Apprentices & Mentors

[chefette]

From your bio, it sounds as though you have had a very rewarding experience in the food field, been fortunate to hook up with excellent people who liked you, recognized your talent and were interested in mentoring you. So I have several personnel related questions for you:

Is this something you immediately recognized or did it take you a while to appreciate the significance of this positive effect others have had in shaping your career? Does this impact how you see people on your staff? Have you sought or identified newbies on your staff and fostered them, helped them become all they could be (mirroring your philosophy that food should taste of what it is (which I read as --bring out its true glory)? Do you have a position on accepting culinary school graduates versus non-schooled personnel into your kitchen? What is it?

[d.hawksworth]

Interesting questions,

I went in with the philosophy that if I worked hard, listened, asked as many questions as possible I'll be on the right path. I like to find staff who seem to want to learn and are hard working, there's a lot of not so glorious stuff to deal with in the kitchen.

Now I never went to a culinary school, I just got stuck in and was very determined. I knew what I wanted to learn. Apprenticeship was completed in a couple of years and then I packed my bags and headed over to Europe to learn how to work. That was a shocker !!! I started out at the Canteen in Chelsea Harbour, MPW's first large restaurant. I had only been in London for 3 hours and I was off to meet Marco and Stephen Terry, everything went well so I started the next day. In at 7:30 am and finished 1 am and back again at 7:30 am and on and on it went. Now that was fun.

DH