Aspiring chef Sajni Richardson, now forging ahead in her culinary studies thanks to local scholarships, is accustomed to fielding questions about her top dish.

“I get asked about recipes a lot,” said the 20-year-old, who discovered her love of cooking back home in the family kitchen.

“I’ve really tried to think about it. There are dishes that I enjoy making above others. But in terms of a speciality, I’m young and still experimenting. To say there was something I had mastered wouldn’t be fair to the dish.”

With scholarships under her belt from the Bermuda Hospitality Institute and the Green family, as well as the Bermuda Hotel Association and the Bermuda Government’s further educational award, Sajni has turned to learning the tough side of the business.

Many people dream of opening their own restaurants, she said — and many fail.

“It’s a shame, because a lot of people have a lot of great ideas. It’s just hard to plan it out.”

Starting out in a Bachelor’s course in food service management at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, Sajni is delving into the “nitty gritty” of the restaurant world.

“It’s a step up from an Associate Degree in culinary arts. I’ve been in the kitchen learning to cook — learning to become a chef. This is all about how to successfully manage a restaurant. It puts life into perspective.”

After a summer internship with celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson in the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club, she is exploring the basics, from creating a menu to marketing and finance.

Counting herself fortunate to grow up around a Bermudian kitchen, Sajni was inspired to cook by her great grandmother.

“It sounds cliché, but it’s honestly true. Our kitchen was always full of food.”

While the cooks in Sajni’s family had their own special recipes, she said she was “always curious to know why we should follow a recipe — why it turns out the way it did”.

Tinkering with recipes and figuring out their secrets means improving them, and occasionally making new discoveries.

Although rooted in tradition, cooking has some classic dishes that came about by experiment: Mexico’s famous mole sauce, for example, is said to have been created by accident when nuns, panicking over what to prepare for a visiting archbishop, threw together a mixture of whatever they had on hand.

Sajni plans to pursue other internships before heading to Germany to learn the traditions of Western European cooking.

France and Germany are the birthplaces of much classic cuisine, and thus “great places to learn”, she said.

Although she envisions one day returning to Bermuda to cook and teach, Sajni aims to get in as much travel and experience as she can first.

“If you’re trying to get into hospitality, just do it,” she said.

“That may sound cliché, but if your heart is set on it — if you’d rather be out talking to people and mingling and you know sitting at a desk is not for you, push yourself to get every experience you can. Take hold of every opportunity.”