Fugitive Chefs

Recorded the week I turned 30, this is a solo check-in — on what's changed since I left consulting work to become a Senior Innovation Chef at Kraft Heinz, and on an idea I keep coming back to: that "paying your dues" might be the most outdated piece of career advice still floating around food.
In this episode, we discuss:
Why working inside a major food company surprised me more than I expected it to
The real cost of skipping steps — and why I don't think waiting your turn means what we're told it means
What changed at Fugitive Chefs this year: the guests, the community turning one, and a line I finally stopped debating with myself
A few names and conversations shaping where the show goes next

🎧 Fugitive Chefs explores how culinary expertise creates value across the modern food system.
🌐 Website: https://www.fugitivechefs.com
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/57kmFAUgp6DhgnguexFuDs
🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fugitivechefs
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fugitive-chefs/id1676930088
📩 Beyond the Pass: https://beyondthepass.substack.com
📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/fugitivechefspodcast

Should you go to culinary school? The president of the Culinary Institute of America says it depends. A head of school says you might not need the next degree. And I never went at all.

Over the last year, I've asked this question to very different people on Fugitive Chefs. This episode puts their answers side by side: two chefs mid-way through the Master's in Gastronomic Sciences at the Basque Culinary Center, the president of the CIA, a head of school in New Zealand, and me, a chef who skipped culinary school entirely.

In this episode we discuss:
- Why the CIA's Michiel Bakker answers "it depends," and when culinary school becomes just an expensive hobby
- Harsh and Hans on the real investment behind a culinary Master's, and what it actually opens up
- The gap between manager-level promises and entry-level reality after a degree
- Adrian Woodhouse (Otago Polytechnic) on imposter syndrome, collecting credentials, and who really owns culinary knowledge
- Why career changers are the group culinary education rarely talks about
- Skipping culinary school: the door I had, and what hiring conversations actually asked me
- The four different questions hiding inside "should I go to culinary school?"

🎧 Fugitive Chefs explores how culinary expertise creates value across the modern food system.
🌐 Website: https://www.fugitivechefs.com
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/57kmFAUgp6DhgnguexFuDs
🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fugitivechefs
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fugitive-chefs/id1676930088
📩 Beyond the Pass: https://beyondthepass.substack.com
📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/fugitivechefspodcast

Most food industry job requirements don't make sense until someone who's actually applying explains why. In this episode I cook pasta with Vincenzo, a Kraft Heinz intern about to finish up and go job hunting, and we get into what the process really looks like right now.
We discuss:
Why AI resume readers are changing what a good CV should look like
Why entry-level food jobs keep asking for years of experience nobody starting out has
How restaurant experience gets overlooked in food R&D hiring
The real difference between interning in a restaurant and interning at a food company
Practical advice if you're interning in food right now
🎧 Fugitive Chefs explores how culinary expertise creates value across the modern food system.
🌐 Website: https://www.fugitivechefs.com
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/57kmFAUgp6DhgnguexFuDs
🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fugitivechefs
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fugitive-chefs/id1676930088
📩 Beyond the Pass: https://beyondthepass.substack.com
📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/fugitivechefspodcast

De Nieuwe Winkel has two Michelin stars, a green star, and a dining room it wants to depend on less.
About a year ago, the restaurant started DNW Lab: an R&D arm set up as a separate entity so it can work directly with universities and with industry. I recorded this one in person at the restaurant in Nijmegen, on their Sunday off, which almost never happens on this show. Jan Majoor is Head of R&D, from a food technology background at Wageningen. George Erotokritou is Head of Gastronomic Development, out of the Basque Culinary Center, Spora and Alchemist. Both are co-founders of the lab alongside Emile van der Staak, who owns the restaurant.

In this episode we discuss:
🔬 Why the lab had to be a separate entity instead of a department inside the restaurant
🍫 Chocolate made from fermented chestnuts, with no cocoa beans and no cocoa butter
🛒 Why that product can't reach a supermarket shelf, from solid state fermentation to allergens to price
⚖️ Why product development starts by asking how to cut costs, and what the lab refuses to start from
🌰 Buying the entire harvest from the only Dutch sweet chestnut producer to prove agroforestry can pay
🔒 Whether a restaurant can protect what it creates, and why IP isn't the real worry yet
📈 The plan for lab revenue to balance or overtake the restaurant
🗓️ Four-day weeks, and serving the same menu at a lower price to more people
🧩 What still isn't solved between the lab and the kitchen

🎧 Fugitive Chefs explores how culinary expertise creates value across the modern food system.
🌐 Website: www.fugitivechefs.com
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/57kmFAUgp6DhgnguexFuDs
🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fugitivechefs
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fugitive-chefs/id1676930088
📩 Beyond the Pass: https://beyondthepass.substack.com
📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/fugitivechefspodcast

🎙️ Most people think a restaurant R&D kitchen is where new dishes get invented. What I saw looked closer to a library than a laboratory.
In this solo episode I break down what restaurant R&D actually is, based on four years in fine dining at Mugaritz and Noma, then three and a half years doing R&D at Basque Culinary Center, and now as Senior Innovation Chef at Kraft Heinz. This is the on-ramp to next week's episode on De Nieuwe Winkel, the two-Michelin-star restaurant in Nijmegen that turned its R&D into a separate business.
In this episode we discuss:
🔹 What an R&D kitchen or test kitchen actually does on a normal Tuesday
🔹 Why R&D teams are physically separated from the service kitchen, and why that separation is structural rather than cosmetic
🔹 The seasonal pipeline problem: creating in January for an ingredient that only arrives in August
🔹 Why restaurants deliberately hold back portions they could have sold
🔹 Why the method, not the dish, is the actual asset a restaurant owns
🔹 Why some failures are deliberately left undocumented
🔹 Who actually gets hired into these rooms, and why food science degrees are not the entry point
🔹 What changes when a method leaves the restaurant and enters industry
🔹 Gold standard: what it means and why it matters
Mentioned in this episode:
📌 What Is a Corporate Chef? Breaking Down the Real Roles Inside Food Companies → [link]
📌 Jozef Youssef, Kitchen Theory, on the science of flavour and gastrophysics → https://open.spotify.com/episode/6zMM7znbNPttrHbpeuFWpj?si=993b10c091be4bde
📌 S1E14 John Regefalk, Basque Culinary Center → https://open.spotify.com/episode/3NvdgFKGaL8OcmzxEPB8z3?si=140203f4a7b84424
📌 Beyond the Pass, "The Recipe Was Never the Capability" → beyondthepass.substack.com
🎧 Fugitive Chefs explores what happens when chefs step outside the traditional kitchen path.
🌐 Website: ⁠www.fugitivechefs.com⁠
📸 Furqan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/furqanmeerza/
⁠🎧 Podcast Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/fugitivechefspodcast/
🎵 Spotify: ⁠https://spoti.fi/3F6j25A⁠
🍏 Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://apple.co/43vBtbT⁠
▶️ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@fugitivechefs