Maria Tampakis, BE08
A wonderful ‘Kitchen Nightmare’
ALUMNI & FRIENDS | As soon as she got a taste of the full-throttle kitchen rush at UD’s Vita Nova restaurant, Maria Tampakis saw her destiny.
She would be a chef, she vowed as a young hospitality management student. She would work for some of the world’s top restaurateurs, and become a leader herself in the flaming hot world of fine dining.
And so she did.
Tampakis, BE08, soared rapidly into the upper echelons of cooking after leaving UD, first at the four-star Jean-Georges in New York City, then overseas at celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal’s London restaurant, Dinner (named seventh best on Earth in 2015 by the global consulting firm Deloitte).
She went on to serve as head chef, television assistant and all-around wonder-woman for the famously hot-headed cook, Gordon Ramsay. “It was the hardest year of my life,” Tampakis says of opening Ramsay’s Heddon Street Kitchen in 2014, where she stood as the youngest female head chef in London. “On top of working at the restaurant 70-80 hours a week, I traveled three months, helping film Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon.
“It was very high-demand, but you wanted to succeed, because you knew who you worked for,” says Tampakis, who has since left London’s high-wire act to work for the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, her “other” alma mater.
“At UD, I learned to enjoy feeling the pressure, feeling the joy when you see people happy with your food. I like that, and I always wanted more,” she says. “I have far surpassed the goals I wanted to achieve.”
