Chef's Journey: St. Petersburg to Irkutsk

“I have a great story about how, as a child, I made scrambled eggs for my grandmother for breakfast. I couldn’t find vegetable oil, but I found vinegar, so I cooked with that. My grandmother tried it and said, ‘Mmm, how delicious! Well done,’ sent me off to play, and quietly threw it all away,” recalls chef Alexandra Borisenko.

She had been experimenting in the kitchen since childhood but never dreamed of becoming a chef. It happened almost by accident. For several years, Sasha worked in St. Petersburg and learned the craft in the city’s top restaurants, then moved to Irkutsk following her husband and began developing the gastronomy scene there.

Alexandra shared with an IrSiti journalist what brought her from St. Petersburg’s top restaurants to Irkutsk, how she argued with Konstantin Ivlev in the finale of a TV show, and why her grandmother threw away her first scrambled eggs.

“I Look Up, and Dima Malikov Is at the Serving Counter”

Sasha made her first dish — chocolate truffles — at the age of five. She read a recipe in a book and decided to replicate it. There was no cocoa butter at home, but little Sasha figured that if she took regular butter and added cocoa, the effect would be the same.

“I also melted some super-cheap chocolate into it, mixed everything, and made the candies. I couldn’t understand why they turned out tasteless. I also made a mess of the whole kitchen and wasted ingredients. After that and the scrambled eggs for my grandmother, my mom started buying me cookbooks with simpler recipes: little kids’ salads, sandwiches, fun little toasts. That’s what I started with,” the interviewee recalls.

Alexandra adds that she cooked from childhood not because she dreamed of becoming a chef, but simply because she enjoyed spending time that way.

“I’m a hands-on person, I can’t sit idle, I always need to be making something. So at school, my favorite lessons were labor training, and I went to both the girls’ and the boys’ classes. Our schedule was set up so that while the girls sewed and cooked in labor class, the boys had PE, then they swapped. I talked the labor teacher into it — it wasn’t hard, I just had to give him a bottle — and I happily went to both,” Sasha continues.

After 11th grade, the girl and a friend decided to apply to university for a degree in ‘Trade Business’ just for company. She says she still doesn’t understand why she needed it. Based on her Unified State Exam results, she got into a state-funded place, but all the spots went to beneficiaries and out-of-town applicants. Sasha had no backup plan; she didn’t even try to apply anywhere else, so her studies had to be postponed.

“My family didn’t have the money for me to study on a paid basis. So after I didn’t get in, I worked for a whole year as a salesperson in a store. That year made me realize I had to do something. But then June came, and tragedy struck — my dad died. I was 19 at the time. I was riding the subway from the funeral, my head completely empty, trying to hold on to something, but it was hard. And as I was going up the escalator, I saw a banner: ‘We invite you to train as a pastry chef-technologist.’ The course was only 10 months, and you’d be a qualified specialist. I decided to give it a try,” Sasha shares.

In the end, she enrolled in one of St. Petersburg’s colleges. She says the theoretical knowledge there wasn’t particularly useful, but the practical training gave her a lot. Alexandra secured herself an internship spot in the very center of the city.

“It was a five-star hotel on the Moika, part of the Kempinski chain. It has a view of Palace Square, the Hermitage is nearby. On the eighth floor of the hotel there’s a very cool restaurant, then run by a French chef. I begged to go there for a long time and said, ‘You can kill me, but I’ll only go there and nowhere else,’ Alexandra smiles.

Since Sasha was an intern, she was put on the canteen — that’s the staff dining room. She didn’t get to cook much, but she stood at the serving counter plenty.

“I remember on the first day I peeled potatoes, helped stir the soup, and then stood at the serving counter. You stand behind that counter, people come up, say what they want, and I serve — give, serve — give. ‘Super’ practice, very ‘educational,’” the interviewee quips.

The very next day she went to her superiors and asked for even the dirtiest work, but in the kitchen, so she could learn something worthwhile. For her persistence, Alexandra was transferred to the hotel kitchen’s cold section. After several hundred fish rosettes she shaped there, she was allowed to move to the kitchen of the eighth-floor restaurant — the one she had dreamed of from day one.

“There I also started on the cold station. The menu had a crab salad that cost around 1,600 rubles ($20 at current rates). Essentially, it’s made of pure crab and spices. So they trusted me to clean the crab phalanges. I cleaned two, one into my mouth, cleaned two more, another into my mouth. I don’t know how much I cost them in inventory, but that’s how it was. I worked for a couple of weeks as that little apprentice chef, and then I was hired as a junior cook,” Alexandra smiles.

In parallel, the girl worked at the restaurant ‘Spices and Joys’. Sasha recalls that stars often performed there, and artists sometimes liked to come just to eat. It was there that she once met Dima Malikov.

“Our kitchen was in the middle of a long corridor, and around it were the different sections. The sections were fenced off and had serving windows. I remember standing there, cutting some salad, I look up, and Malikov is at the serving counter. He looks at me and says, ‘Thank you very much for the food. Everything was delicious and great!’ For me, that was something incredible,” Sasha recalls.

“You Won’t Be Able to Work or Live”

The girl also worked at the bar ‘Bourbon’, where she first encountered the dark side of the food service industry. The establishment had few staff, and in the kitchen there were only the head chef, Sasha as sous-chef, and one other person. It wasn’t easy.

“Then I started noticing that something was off in this place. I discovered that 80% of the food in the kitchen was expired, and I found out that the chef was colluding with suppliers, taking expired products either cheaply or for free, and they went into the kitchen. We had a strip loin steak on the menu; large cuts of beef came to us that we thawed and froze several times. The meat started turning green, and when I asked the chef what to do, he said we wouldn’t write anything off, just rinse it with water, wipe it with a napkin, and that’s it,” Sasha recalls.

At that point, the girl ‘broke’ and told the owners everything that was happening in the kitchen. The chef was fired, and Sasha was offered his position. She even wanted to agree, but then something unexpected happened.

“I started receiving threats from that chef. He said it was a betrayal, and if I agreed and stayed to work there, he wouldn’t let me have a moment’s peace. He wrote: ‘I’ll turn all the suppliers against you, they’ll only bring you rotten stuff, I’ll set all the critics on you. You won’t be able to work or live.’ I got very scared because I’d never encountered anything like that before, and I left that establishment,” Alexandra admits.

After that, the girl got a job as a pastry chef at Cococo. It was owned by Matilda Shnurova, ex-wife of the leader of the band ‘Leningrad’.

“Before that, I hadn’t done much pastry work, but I decided: why not try? I saw that everything there was at a high level. The line there was endless; people booked tables weeks in advance. It was there that I learned to work with creams, chocolate, velvet, caramel, sponge cakes, and more. We even made ice cream. I mastered all the basics there. People from all over the country came there for internships and paid crazy money for it, and I managed to work there,” Sasha says.

“It Felt Like I’d Fallen into a Food-Service Ghetto”

Seven and a half years ago, Alexandra moved to Irkutsk. She jokes that she was exiled here for bad behavior. In reality, she moved to Siberia to follow her military husband, who serves in the city under contract.

“My husband is a child of Russia. He’s a hereditary military man, born in the closed city of Chita-46, grew up in Ulan-Ude, studied in Tomsk, Krasnodar, and St. Petersburg, where we met. We had a running joke when we were about to move here that Irkutsk is the other end of the country. My geography is a bit weak. And he still reminds me of it,” Alexandra laughs.

At first, it was not easy for her to settle in Irkutsk. After the cool St. Petersburg restaurants, the level of local eateries, to put it mildly, upset Sasha.

“If you look at Irkutsk 7.5 years ago and now, you’ll see a drastic difference. Irkutsk has changed a lot for the better and started developing. But back then it felt like I’d fallen into some food-service ghetto,” the interviewee admits.

At first, she worked at the teahouse ‘Kazan-Topchan’ on Krasnykh Madyar Street. And Sasha wouldn’t call that experience positive.

“Girls with sugar daddies came there, not really caring what they were eating. There was no concept of the value of a dish on the plate. I wanted to raise the level of pastry there, but it turned out to be difficult. The staff had one pastry chef — a woman twice my age, of the old Soviet school. I developed a new menu, started showing her how things should be, and she told me: ‘If you need it, you do it, I won’t.’ I felt like I was standing in a fierce rain and hitting it with a stick. My efforts were that meaningless,” Alexandra continues.

She then changed several more Irkutsk establishments, where she often encountered similar behavior from colleagues. In one top restaurant, Sasha created her own line of ice cream with Dorblu cheese, sorbet with red wine or caramelized rhubarb. But it turned out that Irkutsk wasn’t ready for that then: such desserts were hardly ordered. Everyone wanted New York cheesecake and strawberry ice cream.

“People were afraid to try all that. And then I realized that here you need a name for guests to start trying what you offer them. I didn’t have one then, I got very upset, disillusioned, threw a fit, and left the profession entirely for several years,” Sasha recalls.

Alexandra returned to cooking while on maternity leave. While at home with her little daughter, she started baking cupcakes and cakes for family and friends to ‘keep her sanity.’ Then she began cooking some things for sale to have money for her own girly expenses.

She then worked at a chain of pastry shops, where she also encountered quite serious reluctance to change anything in long-established practices. She even faced outright rudeness.

“They told me: ‘You know what, Sashenka? You’ve been working here for barely a week, and I’ve been here 10 years. Head pastry chefs change here more often than my gloves, do you know how many there have been? I’ll chew you all up and spit you out. I’ll keep doing things the way that’s convenient for me, and I don’t care about you or your opinion.’ Once after such a conversation, I sat and cried for about 40 minutes,” Alexandra admits.

Finally, her thorny path led her to the activity park ‘Choka-Loka’, where she still works. She has a friendly team and enough freedom to engage in genuine creativity. This year, Sasha presented her establishment at the regional pastry chefs’ championship, where she took first place.

“If Sashenka Had Kept Her Mouth Shut in Time, She Would Have Been the Winner”

Also this year, Alexandra appeared on the show ‘Housewives vs Chefs’ on the TV channel ‘Pyatnitsa!’ She made it to the finale and almost won, but, as Sasha herself says, she should have found the strength to stay silent during the last challenge.

“On the recommendation of Irkutsk chef Natalya Kolyadenko, producers from ‘Pyatnitsa’ called me and said they were looking for contestants for a show where female chefs compete against male chefs. They asked me to send a business card and all my details. I sent everything, they turned me down, and I thought, ‘Guess it wasn’t meant to be,’” Alexandra recalls.

Some time passed, and late in the evening Irkutsk time, Sasha got another call from ‘Pyatnitsa’.

“They said, ‘We have a problem, filming starts tomorrow, and one girl let us down.’ They asked if I could fly out. By some miracle I had free time, which rarely happens, so I agreed. The producer said she’d buy the tickets now and arrange everything, and… she disappeared,” the interviewee continues.

She was out of touch for several hours, so Sasha decided she’d been the victim of some scam. But by one in the morning, the producer reappeared and asked her to check if all her details were correct.

“I see the flight from Irkutsk is at 9 a.m., and it’s one in the morning. I said everything was fine, then waited until 5 a.m. for the tickets themselves to be sent. I doubted until the last moment, but it all worked out,” Alexandra says.

At the filming location, Sasha was asked to bring a white chef’s jacket without extra logos or decorations, and was warned that her hair and makeup would be done by specially trained people. But no one told her it would be good to bring a snack.

“Good thing I brought ryazhenka, an apple, and some water. We arrived at the shoot around 7 a.m., I thought there’d be at least some cookies, tea, or coffee. After all, it’s a show where they cook food, I assumed we’d at least try what we made during breaks. But Stirlitz had never been so close to failure,” Sasha laughs.

The participants were immediately taken to the dressing room, where over a couple of hours a thick layer of makeup was applied so it wouldn’t run under the studio lights. At the same time, they had to fill out and sign a ton of paperwork.

“You had to read every page and look through it, because there were many nuances. The penalty system was clearly spelled out. If you blabbed somewhere, revealed results in advance, or anything like that, it would be bad and very expensive. I won’t name the sum because I can’t, but very expensive,” Alexandra added.

Contestants weren’t allowed to wander around the set; even going to the toilet or for a smoke break was on a schedule and under supervision, so no one got lost or disrupted the timing. In total, filming lasted until 10 p.m. The whole time, the contestants had no food.

“I held on the whole time in a state of affect. Yes, during cooking I tasted a little here and there, but I was still terribly hungry,” the interviewee admits.

During breaks between rounds, Alexandra met Olga Kartunkova in the corridor, who appears on the show as co-host with Konstantin Ivlev. Sasha and Olga had a funny exchange.

“One of the boys cooked fish, and it wasn’t fully done. Olga ate it, then got worried about it. And as we’re walking down the corridor, she asks me, ‘Won’t I get poisoned?’ I told her that fish had been frozen a million times, so nothing bad would happen. The main thing was to avoid dairy that day. Olga calmed down and went on,” the interviewee smiles.

In the final challenge, Sasha made choux pastries with trout and shrimp filling, served with a sauce of mango, mustard, and Tabasco. It was judged not only by Ivlev and Kartunkova but also by a guest star — Andrey Grigoriev-Apollonov, lead singer of the band ‘Ivanushki’.

“Olga tried it, she found it delicious, Andrey tried it, said everything was wonderful and awesome. Ivlev started criticizing me, and I argued with him. I’m not sure, but maybe if Sashenka had shut her mouth in time, she’d have been the winner, not just a finalist,” Sasha muses.

The girl says she plans to take part in other TV projects. She has already applied for ‘Battle of the Chefs’ and the show ‘Russian Chef’, where the best of the best compete.