2023-05-14 09:33:34
Today she is the most successful chef in Germany. But the way there was anything but easy for Cornelia Poletto (51). After all, it was a red-hot spoon on her bottom that changed a lot in her life.
She has been at the stove for almost 30 years. In her early 20s, when she was still called Cornelia Diedrich, she began her training with three-star chef Heinz Winkler († 73) in Aschau im Chiemgau.
Not an easy band-aid for a young woman.
Saddle-proof for decades! Cornelia as a child with her first pony, Schlingel
Restaurant boss Winkler’s choleric chef put her in the patisserie. Women for sweets, men for fish and meat. But Poletto, then 22, resented. Went to the boss.
She says: “After I had a serious conversation with Heinz Winkler, the chef let me at the stove.” But there was revenge.
“The guy actually put his spoon on the hot glow plate and then held it to my butt. With the comment: ‘So, now let’s step on the gas!’ Under all guns! Inconceivably. Thank God I was wearing a thick chef’s jacket, otherwise he would have burned me with a hot spoon.”
This trainee anecdote, which is the most disrespectful, brutal and misogynist thing she has experienced in her career, has always stuck in Cornelia Poletto’s head. Just like the pain in my legs after standing for twelve hours without a break.
Her mother sent her a package with chocolate and support stockings before Christmas. “So that I can get through these blatant duties in the kitchen at all,” remembers Poletto, who friends only call Conny.
In February 2002 daughter Paola was born. Poletto (then 31) was back in the restaurant just five days after the caesarean section
Seven-day week, standing up. Pressure, shouting, verbal abuse. “Nobody can imagine what I went through as a trainee today,” says Poletto.
“My mother used to accuse me of having too thick a skin. But that is exactly what ultimately helped me to get through the early days as a young cook. If you took to heart all the silly, misogynistic comments your fellow chefs said, you’d run out of the kitchen crying multiple times a day.”
Three trainees are currently learning in their Hamburg restaurant “Cornelia Poletto”. Poletto: “When I tell them how an apprenticeship went in my time, they just shake their heads in disbelief.”
In addition to enjoyment, time is your most important currency, because it stirs many pots. In addition to her own restaurant, she opened the bar “Paolas” (named after her daughter Paola, 21) in 2022. She runs a cooking school (“Cucina”) and hosts the dinner show “Palazzo” for several months of the year.
Poletto regularly sits with her cooking colleagues on the Sat.1 show “The Taste”
Not to forget her heart projects: daughter Paola, who is currently studying music business in Nashville (America), and husband Rüdiger Grube, whom she has loved since 2012 and married in 2015. And their horses and their dogs.
Incidentally, she owes her Italian surname to her first husband, the sommelier Remigio Poletto. As a couple, the two opened their first Hamburg restaurant, the “Poletto”, in 2000.
But that didn’t go smoothly at first. Poletto recalls: “We were actually broke before we even opened. Spent too much, more staff than guests. A tough first time. And it wasn’t the only crisis!”
The path to becoming a successful restaurant owner is not a relaxed, straight path. “And you don’t get rich either. But because my parents thankfully taught me to speak coherent sentences and I met the right people at the right time early on, it has worked quite well with television to this day.
Good keyword: the television! Poletto – never fluffed up, but cheeky and wonderfully clever – works perfectly with the TV audience.
Finally a woman who could hand the spoon over to the big star chefs. And often hit them hard on the fingers.
Poletto has been married to ex-Deutsche Bahn boss Rüdiger Grube (71) since 2015. The roles in the kitchen are clearly divided for this couple: she cooks, he cleans up
Started 2007 with her own show “Polettos Kochschule” (until 2013). For more than 15 years she has been cooking in competitions on ZDF’s “Kitchen Battle” and is a regular guest juror on the Sat.1 show “The Taste”.
Sometimes she doesn’t even know how she gets it all under one roof. But she is undisputedly Germany’s most successful cook. But she would never say that about herself.
“I have a little feminist daughter who always scolds me because I never talk enough about what I’ve accomplished.”
But maybe that’s exactly her recipe for success over the last 30 years. “That I was never such a terribly loud pain in the ass who constantly smeared my success under everyone’s nose,” she says.
“I describe myself as a strong woman, but I don’t have to emphasize every day that I am. I’ve always fought for women, but why do we always have to do it so loudly?”
What do you do after work?
BILD am SONNTAG: What Sunday ritual do you have?
Cornelia Poletto: “I try to keep my Sunday free from work if possible. Sleep in, jog around the Alster, have a hearty breakfast and then visit our horses”
What are you looking forward to most in the next week?
Poletto: “To the 80th birthday of my ‘bonus father’ – that sounds much nicer than stepfather – in Venice”
Which book are you reading now?
Poletto: “I’m reading ‘A Question in Chemistry’ by Bonnie Garmus. A novel about a chemist in the 1960s and her struggle for recognition and success in this male industry.
This article comes from BILD am SONNTAG. The ePaper of the entire issue is available here.
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