Sailing first-class
Omero Gallucci is excited. He has just got back from the Berlin Culinary Olympics where his team - from Sutcliffe Catering UK - won a fistful of medals.
"I'm really fired up by the success," enthuses the senior fleet executive chef of Sutcliffe's Marine Division. He is the team's craft manager, and has been closely involved in its pre-competition training. "We took 22 people and we got six gold medals - five with clover leaf (an elevation roughly equivalent to two gold medals) - and nine bronze, plus eight diplomas as well."
Gallucci's pride in his protégés is evident. The team's triumph helps put paid to the myth that contract catering is for the industry's "nearly men". "It's simply not true that if you're not good enough, you go into contract catering. The culinary skills and management styles are still the same. A lot of the food our team produced for presentation is the same as they are producing every day.
"I don't know why contract catering's got such a bad reputation. I think it's just the stigma of the words - everybody assumes contract catering equals canteen. It doesn't. People choose to go into it because the hours are good (you can often be with your family at weekends), the wages not bad (a commis chef here is within the £10,00-£12,000 a year bracket) and it offers a clear, rapid, career structure.
"I suppose in the past, quality was not as high," he concedes, "but if you look at the food in our places now, 95% of it is wonderful and that's because of the kind of people we employ - they care about what they're producing. The food in our directors' dining-rooms and main staff restaurants is as good as you'll get in a hotel restaurant anywhere."
Gallucci, aged 45, joined Sutcliffe in 1993 as executive chef on P&O European Ferries' 800-cabin cruise ferry Pride of Bilbao, after setting up the company's cook/chill system in the Sedgewick Centre, London, as a consultant in 1989.
The move was unplanned, and followed his return to England after a brief spell in Poland where he launched the pastry kitchen at Warsaw's Marriott Hotel. "My wife was quite ill at the time, so we came back. I started up a consultancy, got involved with Sutcliffe, and when they offered me a full-time job I accepted it - because, although the consultancy was successful, running your own business is quite pressurised. I had mouths to feed [three daughters] and bills to pay."
Twelve months on the Bilbao gave way, in 1993, to Gallucci's current, shore-based job in Portsmouth. He is responsible for menu development and food quality control in 25 restaurants, employing over 60 chefs, on the five-strong fleet of P&O cross-Channel ferries.
Inevitably, much of his job is administrative. But part of his remit is to source, test and cost new produce; and to create and taste new dishes before they are added to the fleet's menus. And he relishes the opportunity this gives him to educate people's palates - after all, with seven sailings a day to France on the four Normandy-bound ferries, and three weekly round trips on the Bilbao to Spain, he has a vast potential audience. The Bilbao alone carries an average of 1,400 passengers per trip.
Gallucci's greatest culinary influence is his background: born in London's Muswell Hill as the third son of Italian parents (his father owned a delicatessen, his mother was "a lovely cook"), he confesses to have been always loitering around the family shop and kitchen from the age of five.
Unsurprisingly, many dishes on the ferries' à la carte menus have a Mediterranean influence. For example, a starter on the Pride of Le Havre is a gallette of crispy aubergine with tomato salsa and fresh shaved Parmesan on a bed of mixed leaves with olive dressing (£4.95), while a main course is vegetable and lentil fermière braised in rich tomato sauce topped with golden potatoes (£4.95).
Gallucci seeks clean flavours: food that has not been messed around with. "It's important to work on flavours and not over-garnish," he says. The two ingredients he could not live without are basil - "both purple and green" - and pure olive oil.
Each of the five ships under Gallucci's control has five eating outlets: a grill (on the Bilbao this is a tapas grill with more than 80 tapas produced on-board by Spanish chefs), a carvery, a self-service restaurant, a café and an à la carte restaurant.
The Bilbao alone serves up to 1,700 covers on any given day. "We change all the menus once a year - that's about 100-150 across the board on each ferry - but we take out and add dishes if something isn't working," explains Gallucci.
He refutes any suggestion that long menu-life and mass catering breeds boredom in his staff. "Although we spec every dish with photographs, all chefs have got the opportunity for creativity with their garnishes - it's down to self-pride. And we don't make vast quantities of the same things. We batch-cook, so everything is fresh.
"People are moved around on ship, too. They do three-week shifts, then have two weeks off; which not only motivates them, but removes the monotony."
Gallucci also gives short shrift to the widely held belief that all contract caterers are simply food compilers using prepped food. "We bring hardly any in - that's a challenge in itself. We do use some fruit purées, because we only use a limited amount and it's too time-consuming for the staff to make."
He admits that the clock presents the biggest pressure to his chefs. "If lunch is at 12 o'clock, it's at 12 o'clock."
Gallucci gained his City & Guild qualifications at evening classes while working as a commis in some of London's prestigious kitchens during the 1960s. He is still an avid learner: a reader of cookery books (Escoffier was a boyhood inspiration) and a watcher of TV programmes such as Ready, Steady, Cook - he has an ambition to appear on it because he rather likes the limelight. A glance at his CV confirms this - competition medals take up nearly half a page.
Indeed, earlier this year the Craft Guild of Chefs bestowed the title Competition Chef of the Year on Gallucci. "Competition work is a great motivator, as well as gaining you recognition from your peers," he maintains.
And what about his future? "I'd be happy to serve out my days with Sutcliffe," he says. "Ultimately, I'd like to be involved in the development of branded concepts, because that's the way everything's going. We already have the Jacket No Ties range [jacket potatoes with fillings] and Zefferelli's [pasta and pizzas]."
"How would I like to be remembered? As a great chef, of course. But also for helping people. It's great to help people up the ladder."
