How to Become a Chef (Real Examples)

Tessa Baker

Tessa Baker is a chef and a painter. However, she started with food and at the lowest rung – she was a waitress at the restaurant in London while still a teen. When she was about 15, her father suggested that she go to Switzerland and work as an apprentice chef. She finished her training and returned to England where she went to art school, but was not happy there.

She went back to cooking and worked as the head chef and only chef at The Howard Arms in Warwickshire, The General Trading Company and finally The Watermill Theatre in Newbury. She fell in love but was later dumped and then fled to France where she worked briefly in a motor yacht, then at St. Tropez and then finally on a boat sailing around the world.

Then she went to do art classes in Venice and finally had solo exhibitions of her paintings in Valbonne and in London. Now she works as a chef in summer and paints in winter, holding exhibitions in spring and autumn.

‘The two are similar in ways. For me it is all about the senses, about vision and color and smell and teasing the taste buds and flirting with people’s thoughts and hoping I can evoke an emotion in people both from my food and with my art,’ she says about painting and cooking.