I

f you enjoy a good brags-to-riches story, then sit back and put your reading glasses on — or perhaps increase the font size on that BlackBerry of yours.

You’re about to find out how Patrice Bouttier, a French kitchen assistant working for a bankrupt tea house in the 1980s became a top notch chef at one of Jakarta’s four-star hotels, Hotel Ciputra.

His tale is one of luck and fortune, involving a French teenage cook, an Indonesian woman and an adventurous spirit.

It was a hazard that brought Bouttier to Indonesia. After he did his military service — compulsory at the time — in the Mediterranean for a year and half, Bouttier settled in Marseille, in the South of France, where he took different jobs as a kitchen assistant before ending up in a tea house as a cook.

He worked there for a while, but the restaurant went bankrupt and the owner could not pay Bouttier his last paychecks.

This stroke of fate changed Bouttier’s life. Indeed, the owner of the tea house, who happened to be married to an Indonesian woman, decided to go to Indonesia after his tea house failed.

Six months later, Bouttier received a one-way ticket to Medan, North Sumatra, as payment for his loyal services back in France.

Bouttier was 24 years old at the time, and had never left his home country. So he accepted the offer and flew to Indonesia. That was in 1992. Almost 20 years on, he is still living here.

So as you can see, everything started as a series of small hazardous events. But this is not what brought him where he is today.

Bouttier is humble, and this may be one of the keys to his success. And if he did have a lucky star, it also came with talent, which led to his destiny. What kind of talent?

Cooking, of course. He learned very quickly how to cook Indonesian food, to which he brought a French touch that seemed to be highly appreciated.

In Indonesia, and as opposed to France, turnover in the restaurant business is huge. So he ended up having to change work places every two years.

After a few months of wandering, he finally settled as a chef in Orleans, an American restaurant in Jakarta. But not for long. Off he was again, travelling around Indonesia as a chef in Kalimantan, Medan, Surabaya, and Bali; a consultant in Bali, where he also cooked French, Indonesian, American food and specialized in patisserie.

So Bouttier has an undeniable talent for cooking and learning new cuisines.

But intuition is another key to success, and Bouttier definitely has it. His intuition led him to move to the right spot at the right time, and improve every place he passed.

Over time, he specialized in opening and revamping restaurants.

This is actually what he was hired to do in Hotel Ciputra, where the restaurant dates back to 1980s.

His priority? Rationalize the use of products.

“Instead of reducing the quality of the product, we need to start by optimizing the products we buy: if you take a chicken for instance, everything in it is worth something, you can make a broth out of the bones. If you use the product at a 100 percent, you can save a lot of money!” he explained to The Jakarta Post.

The second step, he said, is to revamp the menu. He is thinking of creating a fusion menu, mixing both Indonesian and Western influences and of developing the patisserie side of it as well.

But perhaps the most important quality as a chef is to know how to manage a team.

There are fifty people to manage in Hotel Ciputra’s kitchen. And Bouttier’s style of management is very much people oriented.

“As soon as I get to a new workplace, managers always warn me ‘be careful, people are not like in your country,’ they always complain about how they work. [But] I can’t see a real difference between Indonesian and French cooks.

They have the same potential. It is my job to enhance this potential. And anyway, you can’t just come to a new place and impose your lifestyle. Expats should never forget that they are guests here. So we adapt.”

And he has adapted pretty well until now.