Chef Talk with Waldorf Astoria’s Hubert Bourdon

A culinary career wasn’t on Hubert Bourdon’s radar growing up. The native Parisian received his first crossbike – a peewee Yamaha he rode in the garden – at age 14, and from there he started racing, quickly making his way up to the professional level by 17. He wanted to become a mechanical engineer, going so far as to enroll in engineering school, and only fell into the kitchen as a way to support himself between races.

“I raced motorcycles for four years until one day my father told me my mother couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t handle it anymore,” he says. “And I lost two of my best friends. It was the time to stop.”

Then, luck happened by. Bourdon had already racked up an education and experience in the world of food when he met his benefactor on the side of a road. He was coming back from a race in the south of Spain with his pit crew, and they spotted an immaculately-dressed man standing next to a BMW with a flat tire. So they pulled over to the side of the road and changed the tire for him in less than a minute. The grateful man tried to pay him, but Bourdon refused, so he put his business card in Bourdon’s pocket and told him to call anytime so he could return the favour.

The man with the flat tire turned out to be the Vice President of HR for Le Meridien group. Not one to pass up an opportunity, Bourdon called the man and told him that in addition to being handy with a jack and a lug, he knew his way around a kitchen. The next thing he knew, he had his first expatriate job at the Le Meridien in Cairo as an Italian chef.

“They changed my name to Umberto,” he laughs. During his nomadic childhood, he lived six years in Italy, so he spoke the language and managed to pull off his faux Italian heritage for one and a half years, before heading off to another Le Meridien property in Gisenyi, Rwanda. When war broke out between the Tutsis and Hutus, the army started evacuating foreigners, including Bourdon.

“The capital was under fire, but at our area, we were having a barbecue. I was cooking Sunday brunch by the pool with all the guests when we were evacuated,” he says. “[The UN Peacekeepers] came in with bazookas and said, ‘French, Belgian and Swiss people, come to reception’.”

They were told to pack only necessary items in a single suitcase, then they were packed into an army convoy. Bourdon left most of his life’s belongings behind, grabbing only his passport, diplomas and a picture of himself on a motorcycle. Some of his countrymen jumped out of the convoy, running back to the hotel where their unofficial wives were staying. Bourdon never heard from them again.

They spent three days in Kigali waiting for the plane to land amidst the fighting before being taken back to France. Bourdon started to rebuild his life, moving back in with his parents and working for one of the country’s richest men as a private chef. But he got bored, and applied for a job in Turkey, starting a love affair with the country that has lasted on and off for almost 20 years. He’s made pit stops over the years in Azerbaijan, Japan and Dubai, but always went back to Turkey – where his future wife waited for him. “My heart was in Istanbul,” he says.

Then he received an opportunity to become Director of Operations and Culinary for the Rixos Hotels group. Based in Turkey, they also had hotels in Croatia, Russia and Libya, where Bourdon served meals to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi at a hotel that later housed interational journalists and came under siege during last year's civil war. Bourdon got out just in time to avoid another war zone, leaving his post in January 2011. He decided to step back from the managerial role he was playing and head back to the kitchen, accepting an offer to become executive chef at the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund.

“For five years, I missed the white jacket. When you walk in the lobby in a suit, no one looks at you. When you walk in the lobby with a chef’s jacket on, people automatically look at you. And I like people looking at me.”