SALT RESTAURANT AWARDS

This is my seventh time on Salt stage for the welcoming speech. Seven years are quite a lot for the Ukrainian restaurant industry and almost next to nothing for the world restaurant market. Everything is relative, that's why I would like to quote Albert Einstein, who used to say: "If a man points at the moon, an idiot will look at the finger". In our case, the finger is fleeting trends, while the moon is timeless values. I would recommend to look both at the finger and up at the moon, and don't forget about the man. Try to understand desires of this person, what food he or she is craving for, what they would eagerly eat every day and what they would hardly try more than once a month.

Awards, prizes or positive feedback of restaurant critics are not our ultimate goal. Everything we do is for people only. We aim at feeding and satisfying our guests. To achieve this, we need to be always hungry and dissatisfied. Look at me, I'm a good example.

When we are hungry, we keep looking for new tastes and scrutinising a path of each product: from farm to plate. We discover new restaurants all over the world, we learn to read between menu lines and are not afraid of dirtying our royal mantles at the kitchen.

This means we are permanently dissatisfied. Well, I don't have to tell you. Restaurants owners say they are fully content with their restaurant, only when they want to sell it. Don't buy an existing restaurant. It's always better to create something by yourself. Make mistakes, move Heaven and Earth, let yourself have illusions and be disillusioned, win awards and catch flaks.

Congratulations on Salt Awards 2019 and a happy New Year – it is only one months ahead! The new year will be very exciting, take my word for it!