Radoslav Mitro

“My journey to become a chef is at tale of no money and no plan,” smiles Slovakian-born Radoslav Mitro, who, in the middle of the pandemic, opened his self-titled restaurant Rado in Tallinn Old Town. 

At the age of 23, after experimenting with various unsuitable jobs, a friend offered him a job as a dishwasher at his restaurant in Manchester, England.

“I definitely wasn’t a fan of the idea, but knew I couldn’t be picky at the time,” he recalls. “It wasn’t long before I, a completely inexperienced boy, was put to work in the kitchen.

“And so my journey as a chef began. Unfortunately, it was an unbearable experience for me. I even had nightmares about working in the kitchen. The stress of not knowing what you were doing was unbearable,’’ he says.

And so Rado moved on to work at the call centre of United Emirates Airlines and quickly realized that “working in the kitchen was like a heaven compared to that -everything is a matter of perspective.

“I realized that I had to decide what I was going to do with my life and I made the decision to dedicate myself 100 per cent to cooking,” he says.

“At this point, I had a seven to eight year knowledge gap compared to other chefs, so I did everything in my power to fill that gap.

“I went to work in restaurants for free, read a lot of books on the topic and so on. This shift in my mind was so sudden. I’ve never felt like this before or since; that I’m so certain of something,’’ he says.

He calls his style of cooking ‘’spontaneous cooking’’ and what distinguishes him from many other chefs is that, as much as possible, the food needed for the restaurant is bought from the market.

“I don’t write many recipes,” he says. “If we find something new and interesting at the market, we bring it to the restaurant and try to make a dish out of it.

“If we see that people like it, the next day we bring more ingredients and start again. High- quality raw ingredients are important,’’ says Rado.

He has a relaxed approach to cooking and, typical of such spontaneous creation of a restaurant menu, instead of a paper menu, restaurant Rado has a blackboard in front of the restaurant, on which it is written in the morning which dishes are offered on a given day.

“I’m exactly where I need to be. Of course, there have been a few obstacles along the way, but everything happens for a reason and the main thing is that you learn from your mistakes.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be in this position sooner because I might not have been ready. I really enjoy my life as a chef.’’