NOMAD Magazine | The Beginnings | El Nomadic Chef

Jack Cosson is a traveling chef who is based out of London, England. He's on Instagram as @el_nomadic_chef!

Adriana Pintriel Photography

El Nomadic Chef

The Beginnings

The official brand “El Nomadic Chef” came to life very recently,27 March 2018 to be exact; although, it is a concept I have beenstruggling with for ages.

I was born an Aries, starting in England on the 8th of April, and was raised in Spain from the age of 10. I experienced a cultural fusion very early on. I was taken away from my familiar, childish world in England and thrown into an uncertain, adult world in Spain. I remember one of my biggest challenges in Spain being the language. A fear of failure and my perfectionist nature lead me to speak only when necessary or I was certain of the phrase. I convinced myself I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. I inadvertently shaped myself into a very shy and introverted character for the remainder of my school years. On the one hand, my self-esteem and socializing skills suffered; however, my independent self grew out of necessity. These initial challenges in Spain were the catalyst for my selfsearching, ground zero for the restlessness of my psyche.

My shyness may have inhibited my participation in the classroom and break time, but I got on well with my peers and teachers. Even still, my efforts focused around academics. For those very efforts, I received recognition with high grades; I was a very disciplined student.

During my second year in Spain, I was still struggling to speak the language face-to-face with my classmates, but I beat the whole class in our written verb conjugation exams. I sought certainty and structure, like that of an exam or a conversation with close friends, but I felt alienated by large groups, like the interactions in the classroom. The more conversations I had with others, the easier it became to break through the social barrier. Although it bent, the barrier never broke; these childhood experiences were a permanent blueprint for my life to come.

Typically, Spanish students at the age of 16 graduate from secondary school and enter “Bachillerato” which is somewhat equivalent to high school in the US. The Bachillerato Objective: prepare you for university, orient you toward a career, and start your specialization. Your three orientations: Health Sciences, Technology & Maths, or Social Sciences. I elected for the second. I had always been good at Maths, and I continued my pursuit for certainty in the world while I struggled to find myself. My insecurity dominated my decision-making. Since I couldn’t even figure myself out, I needed to study something I knew I could perform in; I needed the external comfort zone to counteract my internal discomfort. Hindsight begs me to have studied one of the other two paths, as my current self is fascinated by and a student of both health and social sciences today.

I remember being very frustrated during these last two years of school. I started to turn on my teachers and parents, the very people to whom I was so loyal. I started to rebel. Up to this point in my life, I had always done my best to please those around me. Ignorance of myself was self-destructive, and the next stages were mundane and inevitable. I lost interest in school. I turned to the gym and smoking pot with my friends to cope. Some days, I would work out before class, coast through school, workout after class, and soothe myself to sleep with a fat joint. I learned to dread going to class; my rationale on self-purpose was diverging from the structure that I used to crave. I would excuse myself from school if I could come up with a reasonable justification in my own mind, nevermind what anyone else thought of the excuse. Philosophy classes were the antithesis of the Math classes that bored me. They triggered self-questioning that fed my new uncertainties. The marihuana helped in that pursuit of who I was, offering up the world from an alternative perspective.

Through the turmoil of my two years of Bachillerato, I found the end of the program, scoring a 7.7 out of 10 in my “Selectividad” papers. With my modest score on the university exam, I had the opportunity to choose my university and program. Architecture Engineering or Industrial Engineering. These were options presented to me due to my skills in Maths and Technical Drawing. The papers pitched them as my options, as my decision point. Is that even a decision? It was simply a continuation of what I was rebelling against the last two years. What was I even deciding on; denial or ignorance? They both looked like the same election I made in my High School Orientation. The external world saw my promise as an engineer, but I couldn’t imagine myself as an architect nor an engineer. I was ready to take my first leap of faith. To nip the notion in the bud, I want to strike down any notion that I was brave or somehow enlightened. I didn’t step out because I was all of a sudden more courageous than the two years previous; it was the contrary. I stepped out in fear of spending four more years fighting a fate for which I feigned interest. How could I do that to myself again? Do I loathe myself enough to maintain a painful path, just to satisfy those around me? I had to make a selfish choice, no matter the consequences. The positive side of selfishness crept into my purview, and up until this point, I only saw the negatives that I had been taught.

Erick Tejas | @kcure

In May 2009, two weeks before the deadline, I decided I wouldn’t be pursuing either of my choices. Starting with my close family, I came clean and bore the truth. I forced myself through the discussions, finding it painful to breach the topic, despite my apparently defiant practices during Bachillerato. The rebellion was only skin deep; I still deeply cared what they thought. Immediately after the release of my inner self, relief rushed in to fill the void that just formed; the rush of relief was such a contrast to the substantial efforts required in sharing my honest self. My parents didn’t react as I had imagined; they supported me unconditionally. I realised the scenarios of judgement that I created in my head simply were not true; they were fantasies in my head and never extended beyond my skull. I was living with my mum, and she encouraged me to look into possible options at university. My thought process was direct: studying by the only definition I knew for another four years fell low among my priorities, so I needed to find something that was not studying as I had known, but a pursuit of my passions. Nutrition, cooking, and fitness were the avenues by which I rebelled. They were handson and practical, fitting nicely with the classroomphobia that I developed after my last 2 years at school.

After many leads that resulted in dead ends, we came across a Hotel-University in Barcelona offering a degree in Hotel Management. My mum and I were sitting at her computer in the upstairs bedroom, googling away and sipping on tea as us English do. We were filtering through the humdrum of modern campuses. As we looked at more and more universities, they all began to blend together. Suddenly, we flipped to a 70s-era hotel, humbly perched on a cliff top and overlooking the Mediterranean sea. It was located in a small fisherman’s village, “Sant Pol de Mar,” about a 40 minute drive north of Barcelona. I think my rebellion and honesty just lead me to study food on a Spanish beach. We phoned the university, discussed the necessary, and the decision shortly followed. With some help from my family and a national grant, I started anew with a life in Barcelona in September 2009.

Erick Tejas | @kcure

At the university, I found something that I not only excelled in but something that I truly enjoyed. And I was quickly recognised for it; that recognition injected a much needed boost to my self-confidence. The kitchen became my new playground, the primary avenue for my creative side. I was no longer choosing between my intellect and my emotion. They were feeding simultaneously and helping each other grow. With confidence overflowing from the kitchen, I gradually started to develop my social self. In Barcelona, no one knew how I struggled with groups and how shy I was before. I reinvented myself. I made connections. I was finally growing into myself. Monopolizing on the growing momentum, I also fell into my first foray with love.

During each summer sabbatical, I worked in London restaurants, caterers, and hotels through the guidance of my Auntie. She worked in the city’s hospitality industry and encouraged me to do so as well. I was applying the mixture of theory and practice that was taught in the University on the Beach. That very mixture of theory and application became pivotal in my embrace of the industry. It harkens back to the balance I sought by pursuing cooking, juxtaposing my intellect and my emotion. Both are necessary and inform the other. As hospitality students, we were required to take Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve shifts at the hotel. While most others were on break, we were applying our new found skills; we were rooting ourselves in reality, far from the “theory bubble” fostered in some contemporary universities.

My objective in the university was to prepare myself for selfsufficiency in the cooking industry, and while challenging at times, I completed the four years with a sense of accomplishment on a personal and professional level.

By June 2013, I had completed the university training, and I was searching for my next opportunity. At the end of the fourth year, the university set up an interviewing platform with international hotel chains from all reaches of the world, offering internships and job opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be tempted by some alluring opportunities, one even taking me to the Caribbean, but most of my opportunities were low-paying internships, relying on skill development for payment. I held tight to my independence and, in a way, wanted to fend for myself. With all of the progress and confidence I had built in university, I regressed by working for a known entity, a restaurant I had trained in during one of my summer breaks. Believing myself to be wise at the time, I chose known territory again, instead of taking a leap.

I moved to London, worked one day at the restaurant, and unexpectedly fell into 3 months of rehabilitation. It proved to be a setback for my new career at the restaurant. It is hard to distinguish how much of that extended rehab was due to my psychosomatic response to the newly-returning internal conflict of taking a known role. Hindsight has afforded a clearer view of how the emotional and mental body affected my physical. Regardless of the degree to which it was self inflicted, my rehab left me largely homebound with only time on my hands. Being the raw and emotionally torn person that you, my audience, has so patiently learned throughout this passage, I unsurprisingly contemplated life once more. But that only lasted so long. I came across the rapidly evolving infrastructure of the internet and encountered platforms like “Couchsurfing” and “Workaway.” These new sharing-economy platforms were responsible for my next paradigm shift, a new way of operating in the world. I could now shirk the formalities that held me in conflict. After much planning and more procrastination, I reserved a one way flight to India; coincidentally, a friend of mine felt a similar sense of angst with traditional career paths. We booked the trip out east together; the company for my plunge into the deep end was welcome, making the transition easier. Before the flight, my practical training kicked in, and I worked for a couple of months in Spain to stockpile as much capital as possible, leaving with around £3,000 in my bank account. Our nomadic plan was not complex, possibly a reflection on us: we were to travel around Asia for as long as we could afford before ending up in Australia. Australia was the land of opportunity where we could get jobs and finish out our Gap Year, replacing some of our spent money.

Erick Tejas | @kcure

Read the next part of the story in next month's issue of NOMAD, releasing August 1!