Meet Vyacheslav Delberg, GOODMAN brand chef
His task? Nothing less than managing all aspects of our cuisine and seeing after the food quality in all our steak-houses. His love for fire, knives and frying pans is something he inherited from his parents – both his mother and father were great cooks and taught Vyacheslav to love the food and be creative about it; he still remembers his father’s gefilte fish with rapture. No surprises here – a boy of such a family became a chef himself. It was definitely fated – his family moved to Tallinn, famous for its restaurants during the Soviet times. Estonia gave Vyacheslav his first culinary lessons (he was even lucky enough to land a job at a “Cock on a log” restaurant), to be continued in St. Petersburg and Helsinki, followed by various apprenticeships in Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Spain etc.
His most important lesson? Well, that was given by his favorite teacher, a famous Swedish chef Michael Dahlin, whose motto is “recipes are trivial, the important thing is to love your job, love being a chef”. Cuisine and romance is a marriage made in heaven (is it by chance that Vyacheslav dabbled in poetry in his youth?), and in no time he found himself out in sea, where he spent no less than 14 years. Mr. Delberg was a chef on a number of cruisers, e.g. “Tallinn”, “Georg Ots”, “Estonia”. Our romantic chef decided to leave the planks in 1994 – in order to get married, to have first five dogs, then two sons. As the millennium approached, it was clear that a new step was indicated – and that’s how Mr. Delberg arrived at GOODMAN.
Year 2004 saw him taking up the position of chef at Tverskaya GOODMAN steak-house, and on June 1, 2006 he became the brand-chef of the whole enterprise. Vyacheslav says that his time at GOODMAN has been a rich experience and allowed him to understand a very important thing: simplicity is the pinnacle of every art. He proclaims that he has no secrets at all, it’s just a small matter of salt and pepper.
And mastery of art, we would like to add.