I’m Andrew, I was born and raised in Budapest. I used to work as a sous chef in the United States, and later as a line cook in a two Michelin-starred restaurant. I also have been the private chef to Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher and a few other well and not so well known characters that due to contractual reasons I can not disclose. I have been a culinary instructor and a market tour guide since 2014. On the side I work as a consulting partner and the head of dining experiences at Hungary’s most visited gastronomy website. I run a blog about American food for Hungarians, and with a few great friends the biggest fermentation group in Hungary. I also have some gigs as a consultant and an R&D chef.
I’m an avid vinegar maker (there was a recently published interview with me about vinegar making in the Hungarian Hospitality Magazine), and I’m also a distiller (mainly gin and palinka), fermenter (from hot sauce to sauerkraut and everything in between). I also do seminars for community gardens and high schools about fermentation. I created webinars on fermentation both in English and Hungarian, and on vinegar making and Hungarian food, just to name a few. In high school, food became my hobby. While I was working on my bachelor’s (in foreign trade) and master’s (in marketing) degree, cooking became a serious passion of mine. After finishing my studies I moved to the US. Then some failed attempts came to work in any of my fields, so I went on and applied for a bartending job. I somehow ended up in the kitchen and worked my way up to be a sous chef. Then I ran a nightclub for a while, took a break, went back bartending, then did some culinary consulting.
That gave me enough freedom to travel in the US extensively. When I felt I cooked and traveled enough, I came back to Hungary. Moving back gave me the opportunity to look at my community from a different perspective, and it also made me fall in love with (American) Southern food. I dug deep in the American regional cuisine hoping the analogy will enable me to understand my own foodways better. I was partially right, it made me understand that foodways are far less intimidating than I first thought, and we have far more in common than I have ever imagined. Meeting a wide variety of people thanks to my travels and work also made me understand that at the end of the day if the food is great and the company we share it with is excellent, we all end up with a big smile.
A lot of things have changed around me, but the love and passion for food haven’t. I love sharing food- and travel stories with people. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are from, what you do, you will have an opinion on food, you will have favorites and stories. And even though food is so diverse, there are a lot of similarities between how we cook and how we perceive it. Through it, you are not just closer to yourself but everyone who shares the passion for it. It helps to understand cultures, people and to experience foreign places like nothing else. In my freetime I still like to cook, but what I love the most is spending time and sharing food with my daughter and wife. Whether it’s sitting around my smoker that I designed and built, cooking hunks of meat while we play, chat and have fun, or hiking in the woods foraging – it doesn’t matter as long as the food is good and there is good company to share it with.
