Piotr Krupa — Der Koch
Head chef. The chef behind plant-based cooking that delights even die-hard meat-eaters. EBM-grounded nutrition — and, above all, real flavor.
I’ve been cooking, on and off, since the first half of the 1990s. With breaks, because life. I came back to the kitchen full-time twelve years ago, and I’ve been a head chef since 2020. Along the way: bar work, restaurants, sales, training, poetry, journalism, and a piece of Germany. The one thing I never did was wait tables. If you want a quick taste of where I’m coming from — start with the pasta that an Italian approved.
Quick facts
- Head chef since 2020
- ~12 years of professional cooking (with breaks — honestly, not 30)
- ~8–10 years behind the bar and in hospitality management: chef, manager, bartender, dishwasher. Never a waiter.
- Member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine (PTMSŻ)
- Specialization: plant-based cuisine, veganizing classics, field-to-table
- Customer-service trainer — clients include the City of Warsaw municipal offices
- Sentimental specialty: Old Polish crust — faworki, but taken seriously
- I write in Polish at rudekitchen.pl and in English here on rudekitchen.site
- Grounded in EBM (evidence-based medicine) nutrition
My story
Katowice, the 1990s. The first time I cooked professionally — though “professionally” is a slightly oversized word for it. I simply earned a living standing over pots.
Then a long break. I did all sorts of things. Sales, training (including customer service for the City of Warsaw, about twelve years ago), bars — eight to ten years in every conceivable role. I was a bartender, I was a restaurant manager, I was a chef, I was on dish duty. Just never a waiter. Not my temperament.
Back to the kitchen — for real. Twelve years ago I returned to the pots seriously. Differently than in the 90s. With a head on my shoulders, with knowledge, with nutrition science. Since 2020 I’ve been head chef at Milarepa Retreat Zentrum — a Buddhist meditation center in Germany (Lower Saxony, near Hamburg). Plant-based kitchen, dozens of guests a month. That’s where, among other things, tofu brotaufstrich comes from — a German breakfast done our way.
I’ve always written. First poetry — back in high school, with a few prizes from competitions. Then journalism for a local Silesian newspaper. For the past twenty years I’ve been building online spaces — these days rudekitchen.pl (in Polish) and rudekitchen.site (in English). Field-to-table, plant-based cooking, depression, Germany through expat eyes. What moves me — that’s what I write about.
Buddhism — because amid all this, you need something to hold onto.
What I do — services
I’ll help you bring plant-based dishes into your restaurant or your home kitchen. Whether it’s the menu, or the simple techniques, tricks and rules you need — like the ultimate Gemüse bouillon that half my kitchen stands on — to make plant-based cooking both genuinely tasty and nutritionally serious.
🌱 Veganizing traditional recipes
Żurek, bigos, pâté, blood sausage — done plant-based. Examples on the blog: fake fish in almonds instead of the traditional Christmas Eve carp, oat borscht that existed long before anyone invented the beetroot one. Done so that a meat-eater says “damn, that’s good” and comes back for seconds. Not so they suffer.
🍽️ Adding vegan options to your menu
You have a place, you have a menu, you want to add plant-based dishes without breaking the rest of the card? I’ll build a menu with you that makes sense, has seasonality, and respects margins. Often one good base — like a sunflower-seed sauce — is enough to open the card to ten new dishes.
📋 Building menus from scratch
Seasonal, event-based, everyday. For restaurants, for home, for catering. Field-to-table. Example of a composed menu: a folk plant-based Christmas Eve. Seasonal pairings: stuffed pumpkin — two different ideas for one humble vegetable.
👨🏫 Plant-based cooking training
Cooking plus theory. Concrete techniques in the workshop — like potato spring rolls, where I teach how to work with potato dough. Differences between vegetarian / vegan / lacto / ovo / lacto-ovo and all the other terminology you need to know so you don’t embarrass yourself. I’ll help train your staff that fish isn’t meat and that vegans don’t eat potatoes topped with bacon cracklings. Here the same combination works — many years of training experience plus the daily practice of a head chef running a plant-based kitchen. Not theory from a course, but what I actually cook every day.
🤝 Customer-service training for hospitality — my edge
I have years of training experience — I’ve taught sales and customer service to, among others, employees of the City of Warsaw. And I have years of real work in hospitality behind me: as a head chef, a restaurant manager, a bartender, a dishwasher. I know the work from every angle.
And that is my edge.
Because the hospitality-training market today has plenty of specialists who know the theory but never stood behind a bar or took an order on a Friday night. I once met a very good food-cost specialist explaining to restaurateurs that swapping chanterelles for button mushrooms was “just a cost question.” From a pure accounting view, maybe. But from the kitchen’s view, and the guest’s — those are two different dishes from two different shelves. Chanterelles are a class up; button mushrooms anyone can do at home. And that is exactly the moment where great knowledge in one field cannot replace experience in another.
I teach what I myself do. I combine the trainer’s craft with the hospitality practice — and that’s why my training works in the real world, not just in the slide deck.
🍳 Guest spots and cooking together
Always happy to. Especially happy to — for social and Buddhist causes.
📩 Write me: chef@rudekitchen.site
Guides and ebooks
📚 Guides
Short, concrete, single-topic. One subject at a time. More coming.
- 🔪 Before You Touch the Knife — free — 3 pages on how to plan big kitchen shopping so you don’t go back to the store three times and throw out half. First in the series. → Get it on Gumroad
📘 Ebooks
A few out, a few in the works. As of today:
- 🔪 “Before You Touch the Knife” — free starter guide. Get it on Gumroad
- 🎄 Christmas Eve (short) — first version, being refreshed (unavailable). Subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll let you know when it’s ready
- ❤️ Valentine’s — first version, being refreshed (unavailable). Subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll let you know
- 🎄 Christmas Eve 70+ — a big collection of Christmas Eve recipes (~70+), in preparation. Subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll let you know
- 🍳 Kitchen tips — a larger collection of techniques and tricks, in preparation. Subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll let you know
- 📅 A full week’s menu — in preparation. Subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll let you know
- 🗺️ An un-guide (PDF with Google map) — in preparation. Subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll let you know
📬 Don’t want to miss new ebooks, guides and recipes? → Subscribe to my newsletter — no spam, just the good stuff.
Philosophy — field-to-table
Not an ad slogan. The concrete version: I know where what I cook comes from, I know what it does to a body, I know what it does to the planet. I cook according to EBM nutrition — grounded in studies, not in Instagram trends. Plant-based — because it’s healthier, tastier, and easier on the environment. Tasty — because without that no one sits down at the table a second time.
That’s why I belong to the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine — because it’s the only organization in Poland that brings together nutrition, movement and mental health at a scientific level, not an influencer level.
Diplomas and certificates
Diplomas are being scanned and described — you’ll see the full list with notes here soon. If you need a specific confirmation of competence right now — write: chef@rudekitchen.site.
Find me also here
- 📝 Medium (in English)
- 🌐 rudekitchen.pl (Polish version)
- 🛒 Gumroad — my ebooks and guides
- 📬 Substack — newsletter
- 🔗 Linktree
Plus all the social media from the header (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and so on).
Contact
Orders, questions, gossip, collaboration proposals, events, guest spots, training, ebooks — write. I reply. Sometimes right away, sometimes in two days — but I reply.
And if you’re not quite ready for the offer yet — check out my recipes or kitchen tips. That’s usually where it starts.
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.