Alex Mwuara, a Kenyan, is a chef with over 22 years experience gathered working in different parts of the world.

In this chat, he said food is the backbone of any hotel as many people will go any length to have good meal. He also talked about training in his native country and what obtains in Nigeria today. He is presently the chief chef of Southern Sun Hotel, Lagos

Here is an excerpt from the interview with Jimoh Babatunde .

•Alex Mwuara

When I came here I decided that we are going to have a hotel with global standard, a hotel whose restaurant will be one of the best eating places in Lagos. And that is what we have tried to do. To do that, we created Sunday Brunch, where everybody that like good food in Lagos comes in on Sunday to have lunch. It fetes 250-300 people every Sunday.

Why a chef

Kenya where I come from is a hospitality country. Back home tourism has a very big base. There are a lot of hotels and good schools where cookery was a career. The schools keep churning out hospitality personnel. So the motivation was the industry was becoming very big and was interesting working in hospitality industry.

Cookery

In school, you chose cookery as a course, but in the class you narrow it down to a particular career. Then cookery was offered at diploma level, but is today a degree course and career for many.

Cookery is an action motivated industry with immediate feedback. When you are far you will not like being a chef, but when you come closer and see how the job is done you will start taking interest in the kitchen.

Food

The backbone of every good hotel is food. You stay in the best of rooms in the hotel without good food, your stay will not be memorable. You can repeat visit because of the food menu and not necessarily for good hotel room.

Nigeria hospitality manpower

We do not have proper hospitality training here in Nigeria. In most of the cases, we have the trainings without any practical attachment to hotels.

In Kenyan, we have hotels offering practical for students to experience the theories they learn in classroom. There is a very big gap in training of hospitality manpower especially in cookery. Cookery is a very wide course. In Kenya, diploma in cookery takes about two years while degree takes four years.

For you to be a very good chef you need to have a good mathematical sense for planning, good leadership skill because you need to continually provide guidance and direction for you staff.

I have 67 staff in my kitchen and must lead them to meet the food need of guests in the hotel. You also need counseling skills to carry all your staff along because they usually will have different strength and abilities.

We do many other courses as part of cookery to thoroughly equip an average chef.  We do management, food safety, costing among others a good chef needs to run a successful kitchen.

Kenya Utalii College

I am a graduate of Kenya Utalii College. The college is one of the oldest hospitality schools in Africa. It is rated as the best so far in Africa. It started way back when the ministry of tourism in Kenya realized that there are potentials in tourism and for you to make a success with your adventure into tourism, you need a school where skilled professionals will be trained.

The school was established with the help of Swiss government and it has a hotel for practical and easy assessment of the students’ performances in the school. Utalii mean hospitality in Swahili language. The collage has greatly impacted Kenyan tourism and hospitality industry because it has produced professionals who now train others.

Challenges

The major challenge I get here is lack of trained or skill hospitality personnel. Most of the staff we get from other hotels are not well trained because most of the people that do train them do not have the capacity or capability to impact such trainings.

It took us almost eight months to get them somewhere close to what we want. Well, training is continuous, we are still training our staff and grooming more cooks.

When you open a hotel, the set of people you encourage to get training are those that just joined you, because they are the future of the place.  We encourage and expose these young people to training.  Even if it is evening class, get some form of accreditation.  You can even see a steward here aspiring to become a cook and we encourage that spirit.

Again, I commend the culture of patrons of our restaurant. Though it is a challenge joggling between indigenous and continental menus all the time, but we are equal to the task. We have never failed to satisfy any of our guests culinary need, no matter the part of the world he/she is from, we have the food waiting on his table in a matter minutes.

While recruiting, you look for people with experience in the indigenous and continental menus.  When you have them, it will be very easy following recommended recipe to dish any menu as is done in the country of origin or locality that where it is popular.

We have some sections that make work easier in the kitchen; the bakery, pastry for confectioneries, the butchery for meat, hot kitchen for hot food while cold kitchen produces cold food.  So when we are doing our recruitment, we look for people who are skilled in these sections and channel their work towards these already familiar areas for better productivity and job satisfaction.

You look for people who know how to prepare dishes and with such skills, they can cook edikikong, ofe nsala among others without necessarily coming from places where these food are popular. We standardize the recipe and formula so that anybody can cook anything perfectly.

Before you open a hotel, you must know where your supplies are coming from. This is one crucial job of the chef to go see and approve sources of the ingredients he uses in preparing his menu.

I have been to Ketu, Mile 12, Oyinbo and virtually all the major food markets in Lagos.  It is only when you know the source, the supplies available that you can write your menu. We normally put three suppliers to any category of food so that there will not be disappointment.

Expatriate chefs

Most hotels employ white chefs not necessarily because he knows the job but for public relations.