Shamburaje Shedge, Executive Chef – Hotel Fidalgo

Mr. Shamburaje Shedge, who hails from Pune, Maharashtra from a middle class family, has a Bachelors degree in Hotel Management Catering Technology and has specialised in Bakery & Confectionary. His cooking traits come from his mother. He discloses that his mother is a great cook and he would assist her in cooking at family functions. He had a great desire to join the defence. His professor was aware of his cooking instincts and so advised him to join hotel management, which was then taken up as a profession only by the elite.

He started his career in this interesting profession as a Project Team Member at McDonald and has worked in all the areas of the restaurant. Further he functioned as the Sous Chef at various hotels like Hotel Orchid, Hotel Peppermint, Hotel United 21 and at P & O Cruises handling diverse activities like planning kitchen layout, designing menu and procurement, standardising recipes and costing, controlling the F&B cycle, staff training, and much more. He has an experience of 13 long years in this profession .Presently he is the Executive Chef at Hotel Fidalgo.

Coming into a hard core profession full of gruelling and exposure to the public was initially a bit challenging for Mr. Shedge. He says that being a chef is a skilful job and it is quite difficult for the new comers to get jobs immediately and easily. He advises the new comers joining this industry to keep learning, become skilled, work hard and keep themselves updated which is, now quite easy due to the easy accessibility of Google.

Being in this profession, he believes that every chef needs to be updated about the current trends of the hospitality industry and be innovative in his approach. He updates himself through the social media and by reading various books. He is very much influenced by a restaurant named Durby – The Soul Food in Washington DC wherein they adhere to basic and conventional cooking methods on firewood. In Fidalgo , Pune he initiated cooking in earthenware as he feels we have to go down to our basics which brings us back to the origin. This helps to enhance the guests experience as nowadays people have become more health conscious and look forward to consume healthy and organic food. So essentially we need to go back to our basics.

He trains his juniors to enhance their performance. Presently at Fidalgo, he has a huge responsibility of the entire F&B which he administers with his excellent team of around 70 people who shoulder his responsibility. His ultimate goal is customer satisfaction and so he trains his staff to be guest oriented with courteous communication. So he feels that team development and teamwork go a long way to accomplish the objective of guest satisfaction.

“Kindness and courtesy are the root of a positive customer service experience.”