From memories of the first Italian pizza to New York culinary one-man shows
Together with his partner, he signed the first stationary food truck in our country, and the craft approach to the real burger won them numerous awards and nominations such as "Best Burger Place" and "Restaurant of the Year" in various categories. Overcoming the challenges of growth and transformation from a small business to a chain with multiple locations throughout the country, nine years later Petko Tsochev and Dimitar Dobrev continue to be different - in their ideas, recipes, approach, interior and attitude towards food. For many people they are Street Chefs, for us they are culinary encyclopedias and the professionals who will head the Balkan and French cuisine teams in the future international school of culinary arts, whose programs they will develop together with the oldest gastronomy school in Europe - FERRANDI Paris.
Before arranging the kitchens of Sharena Fabrika, however, they continue to arrange missing pieces of the puzzle that forms the culinary map of Sofia. This is how YUM Chinese first appeared - a small space for great connoisseurs of Chinese food and the New York atmosphere on 24 Shishman Street. And a little over a month ago, MIZU also opened - a place with a scale not only in square footage, but also in imagination and ideas.
We ask Petko when and how he and Dimitar first entered the kitchen, we go through the “omakase” bar of their new restaurant and get to some of the challenges in the industry in our country.
How did you get into the kitchen?
My partner and I, you could say, entered the kitchen out of hunger. It was our student years in the late 90s and we had to eat. And we had an innate attitude towards food – what you eat, how you eat.
Which one comes from the family in your case?
With him, yes. Dimitar's father has a very serious attitude towards food. He took cooking classes, collected magazines, then gave them to us. On my side of the family, my two grandmothers cooked a lot. At home, my mother cooked to feed us, since we were three brothers. There was no cult of food, nor of slow eating. In general, there was no cult of the table. The only requirement was to have dinner on time and together.
This also fosters a certain attitude and culture of eating.
Yes. Later, Dimitar and I started with how to make chicken livers or chicken hearts. How to make drob sarma… things that are more unconventional. That's how it all started. We lived next to each other and took turns saying "Tonight we're at your place, the next night we're at ours", and with that came a big group of friends who told us that we were cooking. From then on, I also remember the first magazines that I started buying: Bacchus, Salt & Pepper. If I rummage around at home, I'll probably find them.
Practice is certainly the best way to learn, but how was knowledge acquired in cooking back then?
Travel, for sure. There was no internet and there weren’t many magazines, and that’s why they were very valuable. You see a picture, you look at it and wonder how to make it as close as possible to the picture. I remember “Salt & Pepper” and Bacchus very clearly as media outlets that had interesting things in them, because they had more unconventional dishes. I also remember earlier the time when I was in Moscow. We lived in a diplomatic corps with three fenced-off blocks, with only foreigners. One of my best friends was an Italian family from the next block. Two sisters and a brother – Federica, Raffaella and Emiliano. They lived on the seventh floor of the block, in the middle of the entire yard. In the evenings while we were playing, their mother would go out on the balcony and start shouting “Fede, Rafi, Emi…”, we would all stop, look up, and she would wave her hand, calling out “manjare” and take them home. One evening they invited me to eat pizza. Our idea of pizza back then was a thick dough, some kind of bread with sausages and ketchup. And she had made a thin, delicate pizza. We ate it all and were still hungry. I was very disappointed. I shouted, “These Italians don’t know how to make pizza.” Their mother cooks phenomenally to this day.
Have you kept in touch over the years?
Yes, after years I was going to travel to Africa, and my flight was going through Milan. They live in a small village in Alto Adige, a very nice wine region. It was my first time going through Italy, I had one night in Milan. I called Fede a week before to tell her when I would be there and she came. That evening she asked me where I wanted to have dinner. “Well, where?! It’s my first time in Italy, take me to eat pizza”. And she said “great, okay, I know a really good pizza here”. And she took me to a Chinese restaurant. “How can you take me to a Chinese restaurant to eat pizza?!” and she said “They make really good pizza here”. A complete shock. Again in the years I saw their whole family after Fede left for New York, but by chance we were both in Italy. When I called her she said “We are here with my brother, my sister, everyone. Stop by for lunch”. Their house is surrounded by vineyards, but it's like a canyon all around - rocks on all sides. And vineyards below. I asked how the grapes grow there, because of the sun, and they explained to me how while it's roasting on one slope, it reflects on the vineyard, and so before lunch and in the afternoon, it's as if there are mirrors on both sides. They pick the grapes, give them to the local winery, and they return it to them as finished wine in a bottle. As soon as I entered, her mother had put the polenta on a machine to spin, while she told me how she had gone to the forest to pick mushrooms that morning. Their father opened the wine, and her mother took out homemade gorgonzola with nice mold and mixed it with the polenta and mushrooms. These are traditions. And now that you're provoking these memories for me, I can actually say that through this family line I've had some foundational culinary experiences. And there are probably many more like them.
Speaking of culinary experiences, following your stories and your recent trip to New York, can we say that the customer experience is now different? How is the experience of sitting in a restaurant changing?
I am generally a bit reserved about what is happening with cooking at the moment. Yes, we are in this industry and to some extent this benefits us – the fact that there is a cult of chefs, but along with that, people seem to forget that the purpose of food is to eat. The other side of food, seen through the eyes of the inhabitants of the so-called olive belt – all of Southern Europe, is an occasion for socializing. Which, for example, is missing in the northern countries…
From a performance perspective, yes. I was recently in New York at a very interesting place, like "omakase"a restaurant where you sit by the bar. There were 16 of us and the chef cooks step by step for the guests. A Japanese restaurant where the entire menu is based on yakitori, chicken skewers. When I made the reservation, they checked my email and saw that we were from the industry. They wrote to us specifically to tell us how happy they were that colleagues would visit them. They had seated us in the seats from where you could only see the chef working and we had the chance to enjoy this show from the front row. He had taken 17 different types of "cuts", so to speak, from one chicken. He didn't treat the chicken as a leg, a breast... but looked at it differently - which muscle and which cartilage should be in one bite, so that when you bite into it, everything would be different.
It was dark with the focus entirely on him and his grill. It looked like a one-man show in a small chamber hall. But the food was super simple, without anything superfluous. The art was in shaping the given skewer. Typically Japanese, very minimalist, with two types of spices that they give you. Right at the beginning they tell you – this is spicy, this is not spicy, this is for the lighter parts of the meat, this is for the darker ones. When he started cooking, he put on some old school hip-hop music and started dancing while moving the skewers left and right, on two fingers. The team introduced us to him, saying “These are the guests from Bulgaria”. He came and was very respectful. I told him that I was impressed and I would be happy if he came to Bulgaria and we could have similar dinners. I only had one question “why do you lift these skewers non-stop”. He answered me: “With these two fingers I know how much the raw skewer weighs”. That's all I've got. Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to be impressed anymore after so much focus on food in my life, but this one-man show was impressive.
Is this the future of restaurants? Is this the added value? The story, the performance?
Well, certainly this so-called show cooking brings a lot of added value to this business. This is the scene that we should watch. For me personally, the added value, if there should be a show, is that it is cooking in front of people so that they can see the process of preparing this food.
Is that the concept here at MIZU?
Yes, definitely. We have two scenes here for this type of cooking and we want to do similar things. One is the Japanese grill “robata”, and the other is the so-called “Omakase” bar.
In some form, you will still appear as innovators, because Street Chefs was also a novelty in our country at the time.
Yes, we were even a little worried at first with Street Chefs, because in our country the concept of an expensive burger was not at all popular for its time. Street Chefs was the stepping stone on which we stepped and immersed ourselves in depth in the culinary world as a business. You have to know some fundamental things in the chain – deliveries, food production, so that you can separate the good from the bad, the quality from the poor. We have not wavered from quality since day one. If we needed to improve something, we did it. All the ingredients… caramelized onions, pickled cucumbers, etc.… everything is prepared by us, already here in the new kitchen. Everything is still manual labor. And the recipes are kept. If something dries out faster somewhere – we sound the alarm. Yes, I see social media, I read the comments, but many people do not know this process. There is also the human factor and this is not a quality problem, but a staff problem, which is inevitable. When you become a chain, this problem becomes unavoidable.
In an attempt to overcome this problem, the project for the construction of "Sharena Fabrika" will be carried out, in which you will head the section with Balkan and French cuisine, but beyond the topic of cooking itself, there will also be a focus on the attitude and knowledge of each role in the restaurant industry. How do you see this format developing and changing perceptions of the restaurant professions?
It's complicated because in our country there have been accumulations in this industry since the time of socialism. It's hard for me to go back in time, I wasn't a direct witness to these processes, but there is a stigma that originated back then. In our country, the perception of waitering is "I'm just a little bit". It's the same for a chef, although it's already changing. If you take a walk in Greece, Turkey, Serbia, even Macedonia, the majority of waiters are elderly people who have worked this for years and have no intention of giving up while they can still move, carry. This is a craft, a profession that is respected. Very often associated with a family business. But this is a profession. They respect themselves. They dress in white shirts, ties, they are neat. So this stigma that has appeared here on the entire industry is difficult to erase. I have a hard time seeing it at this stage. Indeed, these schools, I hope ours is in this spirit, they instill such an attitude towards the profession. At the very least, every course begins with a course on hygiene. Which is key. The main problem of some chefs in Bulgaria is the lack of hygiene. Of basic knowledge on the subject of hygiene.
This is a lack of humane attitude to maintain your workplace or a lack of funds for quality maintenance.
There is always the upbringing factor. But when it is not required, there is no one to follow it. There is a self-control system, but it is just a document. No one applies it as it should be applied.
What are the biggest challenges in this industry? Is the human factor the most important, the biggest problem?
The human factor is certainly in the first place. You can build the best thing and someone behind you ruins it while talking to you and smiling at you. I mean people from the team. So this is a big problem. Another one, although it seems insignificant, is that there are no premises suitable for a restaurant. Here at MIZU, the premises are an exception and it is nice because it was once designed for a Sofia Press chair and it is radically different. There is space, it suggests making a restaurant.
Does our cuisine have the potential to modernize its presentation in a similar way?
We have the prerequisites, but it would be difficult for us to stand out against the backdrop of Balkan cuisine. A large part of our cuisine is borrowed from Turkish and Greek. It would be difficult to stand out with something authentically ours. But here comes something else that we talked about earlier, besides the added value of preparing in front of people's eyes, the other is the quality of the ingredients. If we can emphasize something, it is the products, because we have pure nature. We have different types of spices, we probably don't even know fully what they are applicable to. The uniqueness of Bulgarian cuisine, in my opinion, should come from the products themselves. For example, in southern Italy, botargata is very popular - dried caviar. It is most often made from mullet, the most common fish there. There are mullets in every port. The caviar is poured abundantly with olive oil and salt and left to dry. When it is salted. It resembles the shape of pastrami. I do the same in our sea, but from turbot. I make turbot caviar into bottarga. And most people throw it away when they find it in their fish. Bottarga is grated into salads, pasta, risotto. It has a very strong sea flavor. But this is just an example. Or this same turbot in the oven. I personally just love it that way. I have a recipe that I know from Uti Bachvarov, who in turn knows it from Misho Zaimov.
Why did you decide to open a Chinese restaurant on Shishman Street?
Because there isn't. And practice has proven it. Yes, it's small, but it's always full. And again, the cooking process is visible. We solved two problems that bothered me - to see who and how is preparing your food and to have an atmosphere with a non-standard interior. Here, at MIZU, the issue was much more serious. I don't like the word "fusion" in the kitchen and here we really wanted the foundation, the backbone to be based on authentic Asian recipes. The robata grill is a whole science in Japan. It can be used for different types of meat, vegetables, fish and seafood. The other scene is the "omakase" bar. We have already done two "omakase" dinners with chef Zhoro Markov, who was in Bulgaria for a while. He prepared a 10-course nigiri menu with very clean, traditional flavors and techniques.
I assume there will be guest chefs as well.
Oh, yes, that's the idea. It's very difficult to find a chef who can deliver this type of "omakase" evening in a structured way. But it turned out very well. That's what we'll strive to do in the future - whether it's sushi, it could be ceviche, but everything should happen in front of people, to always have the Japanese beginning of raw fish on the menu. Two scenes that are missing in Sofia at the moment.
