Rankin plea on chef shortage

by Claire Hu Celebrity chef Paul Rankin has blamed inadequate training for a worrying shortage of chefs in the pub and restaurant trade. Speaking at a Greene King Chef Academy workshop last week, Rankin said both the Government and business needed to look at taking a more professional approach to encouraging talent. "We all have difficulties attracting the right quality staff," he said. "We should be emulating systems that work, like those in the States where they have academies like the CIA (Culinary Institute of America). "The Government needs to take a bit of responsibility and recognise the fact that this is a wonderful industry, and for us in the UK to float to the top we need to be supporting our chefs." He said both the professional catering qualifications, as well as on-the-job training, needed to be constantly evolving. Rankin, who attained the first Michelin star in Northern Ireland at Roscoff and now runs two restaurants including Cayenne and five cafés, said events such as Chef Academy were needed to inspire pride in pub cooking among catering graduates. Greene King brought 80 of its chefs to the Falcon Hotel in Castle Ashby, where they took part in a cooking challenge and had the chance to quiz Rankin. There are an estimated 40,000 chef vacancies in the hospitality industry, and the pub trade is one of the worst hit sectors because of its unglamorous image among graduates. Adam Collett, Greene King marketing director, said poor food standards in the past meant the pub trade had itself to blame for its image problem. "The chef shortages affect the whole industry," he said. "The industry has brought it on itself because for so many years it has been about de-skilling rather than re-skilling people. It tried to take the human element out of food and replaced it with packaged food ­ the ping and ding' microwave culture. "Good people are hard to find, but if you offer jobs where they can be creative and make great food then you will find them. "It's down to us as the pub industry to create jobs that people want." Learning the right skills John Vereker, owner of the Bell Inn in Horndon-on-the-Hill in Essex, this year's MA Food Pub of the Year, said many catering graduates lacked the skills needed for the job. He said: "Some of them are not getting the basics of cooking right when they come into the workplace. Many of the young people coming in through the colleges are looking for a quick fix and want to immediately become a sous-chef without realising they have to learn the trade. But things are changing, with pubs being given Michelin stars and featured in national papers, and the stigma of going to cook in a pub is disappearing.