Kuba Winkowski

Most chefs have pretty similar origin stories. They tend to grow up either knowing they want to be a chef from a very young age – perhaps due to a grandmother getting them to help with something in the kitchen – or happen upon it after not getting on with academic teaching at school. They enter a kitchen or join a catering college at sixteen and spend the vast majority of their formative years over a stove, sacrificing a social life for the thrill and heat of the kitchen. That wasn’t how it happened for Kuba Winkowski, however. Growing up in Gdansk, Poland, he was expected to go to university and go into something like engineering or finance. He eventually discovered his true passion – cooking – later than most. ‘I came to England when I was twenty-four, which is when I really started cooking,’ he explains. ‘I’d studied mechanics at university back in Poland for just over a year, but I didn’t get on with it and knew I wouldn’t survive the second year. I decided to go to Sydney to learn English – or at least that was the excuse I told my parents – and got a job at an Italian restaurant. I still remember the smell coming from these massive buckets of pesto they made every day – I’d never experienced anything like that before. My parents would have gone crazy if they’d known they were paying for me to learn English just so I could wash dishes, but that’s when I fell in love with the kitchen.’