As food and beverage industry standards in Taiwan have picked up, so has the need for related educational institutions. While many colleges have jumped to open their own cooking departments, education models vary, and so does the road to culinary success. Does anyone out there offer more than "sandwich" courses?.
Taiwan prides itself on the wide variety of cuisines it offers, but more than one tourist has been heard to comment unfavorably on local standards of hygiene and professionalism. Service is regarded as a kind of afterthought, and culinary training to international standards is a relatively new phenomenon. When National Tamshui Commercial Industrial Vocational Senior High School (NTCH) established the country's first food and beverage management department nearly fifteen years ago, a lot of people thought it was a crazy idea.
"No one was sure if Taiwan could even come up with enough teaching talent to staff the department," says Peter Su, dean of studies at NTCH, which is located near the coast north of Taipei. "But food and beverage departments such as ours had been around in the West forever, and we thought it was time Taiwan moved in that direction too."
It was not until the late 1980s, however, when incomes rose and the number of foreign-managed restaurants and hotels in Taiwan grew, that the impetus for better standards began to build. But although more and more Western-style establishments were setting up in the big cities, few of them were prepared to share their kitchen and management skills with local companies. NTCH's farsighted planners were thus proved right, and other high schools began to fall in line.
More than one hundred senior highs nationwide now teach food-and-beverage (F&B) skills, and at the college level they are no longer merely taught as add-ons to tourism or home economics courses. "At first, the culinary department lagged behind our seven others in enrollment, but now it's probably one of the most popular," Su says. Ten colleges and universities have also set up F&B departments, but as Su points out, these are relative newcomers.
Enter National Kaohsiung Hospitality College (KHC), which was founded in 1995 and to date is the only tertiary school of its kind in Taiwan. Situated in the country's second-largest city and currently educating almost two thousand students, the two-year college represents the first institute of higher education dedicated to the food, beverage, and hotel industries. Li Fu-teng, the founder of the school and now its president, circled the globe three times with Ministry of Education officials and school architects to do research and prepare for the school's opening. In addition, thirteen academics were sent to Europe and the United States to observe foreign hospitality studies and form a nucleus of seed teachers.
Li is staunchly proud of the way the school has developed, calling it "number one of its kind in the world." What backs up that claim? KHC currently has eight departments, including some firsts on the island, such as a department of Western culinary arts that saves students who want to study this type of cooking the expense and trouble of a trip abroad. It also has a department of Chinese culinary arts, oddly enough also a first for Taiwan. "With more and more foreign schools coming here to try to persuade local students to sign up with them, we've really had to keep on our toes," Li says.
The history of KHC's Chinese culinary arts department is a good example of the way the college appeals to students. At first, the department had a Western and a Chinese section, and the first year saw one hundred eighty-five candidates take exams for the twenty-five Chinese culinary places. As time went on, so many students applied that the two sections had to be upgraded into separate departments. By this July, the Chinese culinary department already had three hundred and two candidates wanting to compete for just fifty places.
Taiwan's cookery schools can be likened to factories that churn out interns for the growing number of hotels and upmarket restaurants on the island. Many courses now offer young chefs-to-be the chance to work at top eateries to see if they can take the heat or should get out of the kitchen. Typically, students take part in these "sandwich" courses after they have been enrolled for between two semesters and a year. After about six months as kitchen gophers, during which time their teachers visit them twice to grade their performance, interns then go back to school, taking with them the judgement for good or ill of their temporary employers. The training is considered so valuable that now a few vocational high schools are planning to set up similar programs.
Not everyone emerges unscathed, however. Students on secondment must acclimatize themselves to night shifts, prolonged standing, and much else. "Even though they're interns, their employers cut them no slack," says Patricia Fu, personnel manager at one of Taipei's major hotels. Understandably, she would have no hesitation in firing an intern for stealing or coming into violent conflict with fellow employees; but sleeping during work hours would also automatically mean the sack. Students who show they can follow the rules and adapt, however, find themselves on the threshold of a rewarding career. Despite the hardships, the spirits of young chefs are still high--when the hotel recently took one hundred fifty interns under its wing, fewer than ten of them failed to complete the program.
Lin Shih-hsuan is one of the many twenty-somethings sweating it out in the kitchen. During his six months at the hotel, he will mostly spend his time preparing utensils and condiments for the chefs. He is most unlikely to be asked to cook anything, but that does not deter him, because he can talk to the real chefs and watch them work, and when he goes after his first job he will have five -star experience on his résumé. "The reason I chose to study in this school is because it had a program like this one," he says. "But after I graduate, I hope to work in a smaller restaurant where the division of labor isn't as pronounced, where I'd be allowed to cook more."
Most interns can expect to earn about NT$18,000-20,000 (US$580-645) a month, and many schools require them to put these meager earnings toward the cost of two-week educational trips abroad. According to Monica Hu, director of the F&B management department of the Jin Wen Institute of Technology, most go to Europe, because the continent is perceived as having a richer culinary culture than the United States. But not all students like to be herded west, especially those studying Chinese cooking. "I really wish I could go to Hong Kong and mainland China," Lin says wistfully. "And Japan would be nice, to study cutting skills."
One of the reasons Chinese cooking courses are given in the first place, Hu says, is to help students pass licensing examinations. Even the island's senior chefs can fail these government tests, where hygiene is paramount. "Older-generation chefs put the emphasis on speed and taste, but they aren't so worried about cleanliness," says Tseng Chu-ing, a Chinese cookery teacher at NTCH.
The Department of Health proposes to adopt a set of standards under which chefs will be graded A, B, or C. As of April 2001, all registered Chinese restaurants will be required to ensure that at least 80 percent of its cooks hold C licenses. KHC is one of the few schools that requires its Chinese cookery students to have earned a minimum of a C grade before they may graduate, and most schools are expected to follow suit. The idea sounds good, but there are drawbacks.
First, at the moment the rules apply only to Chinese cooking. Thai, Indian, and Western fast-food and other chefs are exempt from the licensing system. This is because it has proved harder than expected for local regulators to know what standards to apply to other cuisines. Rules are being drawn up with the help of chefs who have studied abroad, but so far they have not been published.
Second, according to Kung Tai-hua, a section chief in the Skills Testing Division of the Council of Labor Affairs' Employment and Vocational Training Administration, academics and top-class chefs are still squabbling over what criteria are appropriate for the grant of an A license. This difficulty does not affect B licenses, but there is no uniformity in the way holders of such middle-ranking licenses are treated, with some but not all establishments giving them higher pay.
While there may still be a way to go before the licensing system is perfected, most observers agree that a formal education at an accredited school is much the best way of learning the ropes, particularly when it comes to the more academic topics such as nutrition. "You save a lot of time if you go to school for your skills, rather than become a kitchen apprentice," says Herman Lai, a chef at Taipei's Grand Hyatt. "Many traditionally trained chefs have great skills, but they don't know how to explain them."
Older chefs enjoy a reputation for being opinionated and unable to take criticism, and the new army of younger, formally educated cooks is beginning to threaten their livelihood. Senior members of the profession also tend to lack other languages, an increasingly desirable attribute given the growing number of high-paying, foreign-managed restaurants. "They're more likely to face a bottleneck when they look for promotions," says Monica Hu of the Jin Wen Institute of Technology. "These newer, bigger hotels need chefs with global vision, and many of them are expected to be able to go abroad for contests, something they can't do if they don't have the language skills."
For this reason, most cookery departments in the island's schools offer supplementary English-language courses, along with such contemporary favorites as business management and cost control. "Chefs today must know more than just how to cook, they also have to know how to deal with personnel and budgetary matters," Hu notes. Students applying to KHC even have to take an English comprehension test.
But if schools are broadening their horizons, not all of their students are willing to change their mindsets. Many dream of making an easy living and winning quick promotion, but this is unrealistic. "The fast track to success is nonexistent in this business, absolutely nonexistent," Hu says. "In a kitchen, there's no mistaking the pecking order. You start with the basics, and if your seniors decide they like your attitude, they'll teach you something."
Ho Ting-yu, a KHC graduate who cooks at a restaurant in the Kuomintang's headquarters, has nothing but praise for his school's Chinese culinary program. He criticizes many of his former classmates, however, for not following through after two years of hard study. "A lot of them looked on culinary arts as a pastime," he says. "Sure, they were interested in cooking, but they were also interested in just getting a degree." Most of Ho's classmates are now in other professions. "Working in a kitchen is very tiring. Not many people can hold on for long in this game."
Even the most dedicated students can fail if their professional courses fall below par. Although most of Taiwan's cookery schools are fairly new, facilities vary, and private schools in particular are notorious for their Spartan facilities, compared to those offered by government-funded public schools. "The contrast is pretty stark," says Monica Hu. There are an increasing number of schools to choose from, but this may be part of the problem rather than a viable solution. "Food education is good in terms of quantity here, but not really in quality," NTCH's Peter Su says, while KHC's Li Fu-teng notes that "there's a problem finding enough teachers to educate these students at the senior-high level. The schools don't have any trouble attracting students, but the teachers they hire aren't necessarily specialists."
As the island's leading culinary institute, KHC is therefore considering the possibility of opening teacher-training classes. It has also arranged staff exchanges with its counterparts in the West, and two teachers from a hospitality school in England have already taught a short course in Western cookery there. Lee Ming-huei, KHC's director of Career and Placement Services, says the school has even bigger aspirations. "We hope to turn it into a center of Chinese culinary arts for the Asia-Pacific region," he says, although he acknowledges that it would currently be impossible to compete with Europe and the United States when it comes to Western food. Lee Yi-chun, the school's director of Chinese Culinary Arts, is just as confident. "Mainland China has very good ingredients, but our cuisine and culinary techniques are more sophisticated, and we're more hygiene-conscious," she says.
Where KHC leads, other institutions cannot do other than follow. Taiwan has long enjoyed a good reputation as a place to study Mandarin, a language increasingly spoken throughout Asia and elsewhere. It would be nice to think that one day students who wish to learn about Chinese cooking, one of the world's greatest cuisines, will list the island as their number-one destination of choice.