ACF National President Karen Doyle argues chefs deserve recognition as skilled professionals rather than just praise for resilience.

By Karen Doyle, National President, Australian Culinary Federation

Resilient is a word our sector often uses to describe chefs. It is meant generously and it is accurate as far as it goes. My concern is what the word leaves out.

Consider an ordinary Thursday. The seafood delivery lands short. A chef de partie calls in sick an hour before service. The beef invoice is four dollars a kilo above the costing. Within twenty minutes a head chef must substitute a protein without losing the character of the dish, resequence prep across a smaller brigade, reset portion weights so the margin holds, brief the floor on what’s changed and keep a first year apprentice learning rather than merely surviving the night.

That is more than just resilience: it is professional judgment exercised at speed, with incomplete information and no capacity to defer the decision. In most industries work of that description carries a title and salary to match. It takes four years of apprenticeship and a decade beyond that to develop a chef who can hold such a Thursday together and we should describe the outcome accordingly.

The distinction matters commercially, because when a chef’s expertise is attributed to their temperament a business has little reason to fund the training, structure or staffing that would make the work sustainable, given temperament appears to come for free. Median weekly earnings in accommodation and food services sit at $1,300 against a national median of $1,741.* That gap reflects how the market values the work.

Decisions made on the pass shape food cost, waste, compliance, retention and the guest’s experience of the venue. Chefs and cooks hold the commercial centre of a foodservice business and they hold it while teaching the next generation on the same shift.

The Australian Culinary Federation exists to make that case and to give it substance. Mentoring, apprenticeship advocacy and consistent standards ensure skill passes deliberately from one generation to the next and that its value is understood by operators, suppliers and the wider sector.

There is also a part for others to play. Business owners can describe the chefs in their venues as skilled professionals and resource them accordingly. Suppliers can treat the kitchens they serve as technical partners rather than accounts. Media can report kitchen skills as expertise rather than drama. And chefs can talk about what’s required in their work, in interviews, performance reviews and conversations about pay.

Our members have carried this trade through a demanding period. They deserve more than admiration for their resilience. They deserve recognition for their expertise and the resourcing that recognition should bring.