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Amongst the innumerable pivots, upheavals, closures and rebirths we’ve witnessed across the industry during the pandemic, there has also been another phenomenon bubbling away: chefs opening culinary schools. It’s nothing new - as Rafael Tonon pointed out in his recent article for FDL, the likes of Gaston Acurio and Raymond Blanc have been doing it for years. Italian chef Davide Oldani has been operating his Olma institute since 2017. But recently the trend has really taken off, and even Gordon Ramsay – cartoonishly severe in public, but by all accounts a fair and supportive mentor in private – is getting in on the act with The Gordon Ramsay Academy. The question is, why now?
“The only way to spread the culture of food and its primary role within the worldwide food industry is education. This has become more and more clear to me during this period,” says Italian chef Niko Romito of the three-Michelin-star Reale restaurant in Abruzzo, Italy. He has plans to enlarge his existing Accademia school, which up to now has helped to train around 30 chefs a year, with the construction of a new 3,700 square-metre campus that will focus on teaching the wider role of chefs in society. Romito is going macro.
“I strongly believe that a chef today has an ethical and moral obligation towards society, “ says Romito. That means “deep and structured thought on the founding values of sustainable creativity,” including the reduction of food waste, territoriality, seasonality, “and the application of standardised methods of food processing to make it part of the solution and not of the aggravation of collective health,” he says.
Niko Romito's Staff - Matteo Carassale
Over in São Paulo, Brazil, chef Jefferson Rueda of A Casa do Porco has had a similar awakening. He plans to extend his Escola Rueda, currently only available to his 200 employees, to international interns – “people who want to learn about Brazilian country cuisine” – by 2023. The school will also prioritise underprivileged young people. “The time the pandemic gave me did me a lot of good. My reassessment was brutal, and now I know that my role is one of an educator,” he says.
For Romito and Rueda, these are plans that have been in the pipeline for a while, only to be accelerated by the crazy, unprecedented times we find ourselves in. Perhaps the same is true for Ramsay – his team failed to respond to a request for a comment. He’s offering his students work experience and “a guaranteed job” at the end of their studies in one of his portfolio of restaurants. Is this pure altruism? Boredom? Or a canny way to protect restaurants from another staffing crisis?
Speak to the likes of chef Clare Smyth, who ran Ramsay’s three-Michelin-star flagship Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London for many years, and she’ll tell you that Ramsay, although strict, always valued teaching and mentorship highly, and believed that a chef had to earn the respect of his or her charges. Perhaps also, a culinary school is another string to the bow of chefs who have it all: the restaurants, the TV shows, and the product deals.
There’s an element of misty-eyedness too, that we’ve all experienced during the pandemic, and of getting back to nature (or even just outdoors). “I’ve always liked to plant, to fish, to breed, to hunt since I was a boy. That's what drives me to create a school of open-air experiences,” says Rueda of his Escola, which will be located on a farm.
Then there’s the desire to give back, or at least to be seen to be giving back. When chefs are being made UN Goodwill Ambassadors, as in the case of Massimo Bottura for his fight against food waste, it only emphasises the responsibilities all top chefs have today and the impact they can achieve. “We are all more aware of the responsibilities we have towards ourselves, towards others and towards the environment around us,” says Romito.
But is there something else at play here? Many chef-owned culinary schools provide an internship program after graduation that sometimes will turn into a paid job. There’s no doubt the system of unpaid internships and the extra person-power it offers is what has helped many great restaurants get to where they are today (though it is technically now illegal in the US). Could these schools become feeders for a new system? Rueda says, in his case, no.
“I’ve never liked having someone working with me without being paid, so I’ve had very few interns in five years, we don't have the physical space for it. My team has always been local and I think it has always worked for us.”
What is clear is that these new culinary schools will need to teach more than just the beauty of the terroir. As well as a focus on the wider role of chefs in society, attention must be given to improving the business skills of the chefs of tomorrow. As Ferran Adrià argued when we spoke to him at the beginning of the pandemic: “If you want to start a restaurant, the first thing you have to do is focus on management. Right now it is not a priority to think about being creative.” And this is coming from the king of creativity.
However, currently, restaurants around the world are struggling to fill vacant positions as a result of the pandemic. Fine-dining restaurants, with their international brigades of hungry young stagiaires and grizzled ex-pats, and multilingual front of house teams, are hugely vulnerable. Many people have returned to their native countries, or simply left the industry all together. The reasons for the latter are numerous, but a lot of chefs are simply fed-up: with the conditions and the pay, the lack of benefits and insurance, and their work-life balance. In the UK alone, in a situation exacerbated by Brexit, official figures suggest there are over 350,000 less people working in hospitality than the same time a year ago.
So perhaps the real question is, will there even be chefs to fill many new culinary schools by the time they open their doors?
