Track 13

Track 13.

Good evening!

Hello, my name’s Jack Riley.

I worked in a restaurant when I was younger, but now I’m a famous chef.

You can listen to my cooking show on Mondays at half past seven.

This Wednesday, you can see me on the TV show Before They Were Famous.

I’m going to tell you about my life before I became a TV chef.

You can see the programme on channel three and they will show it at eight o’ clock.

People often ask me how I became so successful, and I tell them that it wasn’t always that way.

Most of my friends left school when they were eighteen and went to university, but I left school when I was sixteen.

At school, I was a really bad student.

I only passed my exams in History and French.

I couldn’t understand math easily and I couldn’t write very well, so I failed my exams in both math and English. I always enjoyed trying different foods, especially on holidays in Spain with my family, but I first discovered my love of cooking when I got a summer job working in the kitchen in an Italian restaurant near my home.

The chefs there could make these amazing dishes out of really simple ingredients.

I wanted to be like them, but I lived in a small village near Cambridge and it wasn’t possible to train to be a chef there.

I applied for jobs in Rome, but I couldn’t speak Italian so in the end, I decided to move to London and train to be a chef.

Today, my career is more successful than I could have ever imagined.

I first appeared on TV in The Food Show in 2005, and I started presenting my radio show, Dinner with Jack in 2006.

I wrote my first bestselling cookbook, Jack’s Best Dishes in 2004.

And I worked as head chef at two top London restaurants: The Olive Tree in 2001, and The Lemon Grove between 2002 and 2005.

I’m married with two beautiful children, and my third child will be born in December!

When I was 16, I could only cook soup from a tin and I couldn’t write a sentence without making lots of mistakes.

Now, I can cook over 100 dishes and write books.

I can’t work for really long hours any more like I did at The Lemon Grove.

That was the hardest I have ever worked in my life!

And I still can’t do mathes!