At the start of 2025, I decided to take small steps toward something else I'd loved for a long time — the world of food.

I kept going deeper into recipes, processes, the chemistry of cooking. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to see a professional kitchen from the inside.

Every time I walked past a restaurant with an open kitchen, I'd stop and just stand there. Watching how the cooks moved, how the space was laid out, how dishes came together — and thinking one thing, over and over:

How do you even get in there, if you have no experience?

I didn't have an answer.

So I kept doing what I could — cooking, learning, sharing it on Instagram, and following the lives of people who were already working with food professionally.

And then Lida found me. @fffuufu

I followed her because I loved watching her work, her whole life in the kitchen.

At the time, Lida was in Moscow. I was in Jakarta. We'd never met. Nine thousand kilometers between us.

And then, out of nowhere, a message: come to Moscow, work as a cook at BUF39.

No experience required. A real professional kitchen.

The message arrived late in the evening, on my birthday.

I read it over and over, barely able to believe it.

Was this fate?

A nearly sleepless night from the excitement, a ten-minute phone interview the next day — and soon I was buying a ticket to Moscow.

And there I was, for the first time, on the other side of an open kitchen.

I was terrified. There was no time to ease in — one day I was a trainee, and the next I was running service and prepping alongside everyone else.

I remember, on the fourth day, rolling out dough for a quiche, looking up at Lida and saying:

“You know, it feels like I've been working with you forever. I think I've made almost the entire menu in just a few days.”— VERA

She looked at me, smiled, and said:

“Yeah, I feel that too. You settled in so fast.”— LIDA

Of course, I made mistakes along the way. But I was incredibly lucky with the team. They kept supporting me, kept teaching me — and even in the most intense hours of service, they'd find time to explain not just how to work with your hands, but how to pace yourself, so you'd still have energy left by the end of the day.

That experience made me so much more confident in myself.

Just one month, but it felt like an entire small lifetime.

And BUF39 turned out to be this incredible concentration of interesting people.

One minute you're plating pasta with your own hands, and the next you're handing it to an actress you've only ever seen on screen. And suddenly, a plate of pasta becomes something like an eraser, quietly wiping away the line you'd imagined between people.

I loved noticing things like that.

More than anything, I loved opening the café in the morning.

Getting there before everyone else, turning on the kitchen, setting up for morning service, starting prep, and greeting the first guests.

I loved watching from the kitchen as the café slowly filled up — people talking, drinking coffee, eating things that, not long before, had just been ingredients on my worktable.

In those moments, I understood that it wasn't just cooking I loved. I loved being part of the whole process — from the empty café and the first prep of the day, to the empty plate coming back to the sink.