the owner. But the restaurant does not get this …

In a fair fight beef won

In our restaurant, “Goodman” meat for steaks we buy in Australia. There are a lot of meat breeds and cuts in the world, as well as dozens of ways to cook this steak. Our success in his own line of steaks (grades – approx. Editor). This is for example our “know-how.”

We have almost no pork. It’s not a conscious choice when we opened the restaurant was steak, which we served as the largest pork steak. But the visitors preferred the steak, so the menu is now only pork ribs. So honestly lost pork beef. And the traditional steak house in the first place it is beef.

Professionalism

Business success comes when you do that you get the most of all. If Burenka bring 3.5 tons of milk, you can not make it to 10 tons. Also, as you can not force me to jump 5 meters in length and play basketball like a man two meters tall.

My talent is a meat business.

Business-to-me game. I do not have a definite style in this game: sometimes my desire to win makes me aggressive and sometimes conservative. I do not have this, something easy, something hard. There is a problem – and solve its food.

I think that we are engaged in a kind of modernization: developing animal husbandry. But these categories are not my orientation. I just love what I do, do, explaining himself to his same result.

I’m not a great growth. A smaller increase in man, the more complex the more one needs to prove something, to feel that it is something that can.

I often wonder why we do not make for clothing, why we sell them, rather than not sew clothes from them? Because it hides we will not feed them, clothe can, but do not feed them. And dress warm and beautiful people – this is no longer with us.

If I liked sewing, I probably would have them and worked, and earned it, but I have an occupation that I love, but such a right, not force yourself to understand what I do not care.

The world obeys the ability, not money. I conquered people meat.

10 years later …

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. I will not say what I have in 10 years. But I can say for sure: I do not want to lose those things that I have made over the past year. Firstly, I want to love others as I love now. To feed their delicious meat. Secondly, I do not want me to be held some conventions, on the contrary I want to get me to keep my outlook on life, values ​​that I share today.

Also read:

Market overview

• The Moscow experience: analyst

Master class

• For a while the restaurant will bring loss
• 6 errors restaurateur in HR
• Production plant for restaurants
• The path of successful restaurateur
• As restaurateurs recruited by the KGB
• Arkady Novikov: Siren – my first restaurant
• Japanese lesson from Nobu
• Serve no food, and the image
• Andrew Dellos: The secret to a successful restaurant – great service

Main issues

• Open restaurant: calculation
• Place for a restaurant: a very important detail
• Which restaurant to open
• Financial performance of the restaurant
• The staff for the restaurant: where to look
• To combat theft
• Check the restaurant
• Restaurant promotion

Also read

• Open bar: how to avoid becoming a twin
• Experience restaurateur: thinking out loud