Off-track record: phony culinary CVs

It’s hard to believe someone would risk the reputation of their business for the sake of something as simple as a CV check.

TWAM 21 MAY 2016 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 21 MAY 2016 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION John Lethlean TWAM STAFF DINKUS pic : Julie Adams

I had a strange conversation with a restaurant owner a couple of years ago. This fellow had employed, via an agency, a head chef who had quite a CV. The PR machine went into overdrive and this no-name backwater restaurant suddenly had a nationally known name attached to it. Of course, the employer had done zero due diligence on his new “star”. He had simply outsourced the recruitment and swallowed the hype like a chilled, freshly opened oyster. Of course, it all went to poo.

It’s difficult to believe someone would risk the reputation of their business for the sake of something as simple as a résumé check. In the cooking world, there are different kinds of failures. Such as the failure to present work experience honestly to prospective employers, the media or other stakeholders. The bullshit CV.

“I remember a Japanese guy who was persistent about staging with us,” recalls Martin Benn, chef-proprietor of Sydney’s Sepia restaurant. “Staging” is the widely deployed international system of work experience in restaurant kitchens – a culinary internship, if you like, with far less rigour around parameters such as length of service, duties or access to the talent.

“I don’t necessarily agree with the staging system,” says Benn, “but in this instance, we finally said yes. He came in, did a day, and we never saw him again. Made up all these reasons why he couldn’t come back. Lo and behold, a few months later he turns up as a chef in a Sydney Japanese restaurant and Sepia is on his résumé!

“It happens all the time,” Benn adds, “and we’ve been burned. Staging is a dangerous game. I get a lot of CVs. Some of these people have ‘worked’ at more places in two years than I have in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong; Noma is a great place to train but a lot of the time these guys who staged there just picked herbs.”

Ben Shewry, another elite Australian chef, feels the same way. “It’s happened multiple times,” says the proprietor of Attica in Melbourne. “I’ll get a phone call from someone, and it’ll be like, ‘Bob says he was with you for two years’, but I can’t even remember him.”

It surprises me that this sort of thing still goes on, because modern connectivity makes due diligence so much easier. As Shewry says, “It’s a small world, but pretty far reaching”.

It used to be more opaque. A chef would get off the boat from a stint in the Old Country telling us he’d been working for Marco Pierre White, or the Roux brothers, or Gordon Ramsay when he was actually a restaurant chef, not a TV star. The prospective employers would see the spin value, and didn’t we in the media lap it up.

But I do recall emailing Ramsay’s organisation about 12 years ago seeking clarity on a certain chef’s claims and – finally – getting a response that went something like: “Never heard of him.”

We in the media have to share responsibility here; we need to quantify, to justify. That work experience thing is a fundamental bona fide when you’re trying to justify a story’s worth. But next time you read something like “Former Noma chef opens yadayadayada”, switch on your bullshit detector and ask yourself how many stagers have been through that Copenhagen kitchen in the past 10 years. It may just be a new restaurant with outstanding picked herbs.