Chasing perfection in the kitchen

English chef/restaurateur Jason Atherton has opened two dining ventures in Shanghai.[Photo provided to China Daily]

The Sheffield "donkey boy", as he is often called back in his home country because of his teenage part-time job helping his mother sell donkey rides, found his gift at 13. That's when he "fancied a girl" at school and decided to win her heart through her stomach, though he won't say what food he prepared for this precocious wooing.

"I found it very easy," he says. "I suppose it's just like singing. Someone just can take it up and down and hit the notes without even knowing it. I can taste things and pick up flavors straight away," he says.

Once while traveling with his wife and eating at a restaurant in the Philippines, he could sense that the food was cooked by a very old chef by simply tasting it. The dishes were so great yet so simple, he told himself, that this man has to be cooking for a very long period of time. The chef turned out to be 68 years old.

"It's crazy, but it just happened," he says of that encounter. "A good chef has to have sophisticated palate so that you can pick up flavors and marry them."

Having such a palate himself may have helped him become a king in the kitchen, but he credits an unstoppable pursuit of perfection－one of the biggest lessons he learned from Ramsay－for driving the growth of his own restaurant empire. Atherton's The Social Company now boasts 17 outlets worldwide and annual revenues equal to 170 million yuan ($26 million).