The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, October 12, 1999
By Casey Mahood

Strong economy creating 'chronic shortage' of cooks

Canada's restaurants and hotels could use a little help in the kitchen. A strong economy, a more sophisticated Canadian palate and greater recognition internationally of the country's culinary talent have led to a tight market for some jobs.

"Where we are short right now in Canada, and in the whole industry, is cooks, great cooks," said Serge Simard, executive director of food and beverage at Canadian Pacific Hotels. "They're coming out slowly and everybody is grabbing these guys."

Industry players differ on what skills are needed and how badly, but one indication of a tight job market is that a particularly popular seminar at this year's Hostex hospitality trade show next week (Oct. 17-19) in Toronto is on recruiting, hiring and training staff.

"When you start talking about the quality restaurants, quality hotels, there's a chronic shortage of people," said Anthony Bevan, co-ordinator of culinary and food service programs at Huniher College in Toronto. "We're getting calls every day of the week from these guys looking for people."

CP Hotels, a premier chain that employs about 1,000 to 1,200 kitchen staff across the country, is able to recruit the generals and foot soldiers it needs for its culinary operations, Mr. Simard said. However, the sergeants of the kitchen are more difficult to attract and retain, he said.

These cooks - sous chefs and chefs de partie - who can combine culinary talent with some supervisory experience, are prime targets for restaurants looking to recruit people to run their kitchens. And while it's not unusual for restaurants to try to poach such cooks, the number of places that have opened as the economy has improved has added to the pressure.

Culinary programs at the community colleges say their graduates are having little trouble finding work, and in some cases are getting to pick from multiple employment offers.

Thomas Dietzel, a European-trained chef and president of Dietzel Enterprises Inc., started his own Vancouver-based recruiting and placement firm for chefs five years ago when he recognized the trouble some Canadian resort hotels had finding staff. He said European-trained chefs and such specialists as saucieres and great pastry chefs are difficult to find in Canada, but Canadian-trained chefs for restaurants are available in sufficient supply in the bigger cities.

"The major cities, I would say Vancouver especially, has produced them lately because of the change of attitude towards the business," Mr. Dietzel said. Even 15 years ago in Canada, cooking was usually a job someone took when there wasn't much else available, but it is increasingly approached as a career partly because of the higher profile that chefs now have in the media, he said.

The country's chefs have also developed the chef de cuisine certification program, which recognizes a high level of both culinary and management skills. The program has awarded the certificate to more than 800 of the country's 23,400 chefs.

"We are seeing the first fruits of the labour," Mr. Dietzel said. Canadian-trained cooks are also attracting interest from employers in other parts of the world, including Europe, which is the traditional supplier of kitchen talent to this country. The influence of different cultures in Canada means that chefs here will probably have of some knowledge of everything from sushi to Mediterranean dishes, Mr. Dietzel said. Europe itself is running into a tighter market for kitchen staff as workers there question the long hours and relatively low pay of what is a physically demanding job, he said.

Fred Malley, chairman of the Canadian Culinary Institute and an instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, said part of the reason the industry in Canada is having trouble finding quality people is that the sector has a high attrition rate. "It's a systemic thing within the industry because many of them [employers] still are of the feeling that if you can hire them cheap and keep them that way, they're all going to be happy little campers," Mr. Malley said.

The pay at $8 to $12 an hour for young cooks is hard to live on to begin with, he said, but when the economy booms and the demand increases for cooks, other work paying much more also becomes available. "Many people are in it [cooking] for the love of it, that's true," Mr. Malley said. "If you're not passionate about it, you don't stay in it [for the money] because the people that make the six digits who get the celebrity are few and far between."