But is there a negative side to the media glamorisation of this extremely tough role?
Speaking as one accustomed to the limelight, Indego’s Bhatia agrees “there are negative aspects to everything”, but says the impact very much depends on how the chef in question handles his newfound influence.
“I don’t consider myself a celebrity chef at all, I still say I’m a cook and that what I like to do,” he insisted.
“It’s the media that puts you up on that pedestal — how things go from thereon depends on whether you want to accept this ‘star status’ and how much goes into your head.”
Advertisement
But Angela Hartnett, a Ramsay protégée and now a Michelin-starred chef in her own right, has seen a more negative side.
“People look at Gordon [Ramsay] and Jamie [Oliver] and think ‘oh yeah, I can do that, it’s only a bit of cooking’, and then you have people going into the restaurant business with the idea not of running a restaurant, but of becoming famous and use cooking to get there — which of course is the wrong way to do it,” she told Caterer Middle East in an exclusive interview last year.
“Now you see these youngsters coming in saying ‘I want to be on TV, I want to be the next Jamie Oliver’, and you think ‘OK, but can you run a restaurant — can you make money, can you deliver the product, can you get customers coming back?’
“Because if you can’t do that, forget TV — you might get your five minutes of fame, but after that what are you going to do? So in that respect, I think this whole celeb thing’s been a bit negative.”
However Hartnett admitted the glamorisation of the industry had also brought benefits.
“These chefs have brought cooking to light, they’ve made it a much sexier career move than it would have been ten years ago,” she pointed out.
All the same, some celebrity chefs have come in for criticism over recent years for spreading their culinary empires too thinly.
So what is the impact on a kitchen team when such a figure becomes ‘patron chef’ of the outlet but isn’t working in the kitchen — as is the case for several restaurants in this region?
Indego’s Bhatia commented: “You cannot spend time at each outlet — what’s important is that the guest shouldn’t notice the difference when you are not there.
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
