System Change

Culinary Schools Are Finally Addressing the Inefficiency of Our Education Model. But There's Much More to Be Done

- Eric Nicole Salta

 At the first F&B Summit organized by F&B Report held last October, the hospitality panel posed questions on how societal shifts will affect the direction of post-millennial undergraduates keen on culinary careers as well as professionals playing within the boundaries of the food business.

A couple of weeks later, in a more intimate setting, Enderun Colleges’ assistant dean for the College of Hospitality Management Bel Castro—one of the more enduring figures in the industry and part of the abovementioned panel—drops an afterthought that could shake the very foundations of the F&B and hospitality business.

“The one thing I didn’t say at the talk was that there were a lot of back patting on how Filipinos are so good at hospitality,” she says. “I would beg to disagree. We’re inefficient.” Though Castro has never been one to mince words, it’s never without good reason.

“It’s correct what Peter Pysk said: It takes four people to do one person’s job. In the US, the ratio is 1:14. One waiter should be able to serve 14 people. That doesn’t happen here. What we overemphasize here—the niceness, the puso, the sincerity. Until you go to a country where they are nice and efficient, then you see how backward we are.”

This inefficiency is partly a result of the existing education model. “The way we teach,” says Castro, “we’re stuck in the ’70s. Gastronomy, for example, and food, culture, and society, all these have been in the syllabus for 20 years abroad. It’s only now that it’s being introduced here.”

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