I've no chef de partie and I'll cry if I want to

I have recently been trying to recruit a chef de partie, without success. Surely they cannot be that hard to find?

Ask any recruitment agency or the hundreds of hotels and restaurants currently looking for good chefs de partie, and they will tell you that they are very hard to find at the moment.

When we were recruiting in the early 1990s, the story was different. Every week we received dozens of applications from qualified chefs with good experience, seeking work. This was also the time that the country was moving into recession and brigades that had been highly staffed in the excessive 1980s were shedding staff at an alarming rate.

Since then, the general economic climate has changed and kitchens are looking to build up their brigades more. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those chefs from three or four years ago never found another job in catering. They have long since retrained and are working in totally different careers.