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Bradley Van RooyenM/y The Wellesley
B
eing a chef on an A-list charter yacht
such as the 184-foot (56.2-meter)
Oceanco The Wellesley—recently
lengthened and refit—takes talent.
Bradley Van Rooyen, at age 23, has
it. His love of food stems back to age 5, when his
grandmother was shaping his culinary interests in
his native Zimbabwe. He can still remember baking
with her and hand-cranking an old-fashioned, salt-
packed ice cream maker.
At 16, he landed an internship at the upscale
Leopard Rock Hotel in Zimbabwe. “I could have
spent three months hanging with friends and get-
ting drunk, but I opted to look for a job that might
lead to a career,” he says. “I learned so much from
the South African chef there. To this day, we still
message each other.”
His next meaningful work experience was a
four-month stint at a lion sanctuary in the bush.
“Being in the wild, you have to use the provisions
at hand and make do,” he says. “I think that is
where I learned to be inventive.”
Van Rooyen then attended Tante Marie
Culinary Academy in the United Kingdom, finish-
ing when he was 19 with training in classic French
cuisine. He cooked at a beach club on a Greek
island, worked as a chef at a ski chalet and spent
time in Tokyo learning Japanese cuisine. “I enjoy
using cookbooks as guidelines,” he says, “but never
follow a recipe, except when it comes to baking
where you have to be more precise.”
He became a yacht chef by chance. David
Westwood, a principal at Thompson, Westwood
& White Yachts, was on a cruise up the Zambezi
River in Africa and struck up a conversation
with another guest. Westwood mentioned that
he was looking for a yacht chef. The other guest
was Van Rooyen’s best friend’s father. He told
Westwood he knew just the person, an inspired
young man who was the best baker in southern
Africa. Van Rooyen landed a week’s tryout with
the yacht’s owner.
After two days, the owner told Westwood, “Van Rooyen is not
allowed to leave.”
Van Rooyen started on the owner’s smaller boat in 2014 and
moved to The Wellesley after the refit. He is now the owner’scellar & Galley
a chef and a master sommelier serve up the
perfect pairings. By Jill Bobrow