Guest Author - Fay Olinsky


The grass may seem greener elsewhere but in these times recession is world wide…. trying to take the world by storm when things are bad back home will only end in disaster. The UK is swamped with personal chefs who have no work.

Too many relied on the same type of client and the same type of food. Without extreme diversity, a willingness to travel and the facilities to safely transport food from a proper certified kitchen let alone a reputation for excellence, there is no way a mediocre chef will ride out this recession.

My company receives between ten and fifty CV’s daily from chefs all over the world who want to make a ‘killing’ in the UK…well guys it ain’t happening…there are barely enough jobs and clients of a sustainable nature to go around for the indigenous chefs. Compared to US this is a tiny country and things are somewhat different. The majority of jobs are more private chef work which is very demanding and requires multiskills and usually extensive culinary knowledge. They don’t ‘freezer-fill’ here any more and the jobs are nearly always dinner parties or high class daily cooking…no cobblers or chilli-con-carne’s and 9 times out of ten you will be asked for the egg-white omelette or some other dietary item at the last minute. It’s intensive and sometimes very stressful. Not something you can just step into from a foreign land.

So what can we do to ride out this blip? There must be 1001 ideas out there for promoting PC’s as an economical alternative as well as tempting some of those well-heeled clients to using us more often. Any ideas or suggestions?