Introducing Luke Brown

Hey there. I'm Luke Brown, 25 years old and working in Berlin as a cook. I became interested in cooking quite early in my life. I started to help in the kitchen when I was about ten. Back than I was mainly interested in desserts and cakes. My dad bought me some cookbooks and soon I baked the cakes for everyone's birthdays in our family (except my own, which my dad still made).

When I finished school (and how glad I was to be over with it), I didn't know what to do. So I just started to ask around in Restaurants in Berlin, looking for an apprenticeship. I found one in a fancy restaurant and am to this day astonished that they took me in. And I learned a lot. But it didn't have much to do with what I loved about cooking. Cooking is an adventure, an endless experimentation. I love it when I can follow my spontaneous inspiration and make every meal a bit different. But professional cooking is about consistency. You are trying to create an experience for the customer. Your goal is to create the same experience today as you did a week ago or will in a month. It's an interesting challenge, but for entirely different reasons. And it wasn't what I was interested in the longterm. So after about four years of working in a professional kitchen, I quit.

Luckily I had some money that my grandpa had saved for me. I decided to use this money to travel. My plan was a bit naive. Food is needed everywhere, so I thought why don't I start travelling, giving cooking lessons, work in restaurants, or couchsurf and cook for the people I'm staying with (hoping they pay for the ingredients). I'm still a bit in awe that it worked. And that's how I spend the last two years. But now it's time for a new chapter.

I still think food is important. You'll have to eat for the rest of your life, so you should find a way to eat healthy that you enjoy. But doing only one thing for the rest of my life horrifies me. I want to do something else entirely. But I don't know yet what it's going to be. That's why I moved back into a shared flat in Berlin (to save money), picked up a job at a restaurant (because the only thing I know how to do is cooking) and use my free time to figure out what I want to do next.