The travels of a master chef

True, Rolf, there was no need to lie ... That’s the title of Rolf Schmid’s autobiography just out – No Need to Lie. No need because Rolf has had a life and a half – and a very tellable life and a half.

As described in last week’s Lifestyle, he is a master chef, sportsman, businessman, restaurateur, raconteur – and one of the best tellers of outlandish stories that I have ever had the pleasure of listening to.

He has flambéed, fried, fought and flirted his way around the world – across the Atlantic to the Americas, across the Indian Ocean to Pakistan, and up and down Africa.

But let me backtrack, in case you are one of the very few who don’t already know this man, Rolf Schmid.

He was born, as he says in the first sentence of his book, at not the best of times if you were a German: 1943, when the cruel tide of the Second World War had at last turned against his country.

He had a stressful childhood. His father, an SS officer, was killed in the war.

Rolf has no memory of him. But he has always treasured the Iron Cross that his father was awarded – as he does his own Order of the Burning Spear.

But I am getting ahead of myself again ... Rolf’s mother ran a bar and nightclub – before she ran off to somewhere Rolf doesn’t know, though he assumes it was to the United States and with one of the conquering American GIs who patronised the bar.

Rolf and his older brother were left behind in the care of his grandmother.

Rolf’s own tide turned for the better when he left Ulm to train as a chef in Obertsdorf in the mountains of Bavaria.

He had a flair for the job and, as he often tells us, he worked hard at it.

He also took to boxing and judo; both of which helped him get over a schoolboy complex of not being very good at games.

And both these “martial arts” served him well when he got into scrapes – which, as Rolf tells it, were never of his own making.

Nor was his delightful encounter with Monique, a hooker who picked him up in the Place Pigalle of Paris, his own doing: “I like you, mon petit cher. You are a baby with big strong shoulders and lots of muscles. You play sport?”

“Yes, I am a boxer.”

“Oh, Mon Dieu, très dangereuse,” she flattered. “But you are not going to box me? No? Mon cher ...”

And, despite the 18-year-old Rolf protesting that he had no money, Monique treated him to a drink, a steak meal – and then took him back to her flat, where she cosseted him and initiated him for about four weeks.

Apart from this brief encounter, Rolf is not nearly as explicit about his sexual adventures as he is about his cooking, his fist fights and his other sports.