‘Celebrity chefs’ under fire from high-profile industry stalwarts

HIGH profile chefs have lashed out at television cooking shows for “cheapening” their trade.

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HIGH profile chefs have lashed out at television cooking shows for “cheapening” their trade and spawning a generation of starry-eyed apprentices.

Former Gondwana and Marque IV chef Paul Foreman said he and his colleagues regularly “have a bitch” about the new breed of so-called “celebrity chefs” arising from cooking shows such as MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules.

“If anybody can just come out of a TV show and suddenly put a jacket on and become ‘chef’ it just rubs us the wrong way,” said Foreman, who is executive chef for the Kallis Group, presiding over six kitchens including Cooleys Hotel, the Beltana, the Black Buffalo and Beachfront Bicheno.

“It (the TV cooking show phenomenon) has been great for exposure for our industry but I call them non-reality shows because it’s not reality.

“There is so much more to what we do.”

The term “chef” comes from the French term “chef de cuisine”, which means “head of kitchen” and Foreman said it was earned through leadership and years of training.

“I know it comes off as bitchy but if someone comes along after doing six months wearing a chef’s jacket and doing cooking schools, it’s just a bit nuts,” Mr Foreman said.

His Facebook musings on the issue were supported by chefs including Peter Kuruvita and former television cooking host Ian Parmenter.

“I have for years lamented the fact that the media has portrayed me as a ‘celebrity chef’ of which I’m neither,” Mr Parmenter said.

“I once asked a class of students who were studying cookery what they wanted to do when qualified. They all wanted to ‘be a chef on TV’. Terribly sad.”

Tasmanian MasterChef graduate Ben Milbourne said he understood Mr Foreman’s grievance and would never call himself a chef, despite hosting a cooking show and running food tours and dinners.

“I always call myself a cook,” Mr Milbourne told the Sunday Tasmanian.

“We cop grief sometimes from chefs and we totally understand that.

“We haven’t done the hard yards but that doesn’t mean we’re not working hard now to try to produce the best possible food we can with the skills we’ve got.”