Sunday May 13, 2007
Patrick confidential
Here are some things you didn’t know about Patrick Teoh
He cooks.
“A few years ago I thought I couldn’t cook at all. Until one day I was at an Italian restaurant and I ordered a plate of pasta with some white wine sauce and I tasted it and I loved the taste. And I sort of knew and tasted that there was oregano and stuff like that. So I went home and the next day I bought some pasta and I bought what I thought I had tasted and I cooked up this pasta dish which looked awful but it tasted really like what I had in the restaurant. And from that time onwards I experimented with stuff.”
He likes to iron and clean up.
“For many years I didn’t know why I liked these chores until one day I thought about it. It’s fairly easy to deduce why somebody might enjoy ironing clothes or cleaning up a mess. It’s a basic human need for instant gratification. Some people get instant gratification, like Harith (Iskandar) and Jit (Murad), by standing up on stage, saying something and the audience just bursts out and reacts. That is the same kind of feeling from taking a crumpled shirt, laying it on the ironing board, taking a hot iron and going over it and it’s smooth. Instantly you have a result.”
He has been an employee only once in his life.
“I’ve only ever had one job in my life. When I first started out, fresh after school, I joined the broadcasting company called Rediffusion. That was when I first became a radio announcer and I worked there for close to 11 years. After resigning from there, I have never worked for anybody.”
He doesn’t suffer fools.
“You meet a lot of funny people, you meet a lot of silly people and some downright stupid people. And from them you can learn a lot of things about how to be quick, how to be in your face because if you’re not in your face restaurant customers will climb all over you and take advantage of you. So you have to know when to say, ‘Enough is enough, okay? If you don’t like it, go away.’ In fact, I told somebody exactly that but I think that person was also a little bit not quite there – six pence short of a shilling.”
He is really nice in person.
For the purpose of this story, Teoh was hamming it up for the camera and even agreed to scoop out a fish from the aquarium – something which resulted in him getting drenched when the fish started squirming and splashing. Still, he didn’t snap at this writer or the photographer after he got drenched.
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Dishing it out in spades
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