Cooking one’s-self: from homeless to a professional pizza chef

Ivo stops for a split second. His job is tiring, his face shows. His usual funny and positive expression suddenly changes. He is thinking about the dream he had last night. The dream that made him wake up completely covered in sweat. “I keep dreaming of going back in again and again. That I lose my freedom. Today you’re out and the day after tomorrow you can be back in,” he says.

Ivo has been having these dreams for the past few years. “I dream too much about it. I think I’m back in galera (the Italian term for “jail”), and I wake up suddenly.”

His journey to becoming a professional pizza chef wasn’t easy. His life before that wasn’t either.

In search for a better future

Ivo Georgiev was born in Blagoevgrad (Bulgaria) in 1973. Ancient history was his passion. However, the old communist Bulgarian government forced him to do military service at the age of 17. He never studied a degree. He never studied anything related to history.

In the military he worked as a cook. “The military was the same as galera. Military in Bulgaria was very bad, and I was in the kitchen — imagine the people who were outside in the real military, in the mountains,” he says.

Ivo was in the military until 1993. After that everything changed in Bulgaria: communism crumbled, and the military was dismantled. Ivo went back to Blagoevgrad. He had nothing. He started working at a fast food restaurant as a waiter. He didn’t like it so he learned how to cook the burgers that were served there and became a cook. “I didn’t know anything about cooking, only military cooking, but that is a different ball game,” he says. He spent the next seven years switching jobs; all related to food and restaurants.

In 2001 he got a phone call from one of his friends. “There was nothing here. No future at all. Then they opened the borders and we were curious, we wanted to see other countries. Italy, Spain, we wanted to see Europe. All my friends had left,” he says. “Two or three of my friends had gone to Italy and they convinced me to go and join them”. Ivo then decided to leave Bulgaria to go to Milan in search of a better future. It would take a long time to find.

“I arrived in January and I only worked for a month. Then I got kicked out of the job,” he says. Italy then became a nightmare. “We had no job, we did nothing all day. We ate out of trash containers from the back of supermarkets, we slept in abandoned cars or in abandoned factories,” he explains, “it was very hard”. “They [the factories] had no electricity, no water, sometimes, if we were lucky, they would have water in them. It was dark and cold. We spent three years like that. You can’t imagine,” he adds.

Creating opportunity out of darkness

“We used to always have problems with the police,” Ivo says. Him and his friends knew that if they were stopped by the Italian police after more than three months without a job they would be deported back to Bulgaria. That was a risk they weren’t willing to take. To avoid being deported, they never had their IDs or any kind of documents on them.

After being stopped 17 times by the police Ivo was sentenced to four months of prison in the south of Italy. “When they put me in jail, I felt better than on the streets. The first two days were hard, I was really scared, but after two days I met Bulgarian friends and it all went better,” he says.

It was then when Ivo’s life took a turn. “I was only in for four months, but you learn from them. When you’re young and make mistakes, you learn from them. You stop doing stupid things,” he comments.

Ivo spent his jail time taking advantage of the free courses the prison offered to learn Italian. He stayed out of trouble. “People in jail were very nice. Even the people from the mafia gave us cigarettes and food, and they would normally ask if we needed anything,” he says. “They knew we were scared of being there. They were sentenced for 15 or 20 years so they didn’t care anymore. People were very good to me.”

In jail, Ivo focused on taking as many courses as he could. He felt relieved, he didn’t have to run away from authorities anymore. He found peace in an Italian prison. “The guards didn’t care at all, they woke you up and they opened the door. If you wanted to eat, you ate, if you wanted to go out to the yard, you did,” he says. “Prison is hard here in Bulgaria, Serbia, Rusia, — all the Balkans, it’s very hard. But in Italy prison was okay.”

When he left jail, four months later, he knew 4000 words in Italian, so he was able to get a stable job. “They put me in galera for four months and then I learned Italian (laughs). There’s always something good in the bad,” he says with a smile. Ivo is glad he was incarcerated because, ironically, it gave him a second chance. But he knew he didn’t ever want to go back in. “Four months [in prison] is okay, but imagine four years.”

“After jail it was all very easy,” he says. He was 29 years old when he was released and had the chance to get a new fresh start. He took it. “When I got out, I started to speak the language better and better, I started to work, I was smarter.”

From rags to riches

Ivo can’t really remember how he started working on the stove oven. One time, during his early days in Italy, he was asked if he knew how to use one of them. He didn’t, but he had been watching his partners using one, so he said he did and just started copying what his partners were doing. “I never say I don’t know how to do something. I always say ‘yes, I can do it’, then I see how it’s done and I go for it,” he says.

That’s how he became a professional pizza chef. He cooks pizza the traditional way, using a stove oven at 700º C that cooks pizzas in less than a minute.

“It’s very difficult to work with this type of oven. Gas or electric are much easier but this one is very hard,” he comments while he proves that he has mastered the technique after years and years of practice.

Ivo would stay in Italy for 10 years. During his last three and a half years, he didn’t work cooking pizzas, he worked cooking paninis in a truck outside of the San Siro stadium during concerts and football games. That’s when he made the most money in all of his food career. “I worked for somebody, the business was not mine, but the money was very good because we worked very hard,” he says.

Ivo then decided to move to London, where he would spend the next nine years. After working in six or seven different pizzerias, he reached the peak of his career: he was hired as a pizza chef in The Mews of Mayfair restaurant, one of the most expensive in London. “There was one night when the table Cost 3000 pounds just to make a reservation and then people paid for their food and drinks as well. Once, Tony Blair even booked. This place was the center of the center of London, it is the most exclusive place.”

Ivo met his wife through a dating site while he was in London. She was also from Blagoevgrad and three months after she met him on-line, she left the town to live in London with him. Years after, they had a son and Ivo quit his longest lasting job (two and a half years) in London to move back to Blagoevgrad because he wanted to raise his child in Bulgaria.

Three days after he quit his job in London, he was working in Largo’s View restaurant (where he currently works). “Can you imagine? I was working in the center of London on the 27th of February and on the 2nd of March I was here [back in Blagoevgrad]. The difference was very big.”

The entrepreneur

After three years working in Largo, Ivo is tired: “this is a very hard job. Saturday, Sunday, you have to work. When people stay home, you have to work, on celebration days, you have to work.” He has also recently had surgery done on his right arm as a result of an injury from work. Ivo has the same problem with his left arm but he doesn’t want to have an operation on it until he recovers from the previous one because he doesn’t want to be on work leave. “I work with one hand. But I can’t work alone, I have to work with somebody,” he says.

He doesn’t stop working because he needs the money to pursue his next goal: to open his own business. “I want to open my own business, do bigger things, but it’s more expensive here,” he says while he adds idea of opening a joint business with his sister in London, who already has a pastry shop there. “I want to fix myself and leave. Because the money is there, not here,” he comments. “I’ve had the idea of opening the business with my sister for six years. I want this to happen. I am sure we can do it because I know a lot of people in London, I’ve worked with many from different jobs and countries. I know Arabs who have a lot of money.”

“I don’t know very much about business, but I know something: I’ve seen a lot of things. When you work a lot in different places you end up learning a lot of stuff — a little bit of this, a little bit of that — and then you start doing them by yourself,” he states.

If Ivo doesn’t finally open the business with his sister, he has a backup plan: he wants to open a pizza place with a friend in Plovdiv. But Ivo really wants to go back to London because he thinks everything is better there. He complains about the corruption in Bulgaria: “I work full time and I get paid full time but in my contract it says it’s half time, four hours. Every worker in this place has the same contract. Everything is a half-day contract in this country, that’s why I don’t like it.”

“I came back because I wanted to be back home. I missed the clean air and the food. My son was born in London, but I wanted my son to grow up here. He is already four, and now I think London is a better place to raise him,” he says. “I speak four languages (English, Bulgarian, Italian and Russian, because his grandmother was from Russia). If my son grows up in London, he is going to speak English and Bulgarian and if he studies a third language it’ll be great for his future,” he concludes.