There’s a front page report in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram on the serious shortage of qualified cooks to work in the state’s restaurants.
[Troy] Mains, whose kitchen must turn out 150 lunches and 200 dinners a day but is currently four cooks short, said he has interviewed people just out of culinary school who can’t cut an onion or bone a chicken.
“There’s a decline in cooks, not just the amount but the quality,” Mains said. “When I was up and coming in the restaurant business, I can remember a stack of 50 resumes in a folder of people who wanted to work, and now if I hire four cooks, one works out.”
It is an easy problem to solve. Pay More. In the 80’s a line cook could make $15 dollars an hour. Now you are lucky to get $13.
I would think that cutting an onion properly would be a basic culinary school topic, so are these new recruits poor students or is the school not getting to such elementary tasks?