SNAPSHOT:

The manager: Dimo Dimov
The company: Classic Gourmet Club
The job: Executive chef and restaurant manager of the Sofia establishment
In brief: Dimov manages a team of seven or eight staff - those in the kitchen and those on the floor - which includes organising schedules, resolving conflicts (though these are rare, he says), selecting products, finding suppliers, arranging deliveries, creating the weekly and seasonal menus, and thinking about the decor of the restaurant. He works between five and seven days a week, for about 12 to 15 hours a day.
He has trained in Bulgaria and France.

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Both sides involved in opening a new restaurant see opportunity - for the investors, it can be the ideal moment on the market, a propitious period to create or fill a niche. For chefs, this is where they can have the chance to hone their own style, experiment with accumulated ideas and make a name for themselves as concerns creativity and association.

And for Dimo Dimov of Classic Gourmet Club in Sofia, the 2005 opening of the restaurant led, two years later, to him being in place as the executive chef at what was named the best restaurant in Bulgaria, according to the Bacchus-Chivas Regal Restaurant of the Year Awards for 2007.

Dimov started out his career in 1996 at the Sheraton Sofia Hotel Balkan, where he was fortunate enough to get into the system at its most advanced level, thanks to Balkantourist master cooking classes and training courses. (Under communism, Balkantourist was the state-run travel agency; it as such existed until 1996.) Most greenhorns with no training in the field - Dimov studied design in high school and tourism management at the University for World and National Economy - would begin their career in the local mehana, paying dues of hours of peeling potatoes and chopping cucumbers. However, he saw that the time was ripe for entry into the kitchen, and went for it.

Between then and now, he has hacked the knife at Hotel Rodina in Sofia (at that point, also affiliated with the Balkantourist family), again at the Sheraton, then to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for a year ("I couldn't take it any more," he says), then to the four-star Odadjiiski Hotel in Dragalevtsi where he spent two years, and from there, he went to France. On and off, for about one year total. Stints of three or six months, in places like Metz (Le Pavillion at Parc Expo Metz, where he worked under the guidance of Eugene Zirn, chairman of the Association des Chefs de Moselle), Strasbourg (Au Crocodile) and Saint Avold (Restaurant L'Europe) - all in the north-eastern part of the country.

When he was in France, in the Moselle, he also earned an attestation du chef de cuisine (a sort of certification-diploma). And in 2003, he came back to Bulgaria for "almost good".

Still, from design to cuisine - how did that happen? "It was the most interesting thing for me," Dimov says to The Sofia Echo, the Monday morning five days after having won the Bacchus award. The restaurant is in the process of waking up - cleaning staff are just finishing their tasks at 10am, about the time when Dimov and the rest of the kitchen crew start arriving. "I had the luck to start (working) at the Sheraton because of the courses I was taking there. The benefit of that place was that it was at the highest level in Bulgaria, keeping to the highest standards, so I learnt how things should be."

Back in Bulgaria
In 2005, as head chef, he helped start the "new" restaurant Krim. This was the same year that investor Borislav Angelov decided to open up a place called Classic Gourmet Club; Dimov came on as head chef and manager of the restaurant from the beginning.

"The idea for the restaurant started about a year before I came," he says. They've had this space since 2003 or 2004, but it had a strange floor plan and was being used as a storage area." There are some old-looking semi-crude walls. Knowing that such do not appear just randomly in the centre of a classy restaurant, I ask: it turns that they do have a story, as they are some of the original portes from when what is now Sofia was the Roman city of Serdika. The rough brick-and-mortar construction contrasts nicely with the sleek modernism of the lounge area of the restaurant and the more classic-coloured linens of the larger dining hall.

Dimov describes the kitchen of Classic Gourmet Club as "European with French nuances", these coming from his interest in French cooking. "Most of the dishes are original creations. I take pieces of French and Italian cooking and incorporate the interesting presence of wine."

In addition to his training as a chef, Dimov has also received training in the sommelier field. The 25-page wine list at the restaurant has 250 to 300 labels from wineries ranging from France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Austria to Argentina, California, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and of all prices, from the 400 leva bottle of Joseph Phelps Insignia 2003 Napa Valley, California, and the 600 leva 1993 Chateau Latour Pauillac Premier Grand Cru Classe, to the Pamidov Unique Mavroud 2003 Thracian Region, Bulgaria, and the Finca La Celia Chardonnay 2006 out of Uco Valley, Argentina, both 30 leva. Included is a good selection of Bulgarian wines. "It's hard to find good Bulgarian cellars. Happily, in the past two years this has been changing," he says, naming some of the best-quality wineries. Personally, his favourites are those made from rubin and from shiroka melnishka loza (aka, Melnik), both native Bulgarian varietals.

More than a kitchen
While Dimov is the executive chef of the restaurant, he is also the general manager - everything that happens here is basically under his jurisdiction. That means that though he comes in at about 10am, he often does not leave before midnight, and that between five and seven days a week. One wonders if he has any time for himself; he says that he does, though it be after the clock chimes 12am. And he tries and takes days off when possible, usually Saturdays (Saturday lunches are a slower point in the week) or Sundays. His interests still revolve around the kitchen, however: he lists one of his hobbies as browsing through new tableware and china offerings, while also liking to read blogs and websites dedicated to food and wine like Wine Enthusiast, Wine Spectator, Gourmet magazine, cuisinetv.fr, Chef Talk and, of course, Jamie Oliver.
All questions arising at the restaurant are to be directed to him. And through this, his seven or eight staff members present each day (three or four wait- and barstaff, three plus him in the kitchen) know that when an issue is brought up, it will not be thrown back with an answer from above: Dimov bases his leadership on a principle of consultation and mutual respect.

This respect extends to the guests. Which he emphasises are "guests, not clients - they're not coming to a pharmacy". This welcomeness is one of the basic tenets of how the restaurant operates. To offer this quality and comfort, "we have to find a balance in good cooking styles for it not to be strange for our Bulgarian guests, and for it to also be interesting for our foreign guests". Foreigners make up about 50 per cent of the restaurant's clientele.

The second principle of Classic Gourmet Club is the attention to its products, be they the service that the guests receive or the food that they eat. Their head waiter trained at a classed hotel, starting out when he was 16; he's now 22. Dimov brought him along from a previous location where they worked together. "It's a very young team," he says. "They do not have the erroneous habits that older ones who moved through the ranks of Balkantourist might have." He explains that the Balkantourist style "did not correspond with [Western] European standards - servers worked primarily for their own personal gain".

Next comes the wine selection, and having waiters who are knowledgeable about what is available.

Underlying all this is the responsive attitude and attention to the customer's needs - and for them to feel that. "This is their restaurant," Dimov says, "where they can be in a good place, where they can do business, where they can try new things, be gourmet."

Which makes one ask: is there a Bulgarian gourmet scene? a culture of Bulgarian gourmets? Yes, Dimov says. "There are a number of people with educated taste buds, majority between 28 and 40 years old, who've been abroad and seen things."

Part of what he does is help expand this awareness. Though he loves Bulgarian cuisine, he says that it is limited by its richness and diversity, with influences from Turkey, Greece, Russia and beyond. He tries to present the product in its best form, in a manner that is not overly chaotic or complex. I ask him for an example; he immediately says: fois gras with figs. He loves vegetables, and says that every national cuisine comes from the products of its region, including spices. Bulgaria, from the richness that comes with various outside influences, does have a few items specific to its kitchen: the use of choubritsa (Satureja montana, otherwise known as winter savoury) and of sharena sol [a mixture of equal parts powdered djodjen (spearmint) and choubritsa, one-half part sweet or spicy red pepper, one-third part ground black pepper, one-fourth part fine-ground cornmeal, and salt to taste; used to season salads and cooked dishes].

The six others in the kitchen work rotating shifts of three-and-a-half days a week, about 12 to 15 hours a day. And by now they all know each other. Dimov has worked with most of the staff for four or five years, and with some of them for three years non-stop. It's a balanced team, he says. "Our interests are the same. We do teambuilding on some Sundays, like going on picnics, going fishing or playing paintball."

Apart from the people, he is in charge of synchronising all the details that make the restaurant flow: product choice, finding suppliers, delivery; menu specifications, including the weekly menu (the season-based a la carte menu changes four times a year); organisation of work schedules and overseeing and resolving all problems that arise.

High standards
He is proud of the fact that Classic Gourmet Club was one of the first restaurants in Bulgaria to be HACAAP/ISO Fundamentals and Safe Food Handling certified. "The kitchen is the most important thing to have certified. It is designed, including control points, according to European standards," he says. In addition to which, the facility was created specifically to be a restaurant kitchen, meaning that it is not the transformed basement of an old house. Walking through the four rooms of the large L-shaped kitchen, it is clean, orderly and separated according to function. There are no gas burners. "It's safer - after all, we are underground," Dimov says.

Selecting the products takes a good deal of his time. Some products cannot be frozen, and some need to be fresh every day. Like most chefs, he gets the restaurant's fish at Metro; it is the only certified dealer of such goods. Some of the vegetables, like the baby spinach, he obtains from small local producers who use organic methods. Same goes for the fresh buffalo-milk cheese. In general, though, he finds that Bulgarian products have lost their character and value with the entrance of larger firms.

As we're finishing up the interview and Dimov is heading back to the kitchen, I remember something important, and ask: "The Restaurant of the Year Award that the restaurant just won - what does it mean?" He says: "It is, in fact, significant. It's a sign of confidence in what we do, a mark of success. It shows our guests that we live up to these high standards."

And with Dimov at its helm, Classic Gourmet Club will only continue to raise the bar.

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In addition to being the executive chef of Classic Gourmet Club, Dimo Dimov also manages the Sofia restaurant's daily operations, from product vendors to employee schedules. He and most of his eight or so floor staff have worked together for five or six years. `It's hard to find competent waiters,' Dimov said. `Bulgaria lack good training schools in the sphere." So, he assists in their erudition himself.