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Royal tales from a master chef
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Rustling up gourmet food for the who's who of the world is what Chef Willie Ruck does. In the city recently, he serves a lavish spread of cookery tales to SHILPA NAIR ANAND
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PHOTO: MAHESH HARILAL
A LA CARTE Chef Willie Ruck demonstrates his culinary skills at Hotel Le Meridien
It was to be the first public appearance of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, for a dance, after their wedding. A banquet in their honour and for 550 special guests. The guest list included the Prime Minister of Australia, the Archbishop and everybody else who mattered.
"It was splashed all over the papers and on television... what was going to be served? Who the guests were? I was asked all kinds of questions about the menu. The hullabaloo was huge," says Willie Ruck and just thinking of the banquet makes him break in to a sweat. A troubadour-chef, Chef Willie Ruck, with a bag full of tales, is in Kochi.
His brief
His visiting card says, `Culinary Director Special Projects'; put in simple language he is the `top chef' or the "alpha chef" (his coinage!) of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which owns several luxury hotels and resorts all over the world. Starwood recently took over hotels that form the Le Meridien chain. Chef Ruck has a say in what a menu should be like, what should be on it or off it. But he clarifies that his job is not of the intrusive kind, "I just make suggestions." His job demands making presentations to chefs and the food and beverages department, "on how to do something and also how not to do something."
Chef Ruck calls himself a thief or rather a troubadour. "If I see something good in a place, I pinch that idea from there and take it to another place that can make use of the particular tip. I pick stories from here and there and carry it forward. I don't keep anything for myself," says the travelling chef.
He is in Kochi for two weeks to "take a look at" Le Meridien and make his "suggestions". He, however, sees no reason to make drastic changes. Borrowing an Americanism, he says, "If it ain't broken, why mend it?" He was at Bangalore for two weeks before he got here, and before he got to India he was in Nepal. A month into his stay in India, he is yet to pick the nuances of Indian cooking, which differs from region to region.
South Indian cooking
"I realised in Bangalore that South Indian cooking is different from North Indian cooking and even in North Indian cooking there are distinctions such as Frontier cuisine or Kashmiri. But I like Indian cuisine," he says. The ubiquitous rasam, however, has captured his fancy. Incorporating the local element into the cuisine would bring in the local identity into the food by which he means local craft and artefacts into the presentation. "It would be mad not to do it. When you serve food, you are not looking just at the food, presentation is also important." However, what he has to say is, "the menus are huge here. A buffet here will have 24 different things on it, maybe that is because of the vegetarian and non-vegetarian aspect. Anywhere else there would be say between 6-12 items. Maybe that is too few. Because there is a huge manpower resource here, it is not a problem but anywhere a hotel would not be able to afford so many dishes on the menu. You need people to get all that stuff ready, and you have to pay those people."
Chef Ruck's workday is not just about cooking, he looks into the layout of kitchens of resorts and hotels of the group as well. "I am a chef, so I know what works best for a chef. So, I am sent the blueprint of the kitchen's layout and I make my suggestions. For example, the kitchen at the Kathmandu property had problems, it is difficult to work if the conditions are not right. I am trying to help," he says.
So is there some kind of uniformity where Asian cuisine is concerned?
"Not at all. Schezwan cuisine might come closest to Indian, in that it is spicy. But Cantonese is very bland, or Japanese too. Malaysian cuisine is quite similar to Kerala cuisine. They use a lot of coconut, coconut oil and they roast their spices as well. There are differences but there is something similar in the flavour," says Chef Ruck. His favourite cuisine? Italian, then as an after thought come French, and German.
Chef Ruck started his culinary sojourn in his home country Germany 40 years ago, of which 30 have been with the Starwood group. From there the quest for a job started after three years of training, and the trip started in Europe and brought him to Asia and Australia, punctuated by a brief interlude in South Africa. His first job in Asia was in Hong Kong, and then came the other countries such as Japan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and now the Indian subcontinent. Chef Ruck lives in Sydney and his work takes him to Singapore (that is when he is not travelling, which he is most of the time).
His several encounters of the `who's who' kind have brought him in touch with the royals of Japan, Europe and American politicians besides an exhaustive list of famous people. "When you work for luxury hotels and resorts you are bound to at some point of time or the other to meet them," says Chef Ruck.
Adjectives to describe these range from fairytale, to strange and at the other end of the spectrum there is bizarre.
You may think the jet setting that he does across cultures and cuisines may cause fatigue, but not for Chef Ruck. He looks like a man who is having a blast at work, with work.
So are there any plans of turning off the fire, putting down the ladle? "There is a problem with my retirement plans. I don't know how to fish, and if I can't fish what is the point in retiring. One has to do something," says the avid golfer.
There is always golf, Chef!
Main course
Chef Willie has had several encounters of serving gourmet meals to the `who's who' of the world. Prince Charles and Lady D's banquet was the spiciest!
The brief for the banquet was that Australian produce had to be used in the menu. It was decided to use Oyster mushrooms. "These mushrooms were new in the market and hard to come by. Supplies of these came in only on Mondays and Thursdays, and the supplier was not sure if he would be able to get in by Thursday. The banquet was scheduled for the weekend. So, we stocked up on cartons of mushrooms on Monday. As fate would have it, no mushrooms on Thursday," he reminisces. Chef Ruck's assistant opened the cartons on the day of the banquet, and... . "I had never seen fungus grow on fungus, did not think that was possible and there were cartons and cartons of fungus with fungus. So what do we do? I asked my assistant to get some of the mushrooms; I lightly cooked them and guess what we did? We ate them and I had decided if we were ok till six in the evening, oyster mushrooms it would be." Come evening, chef and assistant were fine, and the royal couple and the 550 or so guests too were served the same. One tiny thing, he got up early next morning to tune to the radio to hear if there were any casualties as a result of food poisoning. "If the PM and Archbishop of Australia and the Prince and Princess were sick or worse, dead. I needn't make the long drive to work. Fortunately nothing happened, but my F&B manager didn't find the thing one bit as funny," laughs Chef Ruck at the memory.
Another tale that the Chef narrates is about the time when Japanese Emperor Akihito and his family came for a meal to the hotel Chef Ruck was working in at the time, "there was an alarm clock on the table that the Emperor was supposed to dine, and it was strange. So I asked the Emperor's security officer what that was all about?" In Japan the Emperor is considered next to God and is never told to do something. "So, I was told, that the Emperor would see the clock and would know it was time to leave for the next appointment or to go to bed!" he says.
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