Katriel's Life Steps
All started when he was 8 years old, on his trip to his grandmother's house in Córdoba. During this vacation, they enjoyed cooking together pasta and tuco. Those moments awakened in Katriel an interest in cooking, which little by little would become his passion and his reason for living.
In his family, culinary practices were very common. He remembers getting together with his cousin to cook sweet things, and with his godfather, more sophisticated meals.
At the age of 12, had a clear idea of what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, and expressed his deepest desires to his mother, he said: "I want to be a chef! These words determined his destiny.
This boy's life was never easy. His parents were unemployed, and there was a lack of food in their home. So he and his brother looked for a way to get ahead together. Katriel began to attend a culinary school, to sharpen his cooking skills.
The first thing they teach him was how to make bread, and he turned it into a business opportunity. Katriel baked while his brother took care of selling the bread in their neighborhood, in the schools near their home and to the people they knew.
During his adolescence he lived through very hard times, in which there was no rest.
He worked after school, and even on weekends. He took every opportunity, he could to work such as when it was classmate's 15th birthday. He mostly did kitchen work, but when he couldn’t, he would work anywhere.
At the age of 18 he started working as an intern in a well-known restaurant in Mendoza, for 6 months, without pay. He couldn’t pay for his studies to become a university chef, so once again, his ability to reinvent himself did not fail him. He spoke to the chef of the place about his situation, and they gave him tips as a salary. The university didn’t take in consideration his situation, his mother and uncle helped him get some school supplies.
But at this moment the sacrifice did not end for Katriel, on the opposite, it was just beginning. He did not have the complete tools to study, and in his job, when he was finally hired, it continued to be difficult. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave the restaurant. He would leave the kitchen so late, that there wasn’t bus service anymore and he had to walk home for two hours in the early morning.
After some time, Katriel was fired but he quickly started working in another place, where he was not paid fairly. So he kept looking for jobs in newspapers, and found "chef needed in Calafate" a place in Argentina 2659km from Katriel's home in Mendoza, but it included all commodities, he didn't hesitate to take the job and went there for a year.
Throughout his life, he never stopped looking for ways to change his life situation. The key to his success is his mentality, "in life, it's not the things that happen to you that matter; it's what you do with the things that happen to you".
