Being deaf has never affected my ability in the kitchen
...explains the three-times winner of the Scottish Chef of the Year
AT first glance it looks like any other busy restaurant kitchen. Chefs bark orders over stainless steel counters, plates of food are whisked away by harried-looking servers, and the heat is almost unbearable. Catch sight of the man at the centre of it all though, wearing a tall chef’s hat and smoothly conducting proceedings like a finely tuned orchestra, and it becomes clear this is a rather extraordinary working environment.
Bruce Price is the executive chef at the Crieff Hydro hotel and a triple winner of Scottish Chef of the Year. He is also deaf.
At the Hydro he runs a brigade of 45 chefs in the hotel’s enormous kitchens. He doesn’t have sign language, and instead communicates with his staff through lip-reading, verbal commands, written notes and a whiteboard in the middle of the kitchen on which he writes regularly, marking up the day’s business each morning. It’s a unique system that works so well, most of his staff now cannot imagine working any other way.
Communicating with Price is an intriguing experience. This interview was conducted via several methods – questions answered over email, a face-to-face conversation monitored by Price’s long-time friend and colleague Joan Cunningham, who understands his speech and helps explain what he is saying.
Otherwise there is the occasional Post-It note, on which Price writes down words in order to get his point across.
This is often the combination he uses also with his staff, who to a man and woman are fiercely loyal to their executive chef.
‘You just don’t notice until someone asks you about it,’ says 23-yearold pastry chef Beth Douglas, who has worked with Price for six years. ‘It would feel weird if we didn’t do this.’
Price, 53, who is originally from New Zealand, feels the same way. He and his twin brother Andrew were both born deaf, and from the word go were taught that nothing should be off-limits.
‘I have never, ever thought of my deafness as a disability,’ he says. ‘If I had sat at home and thought “I can’t do that, or shouldn’t try that because I’m deaf”, I would never have travelled the world or worked in so many top hotels.’
His credentials are extraordinary. After a five-year apprenticeship at the prestigious Hermitage Hotel in New Zealand’s Mount Cook Village, where he started out as a lowly breakfast chef, he went on to work in some of the best restaurants in New Zealand before moving to Adelaide and then Taiwan, where he worked as banqueting chef in the Grand Hyatt hotel in Taipei.
Europe beckoned in the form of the Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich, by which time he had proved himself an excellent, adaptable chef with flair, initiative and a reputation for serious hard work. In the face of his impressive skills, his deafness simply did not matter.
INDEED, this is a chef so talented that in 1991 he turned down a job offer from the Savoy Hotel in London in preference to taking up a role in the kitchen at the Old Course Hotel in St Andrews.
It was to prove an auspicious move – it was in the Fife town that he met and fell in love with his wife Louise (the couple now have two children and live near Dundee).
It was also in St Andrews that he won Scottish Chef of the Year (a title he has now clinched three times), and in the process redefined the modern kitchen in an era where shouty, sweary chefs (take a bow, Gordon Ramsay) have become, if not quite the norm, then certainly a familiar caricature.
‘Most of my staff only take a short time to understand me, and for me it takes about three weeks or so to learn to lip read with someone new,’ he says.
‘I use various methods of communication at work, email and text message are the most important as obviously I can’t use the phone. In the kitchen I talk to my staff and when necessary write instructions down, we also have a white board that is useful for leaving instructions.’
His chefs say there is always a period of adjustment when new members of staff are hired as they adapt to this unusual working environment. Beth Douglas recalls the reaction in the kitchen when Price first arrived at the Hydro.
‘It was a bit daunting to begin with,’ she says.
‘When Bruce first came in we had a big team meeting and our head chef at the time said that our new executive chef was deaf and can’t really speak clearly and we all thought: “How is this going to work? How does he communicate with people?”
‘But you just get used to it. I don’t even know when that happened but pretty quickly we were able to understand what he was saying.
‘And if you ever don’t understand you just tell him, and he’ll write it down.’
MANASH Kolaparth, 39, head chef at the hotel’s Brasserie, has cooked in some of London’s top kitchens and spent two years working with Raymond Blanc. He says that working alongside Price over the past two years has taught him a lot about food, and the contrast with some of his previous places of employment is stark.
‘As a chef, Bruce is more refined,’ he says. ‘When it comes to food, what you’re really talking about is taste, smell, sight – all senses that Bruce has. He can tell from his eyes how he feels about the food. There’s an honesty about it. It’s a very truthful way of cooking.’
When teaching his staff a dish, or constructing something new, Price will often demonstrate it step by step in order to communicate to his staff what he wants, and what his vision is.
‘There are certain dishes where he’ll just say “watch”, as opposed to trying to explain it,’ says Douglas. ‘It’s easier for him, and then it’s pretty easy for us to just copy whatever it is he’s just done.’
Kolaparth admits that he initially found communication with Price challenging.
‘At the beginning it was hard because I thought I couldn’t explain things to him,’ he says.
‘But gradually you build up a very good rapport and he understands what I need to explain to him. He really tests us and all the people working under him.
‘If he doesn’t like what’s happening he lets me know. He’ll come to the pass [the area of the kitchen where dishes are plated and orders given to chefs as they come in] and if he’s not happy he’ll write down a note and say “we can do it better”. He’s not here to shout at the chefs, but he also maintains pressure on you to do your best.’
Indeed, Price may just be the polar
opposite of the shouty chef, although the kitchen isn’t necessarily quieter.
‘It’s busy but organised,’ says Price.
‘But it’s better for the chefs if the kitchen is calm and there is good communication. If someone’s not happy, they can come and see me.’ When I ask what makes a happy and calm kitchen he thinks for a moment and then writes down the word ‘TEAM’.
The driving force behind Price’s success is his mother, who, with two deaf sons, was determined they would lead happy, regular lives.
‘As a young deaf child I did not learn to use sign language,’ he says. ‘Both my twin brother and I have been profoundly deaf since birth, and my mother felt we should learn to lip-read so that we would be able to communicate in any situation.
‘She went to look at the school for deaf children and decided that it was not right for her sons. She really encouraged us both.
‘I did attend mainstream school for most subjects, but I also attended English classes which were for the deaf children at the school. These were to help improve comprehension and grammar.’
He grew up on a farm in Blenheim in New Zealand and as a child remembers the smell of ripe tomatoes in the glasshouse.
‘There were a lot of fresh vegetables and fresh produce. I would watch my Mum cook and was interested.’
Food clearly had an impact on both brothers – Price’s twin Andrew is now a pastry chef back in New Zealand.
Price admits that he did experience some bullying at school because of his deafness, but as an adult working in kitchens says he has never suffered any prejudice or discrimination. His deafness is simply a part of him, and compared to his role as a top chef, only a tiny part.
‘My deafness has never held me back. I’ve never allowed it to,’ he says.
‘There is no point thinking of being a chef as just a job. It is a profession that can take years of training to excel at.
‘A good chef should be dedicated to the role, and be willing to work long hours to learn their craft.’
FROM his first role as a breakfast chef in Mount Cook – where he vividly remembers opening the fridge in the kitchens and seeing so many fascinating foods bulging out and wishing that he could cook them – to his job at Crieff Hydro, he has always aspired to perfection.
As executive chef his role involves overseeing every dish of food produced by the hotel. Each day he does a walk round of the various hotel kitchens (the Hydro has six separate eating areas and more than 200 bedrooms) and, when required, he will assist his head chefs with prep and service in the kitchens.
Does he have a signature dish? He bats the question away. ‘Signature dishes are boring,’ he says. ‘I like to think I’m constantly changing.’
He does, however, confess a particular fondness for shellfish, particularly the scallops and lobsters of both his native New Zealand and his adopted home in Scotland.
‘As a young chef I competed in New Zealand Chef of the Year and I chose to use shellfish,’ he says. ‘It is still my favourite ingredient. Coming from New Zealand and living in Scotland, both countries have some of the best shellfish in the world.’
As for other Scottish chefs, he blows hot and cold. When I ask for his opinion on Andrew Fairlie, Gleneagles Hotel’s Michelin twostarred chef, he pulls a face and shrugs his shoulders dismissively. Is there anyone he particularly likes? He writes down the name Tom Kitchin, the Edinburgh-based Michelin starred chef.
‘His food is better than mine,’ he says simply, with a smile.
Much of his inspiration comes from recipe books (his tiny office, tucked away in the corner of the hotel kitchen, is lined with books and recipe files along with pots, pans and piles of papers), and he shyly admits that he would probably prefer to cook his own food than go out to eat.
If the rest of us could cook like Price, no doubt we too would do the same.