Categories: Lifestyle

Confused About Your Career? Check Out Life as a Chef with Chef Fregz!

If you have been looking for a career to get in to and you have a passion for food and cooking, perhaps you should consider becoming a chef. As part of The Young Nigerian series, Gbubemi Fregene, better known as Chef Fregz, is profiled, giving an open lens in to the exciting world of cuisine — and how he has been able to make a name for himself there.

According to Chef Fregz, he would be called to cook as a youth, after being exposed to delicious food by his nanny, “Growing up as a child, I really loved to eat…. I just remember growing up around good food, tasty food, and at a point, I started thinking, instead of eating this food, how about I try to make it myself.”

And the rest is history.

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Chef Fregz's Delectable Dishes

Growing up in Benin City, Chef Fregz would attend Covenant University, earning a Bsc in Industrial Relations and Human Resources Management, and then after completing his youth services in 2009, he launched his first catering business, DVARD.

DVARD would have to go on a brief hiatus, though, when Chef Fregz was admitted to the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute in Paris.

Once he returned from France, Chef Fregz would re-start his business, even though he had little-to-no entrepreneurial experience.

“I started because I knew in my heart it was what I wanted to do. I literally just started. No business classes, no plans,” he told Whoot Africa. “I just told someone I could do XYZ menu for them, charged them a reasonable price that covered my cost and left me a little something, and bit by bit it was one recommendation after the other and it took off.”

Now with his company, he manages a staff between six to seven chefs and describes his earnings as having just increased from contracts in the thousands to recently reaching the next level, “We’ve gone from making thousands to making a couple of bigger figures — let me put it like that. We are just getting to that next level.”

Watch Chef Fregz explain his career in cuisine here:

Abena Agyeman-Fisher

Abena Agyeman-Fisher is the Editor-in-Chief of Face2Face Africa. Most recently, she worked for Interactive One as the Senior Editor of NewsOne, she worked for AOL as the News Programming Manager of Black Voices, which later became HuffPo Black Voices, and for the New York Times Company as an Associate Health Editor. Abena, a Spelman College graduate, has been published in Al Jazeera, the Daily Beast, New Jersey’s The Star-Ledger, the Grio, BlackVoices, West Orange Patch, About.com, the Source, Vibe, Vibe Vixen, Jane, and Upscale Magazines. She has interviewed top celebrities, icons, and politicians, such as First Lady Michelle Obama, Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett, Civil Rights activist and diplomat Andrew Young, comedian Bill Cosby, Grammy Award-winning singer Jill Scott, actress and singer Queen Latifah, Olympic Gold winner Cullen Jones, international supermodel Alek Wek, and five-division world champion boxer Floyd Mayweather. Most recently, she served as the First Lady’s press reporter during President Barack Obama’s U.S.-Africa Summit, Young African Leaders Institute event, and the 2013 presidential trip to Senegal, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Tanzania. Abena is also a 2015 International Women's Media Foundation Africa Great Lakes Fellow, where she reported on women candidates and Chinese sweatshops in Tanzania for CNN and Refinery29.