Now a well-travelled chef of 34 years will start sharing his experience and knowledge with the New England region.

Jonathan Prior has worked in Malaysia, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and he’s now reinventing himself as a TAFE teacher bringing Asian cuisine skills to the region.

Based in Armidale, Mr Prior is the first to teach commercial Asian cookery at the regional institute, section head Matt McAllister said.

“As soon as he sent me an email, I was onto him within five minutes,” he said.

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“I’d decided to look for people with a unique skillset who could expand what we do, and Jonathan’s got an extensive Asian experience, which is something that we didn’t have in the team.

“It just allows us to offer skills to the region we’ve never been able to offer before, and previously students have either not expanded those skills or they’ve travelled to Sydney to get those skills.”

Mr Prior started as a TAFE student himself, in Newcastle, and has since worked mainly in 5-star hotels, with Sheraton, Shangri-La and Marriott among those on his CV.

In Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, he worked for three years for a 500-room resort.

“[We made] breakfasts for 1400 people during school holidays in one restaurant, so you can imagine the scale and the chaos … You have to have that military prevision, because people are paying big dollars for their holidays and their stays in places like that, so everything needs to be exact and just right.”

In Surabaya, Indonesia, he worked at a large city hotel, doing weddings and birthday parties there for up to 2000 people in its ballroom.

“Seventeen-year-old girls’ coming-of-age parties are very, very big in Indonesia especially with the Chinese Indonesians … and they get a Ferrari or a Range Rover or something like that as their first car,” he said.

“I’m talking about 100,000 US dollars spent on one party ... and that was pretty much every weekend we would be doing that: Chinese banquets for 1500 people, all individual-plated, so 1500 plates times nine or eight courses – you can imagine how many plates we went through.”

Mr Prior will teach Asian cuisine in Tamworth to students of certificate IV in commercial cookery.

He will also teach kitchen operations in connecting learning centres in Glen Innes, Tenterfield, Gunnedah, Quirindi and Coonabarabran; and first-year apprentices in certificate III in Tamworth and Armidale.

“Our target audience is commercial cookery-qualified chefs who works in cafes, restaurants, clubs, pubs – more in that Western environment, but they want to offer some Asian cuisine,” he said.

“This is a great opportunity to reinvent myself and take a new path on my career as well, and share that experience with people who would not necessarily be able to exposed to that type of cooking.”