Culinary arts students converge on the Fairmont Southampton as a way of gaining a practical view of their passions.

Students Malcolm (Royale) O'Mara, Andrea Warren and Fairmont Hamilton chef de partie Alex Dowling, spoke to The Royal Gazette along with the hotel's executive chefs Christopher Chafe, Michael Scott and Thomas Frost, and the head of human resources Nelda Simons.

What these three have in common is that they all interned at the Fairmont Southampton, which is one of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) ex-tern sites. Ms Simons explained that the programme had been in existence for over half a decade, and that during that time they had seen several fully paid internists pass through their doors.

Mr. O'Mara is a student at the CIA, while Miss Warren is still currently studying and Miss Dowling graduated from the Culinary Arts Programme at the Bermuda College.

Out of the three, Miss Dowling's path was one of the toughest, as she essentially had to hold down a full-time post at the Fairmont Southampton, while also attend college and study when she could.

Of the experience, she used only two words, "frustrating" and "hard". Before taking on the challenge to become a chef she had all sorts of different jobs, but she found her passion and the career in becoming a journeyman.

Miss Dowling says after seeing the Chef Search ad in the paper, she decided that she would give it a go, as at the time she was working for Oliver's Diner.

Although she was the first out of that initiative to complete the Culinary Apprenticeship, she didn't realise that she was in for a grueling task, but she rose to the challenge and came out with 13 As, two Bs and one C.

Executive chef Thomas, who was previously at the Fairmont Southampton, said: "I have seen people come into the kitchen and drop out after four or six months, so I probably would have gone either way.

"You could see that she had passion, she was always asking questions around the kitchen and she got one my nerves a little bit, but after four months I could see that she got it.

"Alex has just been a poster girl for it!"

Miss Dowling said: "One thing about the courses that I went through, you would have to be mature and say later for those late nights and partying, because to go to school from 7 o'clock to 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and then come to work from 2 p.m. until 11. Then to go home and study until sometimes two in the morning and then to repeat the process, it was really, really hard and frustrating.

"A lot of my co-workers took a little of that frustration, but they all stood behind me and grew to know how I was. They've actually calmed me down and it has worked both ways.

"If you would have seen my five years ago, I was a handful."

Although Mr. O'Mara is now studying at the Culinary Institute of American at Hyde Park, he also started out at the Bermuda College.

"I started last January and I have covered basically everything, right now I am in the baking and pastry programmes, so I doing cakes, sugar designs and chocolate centre pieces," he said.

"I start candy classes next week, so I will learn to make any candy that you can possibly think of."

Asked if he thought that when studying to be a chef, he would have to cover all aspects of the culinary arts, he said: "Well no, I didn't think that it was going to be to this extent, but when I went to the school I really didn't get to see the curriculum until I got there."

Cooking in the O'Mara household was a family affair and he began helping out from the age of seven.

"My dad and mom would normally be out in the kitchen on a Sunday making dinner and I would normally chop the vegetables," he said. "When The Food Network came out, I started watching that. I think the first chef that I was watching was Wolfgang Puck."

But the culinary talents were not limited to him; his elder brother also studied Culinary Arts at the Bermuda College and he remembered him coming home and making dishes.

"So I thought, 'I could probably do this, so after high school, I signed up."

Regarding his favourite cuisine, he replied: "That's hard.

"I will have an Associate of Arts degree in baking and pastry. The next programme is in restaurant and hotel management."

However, Fairmont executive sous chef Mr. Scott explained that Mr. O'Mara was definitely more inclined toward pastry and baking.

"At CIA there are eight different cuisines, from fine dining, fusion, there is all day dining, there is Italian — everything," he said. "I think that when you start off, as a young chef there are so many things that you are seeing, and I think it will take a couple of years to figure it out and to discover, 'what is my passion?'

"So whatever you are doing that makes you the most happiest is probably what you enjoy doing."

Mr. Scott added: "CIA is probably one of the best schools in America, because they cover everything. Cooking, to service in the restaurant, forecasting, to scheduling, to costing, they do the whole lot.

"They do a really good job in that respect and call me old fashioned, but sometimes they have to concentrate on the actual real experience in a restaurant, which is very important."

During Mr. O'Mara's externship, he has worked at the Waterlot Inn, Wickets and the Jasmine Lounge.

For him the biggest difference between them has been: "Waterlot was a steak house and you had to keep everything hot, Wickets was family style and it slowed down a little unless it was raining outside, then up here it had slowed down also unless it was raining and you could have 500 people coming through here (Jasmine)."

Miss Warren's path to becoming a chef went by way of being a motor mechanic, and although she enjoyed it, she decided to return to College to get a degree in something that she really enjoyed.

"My granny actually taught me how to cook, it was just simple things like mashed potatoes and things like that," she said.

"And when they brought in the new Middle School system, I had to take family studies and I really enjoyed it. I would go home and practise different things that I had learned in class.

"It got away from me for a little while after high school. I graduated from The Education Centre and then I worked at Bermuda Motors for two years."

Her time as an intern has taught Miss Warren that life, as a student and life in the working world are two unique entities.

"I go to the Bermuda College right now, but I will continue my studies at the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Atlanta," she said of next September.

As a summer intern she worked in all the departments of the main kitchen, worked at The Waterlot Inn, Bacci, the Ocean Club and Wickets.

Of the three she said her favourite was The Waterlot Inn, because it is a very, very busy restaurant and it allowed her to see what happens in an actual restaurant.

"It is a lot different from being in the main kitchen where you are doing banquets and things like a la carte service, where you have to be on point with your timing," Miss Warren said.

"When orders come in there is a certain amount of time when they should be out by, so for an appetiser, it should be out in 20 minutes, while a main course should be out within 25 minutes."

With regards to banquets, Miss Warren explained that during the summer months the hotel has numerous functions.

"Sometimes there are six or seven hundred people at a time, so you come in about 2 o'clock to get the prep done and make sure that everything is done on schedule," she said.

"Prep has to be done, otherwise the night is not going to go well at all ¿ so you have to make sure that everything is done on time.

"Prep involves chopping vegetables and food that takes longer to cook should already be in the ovens ahead of time.

"It is not too bad, because sometimes you have three or four chefs working on the prep and cooking different things. Everything must be set up about a half-hour before the function begins to ensure that everything is running smoothly. The functions are either out on the Great Lawn or sometimes they are down on the beach."

In the main kitchen she covered breakfast, banquets, pastry, garde manger (cold kitchen) I was in pastry for two weeks and we worked with banquets and you have to have dessert.

"At The Waterlot, they have these brandy snap baskets, and there can be three to four hundred of them for a function. You have to get them out while they are hot and shape them before they harden and they are not too easy on your fingers."

"The executive pastry chef, Rolf Runkel, does all sorts of sculpting, but I did fruit tarts, dipped strawberries in chocolate, rolls, which are either par baked or par-proofed. "If we had to make all those rolls in a day then it would be total chaos."

Sometimes they have a conveyor belt and the head chef will put the meat on and design it, someone else would put vegetables, someone will put gravy and then you have the stewards packing them away in a hot box, she said. "There is a lot of teamwork and if you are not willing to work as a team, than you will never make it in this business," she added. "There are so many things going on, and you might not be working at their station, but you may need them to go and get you something."

Executive chef Chafe said that Miss Warren was at the hotel for nearly 12 weeks.

"So it is a great eye-opener and it is much more than working in a stand-alone restaurant, which could be anywhere, but in a huge hotel as well," he said.

"So she has her workbook and each sous chef will fill in what she has done in that and she will take it back to college with her. It is part of the course and it helps them to come out in the big wide world."

Ms Simons explained that the apprenticeship programme was already in place before 2002.

"It was largely a combination of the National Training Board (NTB) and the Bermuda College," she said. "The focus was under that programme was that the individual was working in the hotel and doing courses at the Bermuda College. It has shifted slightly in that the last few apprentices were actually going to a school in Halifax for three months.

"The NTB has been moved away from (Department of) Education and back to the (Department of) Labour, so everything has been put on hold.

"Royale and Andrea are not under that apprenticeship programme, but the reason that we do it is that we are committed to assisting any Bermudian that wants to grow in any field."

Ms Simons added that each year the Bermuda College sends out emails for their students and it is not a necessity that they are chefs.

"They are treated as though they are employees, in the sense that the same orientation that every new employee has, they face.

"It helps them to understand the reality of a kitchen. There is a notion that the culinary student can have an academic focus, well we have never found that to work, because a person really has no practical exposure and so to understand how a kitchen works is a completely different thing to learning about cooking."

Mr. Chafe added: "You have got to burn yourself, you have to get hot and steamy, and this isn't working and that isn't working.

"That why it is good with Andrea, because it is not a nine to five job, and all the different kitchens she worked in she might have a 5 o'clock in the morning, and your whole life turns around and you are not out doing stuff until 12, you are in bed by 9.

"Now at the Waterlot you start at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, while at Wickets you primarily at 9 o'clock in the morning.

"It is just the whole sphere of things. With banquets, you might do a split shift because you give people lunch and then you are back in the evening for dinner.

"So you could have a late finish and an early start."

Ms Simons added that given the size of their kitchens and operation, it met the standards that CIA expected their students to be exposed to.

"But if the kitchen was the size of the Waterlot, than chances are we would have never received it, but given the size of our whole operation, dedicated pastry kitchen and the garde manger," she said.

"So we would be in a position to expose them to a greater variety as possible and also to have sufficiently highly trained chefs with whom they would work and in essence that is the basis how we ended up with it.

"The Bermudian, who wanted to come home and work in our kitchens, and to accomplish that and what the school required of her, we had to go through the process."

Mr. Frost added that having the diversity of cultures in the kitchen is excellent, not only for apprentices, but also for qualified chefs.

"There are chefs from all over the world and you probably wouldn't get that in New York or even Paris," he said.

"It is also much more condensed here, as you might be working with a French chef in New York, but you might not be working with him. Here, you are working next to him and at the same time there is a Moroccan guy there and you are watching him.

"I probably learned more here, than the whole time before coming here, because there are so many different styles of coking, that if you want to learn it, than you can learn it."

On practical experience, Mr. Scott said, chefs were getting all sorts of qualifications as a sous or and executive chef, but they lacked the practicality of experience.

"They didn't spend enough time actually coming up through the ropes and experiencing it," he said.

"But now at CIA, the young chef have externships, they work at weekends and at night, so they get the experience.

"For me if I could have more people like Royale asking for externships, I'd be a happy man, because it takes a lot of paperwork to get people from overseas.

"So what we have here for a young Bermudian that wants to become a chef is phenomenal, we have a Five Diamond Restaurant (the Newport Room), first in the Caribbean. We have a steak house (The Waterlot Inn), so the amount that he could learn is phenomenal."

Of Miss Dowling, Ms Simons added that they also sent her to Banff Springs for more exposure.

"She started much later than most of these young people and she just kind of found her passion later in life and she stuck with it.

"And she's a tough cookie and is good at what she does."

Miss Dowling added: "When Fairmont sent me away to Banff Springs to do my pastry training, I learned that there were a lot of other things that people could be allergic to.

"I had never heard of anyone being allergic to flour and gluten, so I learned how to make gluten free cakes and pastries.

"It also helped because I have a diabetic friend and I make him mousses every so often."

Miss Dowling and Miss Warren both worked in the garde manger (cold kitchen) with chef Rudy Runkel, who is described as being on the ball when it comes to waste control and ordering.

Miss Dowling said: "He showed me how to clean a tenderloin and he got really mad at me because I had cut off a little bit of meat with it, he was like, 'that is two dollars right there.'

"He is the one that told me that if I ever opened a restaurant, give the head chef 25 percent of your business and he won't throw away anything."

On her experiences working with the Fairmont, Miss Dowling said: "I wouldn't leave Fairmont, you would have to pay me a lot of money, I tried to get to England, but I figured that I would come here and get some more experience and do some travelling later on.

"I would like to be the first Bermudian executive chef at the Fairmont. I said that on the first day that I started, there is a lot of work involved and I am not sure that I will be able to do it, but that is the end of the line."

On that note Chef Frost said: "You will do it, I have no doubt."

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