HELP WANTED (NO TALENT NECESSARY)

Cartoon by Amy Hwang

The demand for Pastry Cooks in LA is plentiful. So says Poached, Culinary Agents, Zip Recruiter, and numerous other job placement sites. The problem, however, it’s the same four restaurants doing the hiring. Repeatedly. Weekly. Monthly. On an annual basis. What gives? The talent’s there, but this is LA and most places are only interested in hiring help with little experience and offer little pay. In my years working back of house in many of LA’s restaurants, the goal of these places is simple: minimum experience equals minimum wage; or lower. They don’t necessarily want to hire someone with growth potential…growth means advancement; advancement means more money. And that is no no. And despite this unwritten law, the lure for potential candidates from these employers is: growth. Why else would you want to leave your old job? Listen, pastry is a privilege. It requires talent and passion. You can’t just hire anyone off the street to do it. It’s not like being a line cook. Anyone can heat up what day prep did that morning!

The new thing these places are doing now is hiring a consultant. Now, my knowledge with restaurants where I worked that outsourced creative input to that of a consultant was futile. Boatloads of money spent on a person that comes in with overwrought ideas, quick turnaround from station to pass not being a factor, and the recipes are far from accurate. Only for the Executive Chef to pull a couple dessert recipes from the Food Network site and the only creative input coming from the pastry department is feigning enthusiasm. True story. In my opinion, pastry is the bastard child of the restaurant industry, and unless a kitchen is led by an Executive Chef with one iota of skill in the pastry arts, the work will remain nothing more than a daily repetitive chore for those people hired and will bore out of the position; seeking growth somewhere else. So, perhaps, it’s not the candidate that’s hard to find as it is the employer that’s not willing to learn from their own greed and ineptitude.