Meet the Gold Service Scholarship 2020 winner Elizabeth Forkuoh

"I believe this year will be my year," says 25-year-old Forkuoh, speaking over Zoom. "I'm very excited, I'm keeping positive."

It's quite a line-up of prizes she can look forward to; as well as a trip to Champagne, she has elected to take up work experience at the three-Michelin-starred Waterside Inn in Bray, Berkshire; at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok, Thailand; and three-starred Core by Clare Smyth in London's Notting Hill.

Forkuoh, assistant restaurant manager at Gleneagles' Strathearn restaurant in Auchterarder, Perthshire, is the eighth Gold Service Scholar, a competition aimed at inspiring, educating and nurturing the UK's finest front-of-house talent as well as driving standards in the sector. Launched in 2012, it offers the opportunity for an aspiring individual to hone their craft through mentoring, travel and placement opportunities provided by senior service professionals.

Finalists from each year of the competition automatically become members of ‘Team Gold', the scholarship's alumni network, and trustees include industry legends Alastair Storey, Willy Bauer, Edward Griffiths, Silvano Giraldin and Sergio Rebecchi. The Queen herself is patron of the competition.

In it to win it

Entering the scholarship had been on Forkuoh's to-do list for some time, but she hadn't previously felt ready even though competitions have been very much a part of her development. She competed at WorldSkills Abu Dhabi in 2017, representing the UK in restaurant service – in which she won a Medallion of Excellence – and was recognised at the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts' Annual Awards of Excellence in 2018, all with the backing of her tutors and trainers.

She studied an NVQ Diploma Level 3 in hospitality supervision and leadership at Coleg Sir Gâr while working as a waitress at Stradey Park hotel in Llanelli, Camarthenshire. Forkuoh originally planned on becoming a translator – she and her family moved to Llanelli when she was 15 from Italy and she speaks English, Italian, Twi and French. Although she intended to study both hospitality and languages at college, the subjects were taught at two different campuses, and while she chose to prioritise catering and hospitality with plans to complete her Italian and French A-Levels afterwards, she fell in love with the guest interaction side of hospitality.

"I just fell into it and I happened to enjoy it," she explains. "With my personal tutor back at college telling me how good I was and how many things I could achieve, I kind of believed in it, and it brought me to where I am now."

One aspect of college she says she really enjoyed was her experience in its training restaurant, Merlin's. "It's essential and really important to have a realistic environment," she enthuses. "It prepares you for the real world."

Despite this, the industry has seen cuts to further education funding put college training restaurants in the firing line, with high-profile casualties in recent years including Foxholes restaurant at Runshaw College in Lancashire and Oxford Brookes' Brookes restaurant. Time will tell if efforts being put in by the industry, institutions and reforms to further education will provide the stability colleges across the country need. After finishing college in 2017, Forkuoh was recommended by her WorldSkills technical expert Dr Shyam Patiar to gain experience at a five-star hotel such as Celtic Manor Resort in nearby Newport – or Gleneagles. Having never previously been to Scotland, she was excited by the opportunity to travel and flew to Edinburgh to undergo a placement at the hotel.

After just a week or two, she was offered a job and has been there ever since, joining as a chef de rang in the Strathearn, progressing to head waitress, junior assistant manager and finally assistant restaurant manager in February 2020. She says her Gleneagles colleagues have also been very supportive of her development, encouraging her to enter the Gold Service Scholarship and helping her prepare for the final. "I had five days to prepare for the final menu, so after the developer seminar, while I was on the train travelling back to Scotland, I sent one of the executive chefs the menu," she recalls. "The following day I came to work and they had actually prepared some dishes from the menu that required some guéridon work, I think it was a pâté en croûte that I needed to carve for the guests during the final. They actually prepared a pâté en croûte within 24 hours for me.

"And then they prepared a rum baba, which was one of the desserts, with the chantilly cream which we needed to quenelle or rocher. I was so overwhelmed and full of joy to see that they actually went out of their way to help me… I had support from the chefs, from my restaurant manager, from the sommelier. It was amazing. I really enjoyed it and I honestly felt prepared when I went back to London for the actual final."

Heart of gold

Forkuoh was declared the winner of the Gold Service Scholarship at a glittering ceremony at the Berkeley hotel in London on 12 February 2020 – just one month before the world went into lockdown.

"It was very challenging, I'm not going to lie, especially during the first lockdown. We were all furloughed and there was so much uncertainty, we were not sure what was going to happen," she remembers.

However, she has used the various lockdowns over the last two years to invest in her own development including taking part in a 10-week management course as well as an intensive cognitive course to support information retention, memory and effective communication. She also hosted an online masterclass for hospitality students at three colleges across south Wales.

"It was nice to be able to share my experience with young students and for them to know that I actually started where they are," she says. "Thanks to my tutors, I was able to progress in my career and now work in a five-star hotel. But I think it's really important for them to have an example of somebody who went to that college and progressed because it's something that they can be inspired by."

Promoting the industry in colleges and schools is something she feels strongly is a way to attract young talent to the industry and to sell the different opportunities a career in hospitality can offer.

In fact, she'd love to see a television programme focused on the front-of-house profession: "People see MasterChef, they see Great British Menu and they see how well the chefs do and the recognition they receive, but what about front of house? What is there for us to be able to watch and be inspired by and be encouraged to enter? I think that's what's lacking and I would love to see it. I would love for somebody like maybe Fred Sirieix to do that.

"And who knows, a student in hospitality might see it and think, ‘oh wow, I want to work there'… Maybe it's not as simple as that, but I do think that if we are showing what we do, we would attract more people to enter the industry because they would see it with their own eyes."

She suggests that the industry being classed as ‘low-skilled' isn't helping and is discouraging people from hospitality. She would also like to see more female front-of-house leaders visible in the industry, quoting Clare Smyth and Anneka Brooks as women that she looks up to.

"Maybe because I haven't looked hard enough or I'm not following the right links to be connected to these people, but from what I've seen, I don't really see many female managers or leaders in front of house in the UK… I would like to dig deep and find out the real reason why the hospitality industry is mainly led by males," she adds.

What next?

Forkuoh has plenty of ambitions for the future – she would like to progress to deputy restaurant manager of the Strathearn and even restaurant manager, perhaps managing a hotel or owning her own business one day, although feels that she needs to gain more experience abroad first and hopes to do a placement in France at some point to improve her language skills and learn more about French cuisine.

The next competitions she has her sights set on are Restaurant Manager of the Year and the Master of Culinary Arts (MCA), "but I know how difficult that one is, and I think I would need a few more years of experience to be able to do that", she says. "I'm the kind of person that if I want to enter a competition, I want to get it right the first time."

This was certainly the case with her entry to the Gold Service Scholarship, but despite this, her advice to future potential entrants is clear: "Go for it. Don't even think about it. I hesitated so much, and I wish I didn't, I wish I had just gone for it with confidence. My advice would be just to apply. There's nothing to lose, you're going to get so much out of it, whether you only get to the quarter-final or the semi-final. If you get to the final, it's a bonus, and if you win it, that's an extra bonus. Just being part of Team Gold, it's extraordinary."