Training suffers in rush for profit
THERE is something about the expansion of McDonald's that worries me. I have the same unease about TGI Friday's, Beefeater, Harvester and Pizza Hut. Come to think of it, I'm a mite vexed about the growing popularity of trendy London bistros, Birmingham balti houses and the whole of Manchester's and London's Chinatowns.
Have you spotted the connecting strands between all these superficially diverse restaurant operations? The first strand is that they are very popular, provide a good product at an attractive price and make their customers happy. They are the embodiment of the mid-1990s popular restaurant movement, offering atmosphere by the bucketful and deserving every penny of profit they make.
Here is the second strand. Assessed from a particular viewpoint they all serve much the same type of food. There might be an intellectual gap between a cheeseburger with regular fries from a drive-thru McDonald's and a plate of sun-dried wotsits-on-toast in London's West End, but both are part of the mode for simple cooking. It can be cleverly conceived simple cooking, but it is always designed to avoid hours of work by a large, skilled brigade of chefs. A small number of chefs who know the routine can produce food for a remarkably large number of people if the menu is written smartly.
In the case of fast food operations, they aren't even chefs. they are, to use a horrid Americanism, line cooks, trained to cook by the egg-timer and to present meals to match the coloured pictures on the wall. This keeps the costs down for the operator and the customer. The food is still great, the atmosphere fizzing, and the customers are happy. So what is the point I'm trying to make?
It is this, the third and final binding strand. The growth in easy-cook, popular food restaurants is an employment time bomb with a medium-term fuse no one seems to have noticed. These restaurants are incapable of providing anything but vertical training with horizontal career opportunities. There are only two ways to go if you have been trained in a popular food operation, one of which is sideways.
Training with depth and breadth is still left to hotels and the kitchens of more formal restaurants, which is almost certainly where most of the brasserie stars learned their basic craft. Yet with hotels and the grand restaurants continuing to lose business to popular restaurants, their ability to employ and properly train young chefs is diminishing at a worrying rate.
Who is training the bright, young brasserie stars of tomorrow? It certainly isn't the brasseries themselves. With a few exceptions, these fast-moving, trendy places want chefs who have received training from somebody else, they haven't the time (or is it the inclination?) to do it themselves from scratch.
Shouldn't the fast food sector be doing more to broaden the training they give their staff, so that one day the line cooks may work as chefs? Or is this binding strand yet another example of craft training being the first casualty in the rush to make quick money. Not my problem, mate. o
