This year’s MHB Bank Gourmet Festival in the Hungarian capital focused on a new generation of culinary professionals. One of them is Edina Makai, the sous chef of the Michelin-starred Budapest restaurant ‘Salt’. She tells Diplomacy&Trade how she ended up in fine dining – something that seemed quite remote many years ago when she studied philosophy in Cluj, Romania, played in a band as drummer and worked in a bistro at the same time.
Given the family background in confectionary, it is understandable if someone ends up working in a restaurant but for Edina Makai, it was not so evident.
Curiosity about cooking
“It wasn't really a conscious decision to become a chef. I really loved – and still love – the arts, so for a while, I was very much oriented towards a career in the arts, either as a drummer or as an aesthetician. But I realized that I wasn't putting in as much work as I would have liked (although I still find it hard to let go of drumming) so, alongside that interest, a third one crept in: a curiosity about cooking and food. Although, I initially became a chef just to earn money, I soon realized that I really loved it and very rarely felt tired of it. It just makes me happy when someone likes what I cook and for a moment, I exist only in the universe of what they are and what they taste. But I couldn't really approach this profession without my interest in philosophy and art. So, it all made and still makes sense,” she explains.
In logical and systematic order
She is now a chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant. As to what role that involves and how she evaluates the experience she has gained there, she notes that “you go through a lot of things and an interesting individual development in a restaurant where it is important to keep a logical and systematic order. I have become a much more determined person and have learned a lot about cooking and preservation techniques. We do a lot of fermentation at Salt and we often talk about how we can do more for sustainability with this technology. Philosophy helps a lot, starting with helping us to understand the problems that affect our society and our food systems, plus the ecosystem. And I feel that a chef's job, in addition to being a restaurateur, is to mitigate these problems.”
Transylvanian background
Edina Makai is from the Transylvanian part of Romania, an area with substantial ethnic Hungarian population. She says she is not able to utilize this background in her work now as much as she would like, since she no longer lives there. “However, there are a few ingredients, or recipes, that I was able to show to Szilárd [that is, Salt's chef Szilárd Tóth] and he thought they were exciting, thus, we included them in the menu. Besides, there are a few ingredients that Szilárd showed me, for example, the churut which is a Transylvanian-Armenian fermented cheese with a lot of parsley. I definitely plan to learn more about the gastronomy of my homeland.”
Building on local traditions
This year’s Gourmet Festival focused on a new generation of gastro professionals. Regarding how this generation can contribute to the development of Hungarian gastronomy, the young chef believes that Hungarian gastronomy needs to be shaped on many levels, because there was a long period – that is during the communist regime – when it was largely stagnant and there was almost no development. “Since a public taste for certain dishes was formed during this period, many professionals feel that these are the only dishes that should be served to the guest, because this is part of Hungarian culture. However, we forget about a lot of recipes and techniques that are rooted in our traditions. So, I see it as our task as young chefs to cultivate and revive tradition on the one hand, and to learn about the gastronomy of other cultures on the other. Another very important thing is to know our raw materials and the people who produce them. A very large proportion of Hungarian raw materials are exported abroad because our processing industry is finding it increasingly difficult to survive. It is also our task to use local and seasonal raw materials and to make them known to our guests in order to shorten the long food chains as much as possible,” she stresses.
High-level gastronomy
Edina Makai is in fine dining now. When talking about how cooking has evolved into high-level gastronomy in her case, she mentions fermentation, which also involves knowledge of certain sciences. “I see that the chefs nowadays are also becoming more and more serious researchers, experimenting with different molds and bacterial cultures, for example. For me, that's what's exciting and challenging about this profession.”


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