Are we shy of the work-shy?

In my various attempts to convince employers to take on apprentices and help reverse the fortunes of the long-term unemployed, a common refrain from businesses is that the people we are aiming to help don’t actually want to be helped, that they don’t want to work.
Why should we spend time and effort with the jobless when there are so many eager workers from around the world willing to take any job going and do them with fervour, they argue?
At lunchtime today, I am speaking at an event at The Cinnamon Club where we see the effects of the short-sightedness of this approach. A decade ago, we brought over a large number of chefs from India on work permits who now have the right to stay. Part of the deal with the issuing of work permits back then was that employers committed to sharing the expertise these chefs had with local people.
None of the restaurants those days did anything but pay lip-service to that part of the deal and now the Indian restaurant sector is facing the consequences. The tap has been turned off on more visas being issued and now they find they cannot grow. Programmes like the one we are promoting today called Mastara Chef aimed at recruiting young local talent to fuel the growth of this sector is based on re-invention because these restaurants didn’t see what was coming ahead. So it’s a game of catch-up rather than growth, which will have to wait a while. But that’s better than standing still and watching the gradual demise of your business.
I’ve often remarked that Indian restaurants need to learn from other sectors. But here’s something everyone else can learn from them. Employers who don’t engage with the long term unemployed, who rely on overseas workers, may also soon find themselves coming a cropper. We can easily and compellingly argue that Romanians and Bulgarians aren’t actually taking “our” jobs because “we” don’t actually want them. But where does that eventually lead us?
If for no other reason than sheer practicality employers need to reset their thinking. Today or tomorrow more curbs will be placed on the eligibility of people coming to this country to work. So let’s not all find ourselves in the curry catch-up place. Instead, let’s shore up our businesses so we are prepared for that eventuality. We will soon need the unemployed as much as they need us.

Payday loan sharks

I get put up for industry awards now and then and when the competition is particularly slack, I occasionally am lucky enough to win. Sometimes I dread the thought of winning something like the “Industry Legend” as I was nominated for in one such event recently. I so didn’t want it that I didn’t go.
Other times I feel I deserve a pat on the back, take one for the team, something like that. About a year ago, I was put up for an Entrepreneur of the Year award and lost out to the bloke behind Wonga. I wasn’t so much disappointed for myself but staggered that his was considered a commendable business. When would this false belief stop, I wondered?
Hopefully that time has now come with the publication of the Office of Fair Trading report on payday lending which has busted the myth that we shouldn’t worry about the ugly 4000% APRs cited because it’s only for a few days. We now know that over a third of all loans are rolled over at least once which is where the big interest rates kick in and half of the lenders’ income is derived from defaulters – so it’s good for them not to be too meticulous on people’s ability to repay on time.

There probably is a legitimate business proposition for families who genuinely just need to be covered for a couple of days to allow food on the table or rent to be paid. The report’s recommendations don’t go far enough; it’s asked for better checks and balances. What they should say is those who have slack assessment criteria should not allowed to be called payday lenders and be slapped with a loan shark tag instead.
The Wongas of the world may posture that they are helping people but the penury that so many customers end up from a seemingly painless process loudly tells us otherwise. Politicians again are missing a trick here: rather than call for a tax on the super-rich, let’s slap a big one on the super-immoral.

Anomalies of London Dining

There are a lot of new restaurants opening in London and I feel it my duty to appear at least slightly knowledgeable about them.
Highpoint of the past week’s excursions was HKK, the new super-smart Hakkasan tucked away in the City. It’s on a strange side road near Finsbury Square with it standard lack of signage which made it hard during the day to find so heaven help the first time evening visitor. Unlike the other two, which are all about style and beautiful people, this one is all about the food. There are dozens of Chinese chefs on full view (how do they get visas when there’s a clampdown?) as well as a special duck roasting oven.
The dining room has about half of its space dedicated to display area where grand chefs emerge with trays of whole duck which they ceremoniously carve and slice into things of beauty. Do go.
Don’t be bothered about the fact that you can’t get into Balthazar. By the time you do, hopefully things will have moved on from my visit where bass en papillote had been opened from its special parchment in the kitchen so it was just well, a rather drab fish stew. I sent it back and had a long chat afterwards with the hugely talented head chef who charmingly took on the chin my comments. Not many chefs would.
Confused is the word for Blue Boar in Victoria. You simply cannot, must not, try to do southern fried chicken and smoked ribs in such a fancy way – ribs in a silver ice bucket and fried chicken is only breast rolled up to look pretty but not taste of much. Nice beans though.
Tragic is the word for the news from The Heron, the brilliantly grunge Thai place underneath a pub in a council estate off the Edgware Road. Minced catfish salad with chillies, pickled century eggs and other such treasures will soon no longer be with us as the chef has to go back home for personal reasons. It’s great that Hakkasan can find ways of bringing the talent they need over, but what a shame that this secret London treasure relies on one person to make the magic – and then make it disappear.

Curry careers

Yesterday at Tamarind we launched a new programme to entice youngsters of all backgrounds to enter and grow the Indian restaurant sector. Have a look at http://www.mastarachef.co.uk and you will see what we’re doing. Mastara is an ancient Hindi word for Master, so I’m pleased with the name.
The Tamarind group, which includes Imli and now Zaika as well, has seven apprentices working with them and it was they who cooked our lunch and afterwards, to make the point as vividly as imaginable, they came out of the kitchen on parade. Only two were Asian.
There was a time when it was important to bring talent over from India to drive this sector and about 12 years ago Vivek Singh and I recruited a large number of chefs from different regions and that was really important to our mission then for The Cinnamon Club.
Today our views and needs are rather different. We’ve brought over the talent and now it’s time to share it by sourcing more locally from now on. We also have to recognise that Indian restaurants have obligations as part of the communities they are based in to help alleviate economic blight by taking people off benefits and into work.
Many Indian restaurants need to play catch-up in their part in creating a more integrated society. Once a month at Roast I have lunch with members of the team and one of the things that we always take away from these is the different national and cultural backgrounds that we all have and which make us a stronger team from knowing.
Top end Indian restaurants already get this and like Tamarind are already acting on it. That’s a great start. Now my challenge is to take this message to the high street curry house, which as you know is largely a Bangladeshi domain. What are my chances? Well, it’s not going to happen overnight. But it needs to happen.

The buzzword of today

No sooner than it arrives, the term Flexitarian (denoting the move away from meat to fish and vegetables in our diet) has been superseded. A UN report published today on food consumption calls on us to become Demitarian – to halve our average meat intake.
Interestingly, this is increasingly a discussion about the environment rather than our own health. Consumer demand for ever-cheaper meat (by the way, why is horse meat so cheap?) requires intensive farming, pesticides, fertilizers and this results in ever greater pollution. The report says that if we cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 million tonnes by the end of the decade we would save a whopping £110 billion.
Every Monday morning I have a geek moment where I go through the weekly food sales at Roast, dish by dish. Five years ago, our best selling sides were roast potatoes and chips. Now it’s broccoli and carrots. Our protein sales haven’t changed though – people still come in for our roast pork belly and our steak. The trend though has already been established; we eat less meat than we did a decade ago. It must be happening at home rather than in restaurants. That’s certainly the case with me.
We’re planning the menu for a new southern US project coming up which will be called The Hickory Pit and well, they eat a lot of meat over there so what do we do? We know people will love the smoked wings and the pulled pork. Are we then hindering the process of people becoming demitarians?
The process would certainly become more sellable if we didn’t just talk about “meat”. The fine print of the report says that chicken and pork production aren’t anywhere near as damaging to the environment (and certainly not to our health) as beef or lamb.
People will still come to our restaurants and order what they want rather than what I might think they should have. And if you do order a steak at Roast, pile your plate with vegetables, eat half the meat and take the rest home to eat another day. That will make both you, and me, feel better.

Dyson needs a new model

Writing in The Times, the vacuum can man Sir James Dyson says government should place more of its education investment into design and technology and less on fluffy stuff that people aren’t interested in. Food is high on his disparaging fluffy stuff list.
Yes, design and technology is our biggest export. “Tech funds” are a must-have item for any finance house these days that wants to be with it. Even the social enterprise investment bank which I sit on the board of has one and yes, we need to build young people with the skills to take up these funds and opportunities.
But he ruins his case by saying the money should come from programmes currently aimed at getting children cooking, saying they don’t want that. I still vividly remember my primary school teacher physically forcing us to “eat our greens” at lunchtime (why do they get called school dinners?) and so the notion that children know what they want and should be indulged – burgers and loads of chips – is the kind of idea that belongs sucked up in a Dyson.
There are too many single-issue lobbyists around clamouring for media and government attention. We need cookery classes in schools not so that Jemima can make cup cakes for her tea party but because we need to control what we eat and know what’s going into it so that we might take a better grip of our well-being and become a fitter, healthier member of society.
It’s unlikely that Dyson’s rubbish will get sucked in; the guys from Leon are doing great work in schools taking off from where Jamie Oliver left off eight years ago in getting affordable and nutritional food into kids. If Dyson had a more rounded view, he would back rather than oppose these efforts because we could then deliver good techhies with good tickers.

Wanted: health warnings on junk food

I tweeted yesterday (my latest hobby – please follow me #iqbalwahhab) that the Chicken Cottage near where I live opens at 10am on weekdays and does brisk business. It’s not the only place to do so. In my travels to find new locations for Moolis, I once visited Bluewater and there must have been 50 people breakfasting at the KFC there.
Public authorities have an easy sell in clamping down on binge drinkers because it’s visually engaging; a picture of drunken boys and girls throwing up and falling over makes a compelling case for messing with our freedoms. But slobbering over saturated fats first thing and presumably carrying on throughout the day in a similarly grubby fashion is not so easy to engage the public against as there is no obvious anti-social implication.
People slowly get fatter, lethargic and ever more unfit. It’s a matter of time before heart disease, diabetes and obesity kick in. If you neck ten pints you get drunk there and then and it’s there for all of us to witness and scorn. Not so much with the relative slow burn of bad eating habits.
Perhaps we need to build the same shock tactics that anti smoking campaigners have done with the recent advert of a picture of a tumour on a cigarette. Fag packets carry government health warnings. Yet somehow we do next to nothing to challenge what we eat and the consequences of those invariably damaging eating choices.
Fitness dvds are often promoted by before and after pictures of people who have gone through the regime being promoted. Health bodies could flip this on its head and spell out the ever-mounting dangers of junk food. Yesterday when I walked past Chicken Cottage at 11, a father and his probably ten year old son were tucking into boxes of chicken and chips. Would the dad have been allowed to take his son to the pub for a pint? For anyone who wants to, you can see where this is all heading.
Yet we do next to nothing about it.

An independent London

Hearing this morning’s plans for the government to spend £32 billion on developing better train lines to go up north makes me wonder whether it’s time instead to declare an independent London. Why are we so worried about Romanians and Bulgarians coming to Britain with their can-do work ethic when we should perhaps be worried that people from Huddersfield or Birmingham might come down and have a more harmful impact on our economy?
Instead of building those train networks, let’s give half that money to the midlands and northern cities to help them get onto a better road of their own. There would be many ways in which we could help them. When I travelled across the country a few years back on a government inquiry into the effectiveness of policies to tackle unemployment (verdict: not at all; outcome: report got buried) I suggested we call on Bangladesh to help these cities do better. Nobel Prize winning Professor Younus Khan has enabled millions of poor families become economically independent through simple micro-financing their own little businesses. The same could work here.
By building a stronger London we will better placed to make more blighted cities self-sufficient. In turn, we could create a new social contract for Londoners based on the simple premise that unless you abide the rules of the game, you are a gonner. So if you continue with knife-gangs, you get sent to boot camps in Liverpool and if you follow this ghastly new trend of Muslim vigilantes, you go to one in Bradford (which we pay for – cheaper than keeping them here).
Who cares whether Wales or Scotland get their independence? Whilst eavesdropping on their conversations, we’ve neglected to conduct our own.

A lesson for Indian restaurants

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting Peckham (not a phrase I would have been able to use a decade ago). It’s all gentrified and now looks like Fulham.
We went to visit a Thai restaurant called The Begging Bowl and one thing struck me straight away from looking at the staff (there’s an open kitchen). There were no Thai people working there. It’s a short menu so we decided to spend two hours working our way through all of it and I’ve got to tell you that it ranks with The Heron as some of the best Thai food you can get in London.
The Heron is by Thai people primarily for Thai people and whilst that’s not the greatest integration model ever invented, dining there takes the non Thai visitor into the realms of the social anthropologist in observing another culture’s habits.
I had the pleasure of meeting the (Australian) lady who set up The Begging Bowl, who had previously been at the now-no-longer Nahm, which was headed by fellow Australian David Thompson, widely recognised as the world’s leading authority on Thai cooking.
The future of Indian restaurants must lie in following this example. Thai food can come out of its husband and wife operation in pubs existence and become like The Begging Bowl and have queues out of the door for their staggeringly lively dishes.
Curry house owners have to stop thinking that only people from the Indian sub continent can run their places. Not only is that daft and racially insulting, it’s also bad for business. A workforce that is representative of its customer base is always more likely to build a successful business. It also unlocks new talent pools. So Mr Ali, Mr Uddin, take a night off from your Light of Indias and Taj Mahals to take a trip out to Peckham to learn and earn from the lesson. Only fools and horses would fail to get it.

Wanted: a new waste line

You will have seen the amazing claim earlier in the week that half of the food we produce goes to waste.

I wonder what the definition of waste is; is it that which doesn’t get harvested, that which doesn’t get eaten by the sell by date and therefore thrown out or food on the plate that isn’t finished? All three, I guess.

But anyone who has watched Man Versus Food will know there is another, perhaps less easily quantifiable one of how much more we eat than we actually need to. Take fried chicken – I hear my (educated and intelligent) nephews assess the merits of one outlet over another by how much you can get for a couple of quid, not by how good they are.

I have this dilemma at Roast constantly. One of the reasons why our customers love us is because our portions are ‘generous’, by which they mean big. Now of course we source ethically and cook well but come for breakfast one day and you will see over half our diners ploughing their way through what we call The Full Borough.

We now have an even bigger one called The Full Scottish which also contains haggis and Lorne sausage. The first one coming out of the kitchen leads to many others wanting one.

So what’s worse – that a diner finishes it or that they can’t and bits get thrown away? One’s troublesome for the waist and one for waste.

The easy but wrong answer is for me to cut the portion. All that would happen would be that our customers think we’re doing it for profit reasons and they would end up dining elsewhere for bigger sized meals.

As an industry we will never do this unless directed to. How many restaurants were smoke-free until the ban was imposed? Our lungs are better off for the initiative. A new one needs to come in to save our waist and our waste.