Estonian chef on working for Saudi prince: The chaos scared me

Estonian chef Mati Lüdimois, who has previously for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, told ETV show "Ringvaade" how he had to prepare food under extremely close supervision and how chaotic his work in Saudi became. Now, Lüdimois has opened his own restaurant in Tartu, serving food that brings together flavors from all the different cuisines he has worked with in his career.
"I ended up doing what I wanted to do. I can apply all my experience here, in my own restaurant 'Puente,' where we bridge all these different cuisines I've experienced in my life," said Lüdimois.
"Puente" means "bridge" in Spanish, and Lüdimois' new restaurant is in Tartu's Aparaaditehas.
Lüdimois spent several years working in Spain, where his favorite cuisine became Nikkei – a type of fusion with Peruvian and Japanese influences. "That freshness, simplicity and straightforwardness, while insisting on high quality in everything, is really appealing to me," he said.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Lüdimois returned home to Estonia. "I then received an email from one of my agents saying that a VIP client in Saudi was looking for a chef. An offer was made, but it didn't satisfy me in any way. A month went by and then a better offer came in and so I said 'okay, let's give it a try,'" Lüdimois recalled.
It was only then that requests for different documentation started coming in – security checks, health checks, background checks on his immediate family and other relatives. " Having sent all the paperwork off, I managed to forget about it in the meantime," he told ERR.
Ten months later, the agent called to say that everything had been sorted and that Lüdimois should fly out to Saudi Arabia right away. It wasn't until he arrived that Lüdimois found out who he would be working for. The VIP client turned out to be Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
"In the course of the doing the job, my colleagues who had been there before also told plenty of stories, but they are the kind of stories I would rather not pass on," Lüdimois said.
The Estonian chef also saw bin Salman up close on a couple of occasions. "The security team made that mistake twice, so we were close together."
The kitchen Lüdimois worked in served dishes from seven different national cuisines, and there were 20 chefs working there. The work itself was extremely stressful, and he had to be prepared to work around the clock.
"He had a lot of different palaces and all of them were unique. One good example is Sharma, where the huge NEOM megacity is currently under construction. We lived in sea containers, outside the NEOM area, in the desert. We drove our golf buggies through the security checkpoints to get to work, and then it was all greenery and luxury," Lüdimois said.
"The most exhausting thing was that we had some travel restrictions. You couldn't be more than an hour away from the hotel and you always had to have a suitcase with your work clothes ready. If there was a plan to fly to Paris, London or wherever, some chefs would have to pack up and leave immediately. If a message came up on WhatsApp with a red asterisk, you had to run," he said.
According to Lüdimois, the most frustrating thing for him was the huge amount of waste and indifference to the cost.
"'Medically trained' soldiers were in the kitchen all the time checking that there were masks, gloves and goggles," Lüdimois said. "One person started sorting through blueberry bushes in the morning to make sure that all the blueberries were the same size when they were served, as well as that they were not spoiled."
One of the things that really scared him there was the chaos. "It was kind of out of control. There were planned visits, when the prince would fly away and we sent chefs in advance [to prepare] several meals, while three of us stayed in the kitchen. But these gentlemen never ate local food, so we packed everything from our home kitchen under guard. The chefs put their stickers on, and then we sent them off to the locations. But then, the prince decided he wasn't going to go anywhere, he was going to miss four trips. So the three of us just sat there for a couple of weeks, killing time while the others were waiting in hotels in Moscow and London," he recalled.
Lüdimois worked for bin Salman for nearly a year. "The longest shifts we had were 48 hours. That's when I realized I had a limit," he recalled, adding that he ended up in hospital with a health problem as a result of the grueling work.
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Editor: Annika Remmel, Michael Cole
Source: "Ringvaade," interviewer Heleri All