Kitchen Hell: Why Suffolk Trains Chefs Only to Break Them

I’m no Marco Pierre White — let’s get that out of the way before anyone starts polishing a plaque. I’m self‑taught. Yorkshire self‑taught. Which means I learned to cook the same way we learn everything: by cocking it up repeatedly until it stops being embarrassing. If I can make it better than you, I’ll do it myself. If you can make it better than me, I’ll happily pay you — because that’s how skill works. That’s how respect works. That’s how food should work.

But just like me, Marco ended up in Felixstowe. The difference is he arrived with three Michelin stars and a reputation that could part the North Sea, and still found himself running a hotel and restaurant in a county where even the greats have to wrestle with the same hospitality headwinds as the rest of us. And I’ll tell you this for nowt: any Yorkshireman charging ninety quid for a bit of cow has changed. Marco might still have the accent, but that price tag’s pure southern behaviour.

And that’s the tragedy. Suffolk trains chefs. Real ones.

Young people in whites, learning knife skills, mother sauces, pastry, plating — the actual craft of cooking. And they’re not just practising on plastic veg and theory sheets either. They have to prove themselves in Chefs’ Whites, the college’s own restaurant — a real kitchen, real tickets, real pressure, real customers who’ve actually paid to eat what comes out of the pass. They cook properly. They plate properly. They graft. They learn the craft the way it’s meant to be learned.

And then, the minute they graduate, we send them into jobs where none of that matters because the menu arrives in a lorry and the “cooking” is mostly scissors and a microwave.

We throw them into kitchen hell.

Not the TV version of Hell’s Kitchen either — the one where Marco’s old sous‑chef, Gordon Ramsay, just shouts at people until they cry or turn cacciatore, whichever happens first.

The quiet, polite, corporate version. The one with laminated spec sheets, central‑kitchen deliveries, and menus that haven’t changed since the Cameron years. The one where the “chef” isn’t a chef — they’re a line operator, a brand custodian, a reheater of vacuum‑packed optimism.

This is the part nobody wants to talk about: we are deskilling people on purpose.

We take talent, train it, polish it, encourage it… and then funnel it straight into jobs where creativity is a liability and consistency is king.

The lad who wanted to master mother sauces ends up portioning chips in a “brasserie” that hasn’t seen a fresh stock pot since the millennium. The woman who wanted to specialise in pastry ends up plating defrosted cheesecake from a national supplier. The apprentice who wanted to learn butchery ends up opening plastic bags of pre‑trimmed steaks.

The fire goes out long before the contract does.

And the worst part? Everyone pretends this is normal. Expected. Inevitable.

We talk about “career pathways” and “industry experience” as if the industry isn’t actively stamping the chef out of people. As if the problem is the kids, not the kitchens. As if the only thing a young cook needs is “resilience,” when what they actually need is a workplace that values skill over speed and craft over compliance.

Suffolk is small enough that you can see the damage in real time. You meet a student in their final year — bright, excited, full of ideas — and six months later they’re dead behind the eyes, working a grill station that could be run by a Labrador with opposable thumbs.

We’re not short of talent. We’re short of places that want talent.

And if I wanted a robot to cook my dinner, I’d order one off Amazon. I don’t. I want someone with skill, drive, and the ability to swear creatively when the ticket machine has a tantrum.

And that’s the bit that winds me up as a self‑taught cook. Because if someone can do something better than I can — and plenty of these young chefs can — then they deserve a kitchen that lets them do it. They deserve a job that values the thing they trained for. They deserve a chance to be brilliant.

Instead, we’re sanding the edges off. We’re flattening the craft. We’re killing the chef inside them before they’ve even had a chance to burn a sauce.

And then we wonder why the food scene tastes like nothing.