Miles Collins

The wise bugger off!!!

I was glad to see the back of 2008, the last three months were very difficult and I looked forward to a new year and a fresh start but this year has proved to be tougher still. Whilst others are struggling we, as a company continue to do well, business, whilst not brilliant could certainly be worse and ironically it is staff shortages that is my current overiding concern. The kitchen staff in the UK division of the company are learning a valuable lesson right now, work is hard, time off is rare and their character is being tested.

I have been in this situation more times than I care to remember, as a young head chef I found it hard to take when a chef I had given a lot of my time and experience to decided to leave and make me go through the whole retraining process with someone new all over again. Despite the fact I had done it to the head chef’s I had worked for I still felt a certain sense of betrayal even though I knew that it was their perogative to gain experience in other kitchens.

Today has been interesting, I have been involved in interviewing for a management position in one of our hotels and two of the candidates were both made redundant from their respective hotels and restaurants at the start of the new year. One was offered a 20% pay cut in order to save his job, another had no choice. Both were prepared to spend five days a week away from their partners in order to earn a living. At the other end of the scale one of my head chef’s rang me tonight to say that a young chef we had given an opportunity to work in a kitchen preparing fresh food (unlike her previous position) had not returned for the evening service on her first day. This is his first ‘knock back’ and it has affected him because he felt this was a person who would want to learn from him and he had gone to great lengths to make her feel welcome.

There is a distinct lack of movement in the recruitment sector at the moment, industry journals which were once the major source of recruitment are now reduced to no more than a couple of pages, letters from recruitment agencies touting for business are commonplace and as the economic downturn continues more restaurant owners are changing their menus to cheap, ready made alternatives which eradicate the need for a skill base in the kitchen. Historically this has always been the best time to recruit, Christmas and the Winter season are all but over and chefs want to move before the Summer season gets going but that hasn’t happened so far. Two usually very reliable agencies I have used in France are very quiet, making their own redundancies whilst local advertising has proved a costly waste of time.

I would be interested to know what all of the relief chefs are doing right now, their days of earning big bucks at the mercy of desperate hoteliers and restaurant owners would seem, by and large, numbered. Perhaps now is the time for the industry to take at better look at itself as a business model and adapt accordingly. I always said 2009 was going to be an interesting year.