Meet The Chef: Chez Victor



Chef Victor during his long gastronomic career has worked his way through restaurants, catering businesses and kitchens in countries such as Togo (his native country), Burkina Faso, France and the UK. Today he owns and runs Chez Victor, a restaurant for exquisite French and African cuisine in Abuja.

After attending hotel school in Togo, Victor ventured beyond his home country to try his luck in Ghana and Burkina Faso. He spent ten years in Ouagadougou, working his way from waiter to Maitre d’Hotel to chef. He then established his catering business in this capital of conferences, but left Ouaga after meeting his wife to join her in London. Victor worked for the National Gallery in London before joining the large gastronomy team at Harrod’s. He worked in the famous Georgia Restaurant at Harrod’s, but also used his time in London to further his culinary career by attending the French Academy of Culinary Art, Le Cordon Bleu. He graduated and obtained the cherished Superior Cuisine Diploma in 2004.

You’ve worked across the world in many places, where has been your favorite.

Of course it’s Abuja, I love Nigeria. In west Africa I feel always at home.

There are many restaurants in Abuja and a lot of them don’t last long, how do you stay popular and current within the Abuja scene?

Next year, will be 10 years that Chez Victor has been running. The secret of this is that, if you are not a chef yourself you can’t last, that is the main secret, it’s not because you are making too much money that your surviving, you have to be a Chef to open a restaurant in Abuja, and Nigeria in order to survive. You need people that work for you and are skilled or trained and have passion to work in a restaurant, with food. There is no culinary school here where people attend and say this is going to be my career. People come to my restaurant, they stay for 6 months, 1 year, then leave because that’s not really want they want to do. Back home in Togo and abroad, people go to culinary and hospital school to learn to be a chef, a waiter, to work with food. These are the people that will stay and help make your restaurant, they are happy because they are doing what they want to do. Here in Nigeria, they are working to work, it’s simply a job, so if you don’t have those passionate people working with you, you cannot survive.

Within those 10 years, what obstacles and difficulties have you faced?

Life is full of surprising things, I put my passion and hobby in front of the business, I love to cook, I love to meet people and so the difficulty when it comes you look at it and embrace it. We have difficulties with suppliers, if you don’t want food poising, you have to bring things from far away, such as Lagos, which is expensive. And there’s the general difficulties all business owners face but we just try to put it aside, and just know its part of it.

Is there plans for a 2nd Chez Victor in Nigeria?

No, No, people are always asking and suggesting but no. I opened a Chez Victor in Togo because I had a chef, who understands what is gross profit, a chef is supposed to know if I have 1 kilo of potatoes, how much am i getting from one potato, if I fry it for chips, if I boil it. What am I going to do with the remaining potato, how much potato chips do I sell in a day before i fry all of them. You need to know how to manage your produce, you even need to know the skills for cooking a potato. We don’t have that here, there’s no passion to learn that. When I was in Le Cordon Bleu, our teachers asked us, ‘What makes the best chef’, he asked, is it the person who decorates the plate? He replied no, it‘s the person that can cook the same dish over and over again with consistency in its taste. Another problem is that, when you employ staff they are thinking about themselves and their own business so they’re not focused on the job. So until I find the right team, I’ll enjoy my one Chez Victor.

Article Featured in goabj.com/meet-chef-chez-victor/ in 2016