Hacks for future food business bosses

Now. Do it now,” is a popular advice for starting entrepreneurs. “What do you have to lose?”

But for Center for Culinary Arts alumnus JP Anglo, it’s probably best to get some experience before starting your own food business. Experience, after all, is the best teacher.

“Try out cooking school first,” the tattooed chef told SparkUp after one of his weekend cooking classes with the CCA. “If you can hack cooking school then try working for a restaurant first. Money’s at stake when you open your own business. You have to pay operation costs, construction costs, and your own employees, to name a few.”

He admitted that he was probably too excited when he graduated from CCA in 2003. He built his own Asian restaurant in his home city of Bacolod—planned, cooked, worked and then realized that he wasn’t ready to be his own boss yet. That’s probably a realization best had when you don’t have employees to pay and customers to feed.

He left his restaurant for five years, and went to Australia to study and work part‑time in another restaurant. In 2008, he went back to Bacolod and established Asian restaurant Mushu, which is open until today.

“If you work for someone first then you get to learn while you work,” advised Anglo. “Then you get to realize what you want to do in life, what you want to do, and what your strengths and weaknesses are.” And for our good chef that’s running his own restaurant, teaching the youth how to cook, and starring in his own cable program this March.

These days, Chef Anglo teaches open‑to‑the‑public weekend cooking classes at the CCA. Last December, he taught participants to cook indulgent Noche Buena meals and in January he taught participants how to cook relatively healthier meals for the New Years, less pork and sugar and more chicken and seafood.

He is certainly a hands‑on teacher, making rounds in the kitchen and offering advice on how to improve the dishes so that they’d come out as a balanced meal. Balance is his key lesson, as well as improvisation. Cooking is taught as an art, and not a science, leaving room for interpretation in his recipes. At the end of the day, no group will serve exactly the same dish, but they will definitely all be delicious. (Word of advice though, keep your kitchen station clean at all times. All times.)

These lessons are a whole‑day affair. The CCA chefs demonstrate how to cook in the morning, the participants start cooking after lunch, and they have to have a five course meal plated and ready by six in the evening to serve to their guests.

“There are three parts to these lessons,” said Anglo. “You learn, you do, and then you serve. Pausing for a while, the chef added: “then you enjoy.”

“This is not your traditional cooking class. We’re very go with the flow. We don’t follow any system and we act like you really would in a kitchen where you have to learn how to make diskarte, the chef said on how his lessons are conducted. (But seriously, this is not an excuse to have a messy kitchen station. Don’t tempt fate, just trust me on this one.)

“Free up one Saturday for yourself next month so you can join us at CCA Makati.” While the class has its share of CCA students and alumni, there are also your fellow weekend warriors—millennials who dedicate the weekend to learning new skills. Everyone is grouped together in a way that will allow you to learn from your fellow participants too.

For February, the CCA will hold its cooking class in its Makati campus on a Saturday. The registration fee and main theme is still being discussed, because that would vary depending on the recipes and ingredients needed for that meal, but it will most likely be Valentine‑related.