He cooked for Marlon Brando in the jungles of the Philippines, Brigitte Bardot aboard her yacht, prepared frogs in palm sugar for the King of Tonga and was threatened with imprisonment by the Sultan of Brunei if his food wasn't a success.
At 56, Roland Sollberger's life is as extraordinary as the people he has cooked for.
Over his four-decade-long career, he has cooked in more than 40 countries, worked at scores of five-star hotels, palaces and even The White House and Air Force One.
It is perhaps the most unassuming place you could imagine to find the award-winning chef, but in a small Italian restaurant above Rick's Kountry Kitchen in Juffair, Mr Sollberger is rustling up rustic Mediterranean dishes.
From overseeing 1,500 cooks as the executive chef to the Sultan of Brunei, to a small staff of just four at the recently opened Tratoria is a vast change for Mr Sollberger.
"I said to myself I needed to relax," he explained. "The best way to forget misery is to cook."
A heart-breaking family tragedy in 2004 - which he still finds too upsetting to talk about - meant that Mr Sollberger's life and career came to a standstill, but when he moved to Bahrain nine months ago and met owner and restaurateur Rick Abernathy, he once again began to piece his life together.
The pair embarked on a new restaurant venture with a plan to put together a simple 'home-cooked' menu.
The restaurant opened a few weeks ago and through word of mouth - and unbeknownst to most diners, a Michelin-starred chef - it is already bustling.
"Everyone can read a recipe, but you need to put your heart into a meal to cook well. Food is about love; it brings people together and can bring so much happiness," he explained.
Born is Switzerland to a 20-year-old mother and a 70-year-old father who died when he was one, Mr Sollberger was never destined to be ordinary.
It was a tough childhood and he was introduced to the rigours of the kitchen at an early age.
"From the age of five my step-father would make me peel potatoes and chop fish while my friends were playing football," he explained.
"He wanted me to become a chef but I wanted to rebel against him and eventually I studied agriculture to become a farmer."
But his passion for cuisine never abated and at 18 he headed to Cornell University, New York, to study hotel management.
By the early 1970s Mr Sollberger was determined to see more of the world and realised that cooking was the way to achieve his dream. He secured a job with the Grand Hotel Royal in Stockholm, Sweden, and it was there that he had his first brush with celebrity.
"The maitre'd was sick one night and I was asked to flambŽ a Steak Diane for a customer. It turned out to be Brigitte Bardot. I was stunned because there was this star that I had always had a crush on."
Bardot was so impressed with the young man that he was recruited to work as a chef on her yacht that was cruising to Athens.
"I was so shocked. It was an incredible time for me," he said. Guests on board the yacht included John Wayne and Marlon Brando.
"John Wayne was an incredibly nice man and really appreciated everything I cooked. He was one of my favorite people to cook for," he explained.
But Brando proved a trickier customer: a few years later after stints at the Grosvenor Hotel in London, the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong and the Hyatt Regency in Manila, he was recruited to cook for Marlon Brando during the filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.
"He was very difficult to cook for," explained Mr Sollberger, "he never liked anything and was quite a miserable man."
Another remarkable appointment was a job as an executive chef in the White House during President Nixon's term of office.
"We both left after Watergate," he joked.
By the age of 30 Mr Sollberger's talents had propelled him into the position of culinary director at Hyatt International - responsible for opening kitchens in hotels throughout the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
While he was working as the executive chef at the Hyatt Regency in Dubai he was asked to go to Cairo and prepare the funeral dinner of assassinated Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat.
"Nixon, Ford and Carter were all sitting on the same table and it was the first time anyone had cooked for three US presidents seated at the same table. Henry Kissinger was also there and the secret service was everywhere, but it was amazing because as a chef I was allowed to go anywhere," he explained.
It was also while at the Hyatt group that Mr Sollberger's life took another dramatic turn. The Sultan of Brunei invited him to work as his executive chef in his new palace where he was in charge of all state banquets.
"At the Independence Day celebration the sultan warned me that I would be put in jail if banquet wasn't a success," said Mr Sollberger.
Luckily it was a triumph, but Mr Sollberger's peripatetic life once again led him to another country - this time to Malaysia's Shangri-La Kuala Lumpur where he was ranked number six in the 1987 World Cuisine Contest, "Le Bocuse D'Or."
Throughout the 90s he worked in a number of hotels including the Orchard Parade Hotel in Singapore before returning to the Middle East as general manager of the food division of the Landmark Group in Dubai.
When he moved to Bahrain earlier this year, it signaled a much-needed deceleration to his hectic pace of life. But after nine months his plans have developed and he is determined to make the Tratoria a success.
"You must always turn things into a success, and then leave it for people to carry that success another step forward," he said.
After almost 40 years of professional cooking, Mr Sollberger is also ready to impart his knowledge and hopes to start cookery classes at the Tratoria.
"Food is about passion and the art of teaching is about giving people confidence in their abilities, everyone can cook if they love," he explained.
