Chefs Career Advice from Jose Souto, Lecturer in Culinary Arts

Chef Career Advice

Based on his extensive experience working within the Culinary Arts, Lecturer, Jose Souto offers his advice to aspiring Chefs in an attempt to help them on their journey up the career ladder:

I'm Jose Souto, I'm a lecturer in culinary arts at Westminster Kingsway College.

The advice I’d give to the young Chef who wants to come into the industry today, is to be passionate and to not lose any of that passion basically for his chosen career because this is a career, it's a life choice it's hard but it can be very rewarding. Young Chefs from our industry today can expect a very fulfilling time, a time where there going to find out about how gastronomically diverse the world is and we've never been in a position in where we have so many different flavours so many different ingredients from all over the world.

The Chefs before us had a really small melting pot of ingredients and products to use. The world is our oyster so it's a very exciting time for anyone to be entering this industry, also with the advances in molecular gastronomy and in also bringing back some of the old traditional things like smoking, curing that stuff. The best bit of careers advice that I’ve ever been given,

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is to work hard, to keep my head down and work hard and if I’m ever stood around and didn't have a job, look for one.

My primarily I’m looking for someone that's passionate. Someone that's passionate and interested in the subject, someone that really wants to know about the whole world of catering. That's what I’m looking for, I'm looking for someone that's going to stay, someone who's going to be here and do three years here at the college.

Like a lot of the lecturers here we are products of basically what this college does we're products of the Westminster family, which goes onto produce many high calibre Chefs. Who have a massive knowledge about catering not only in the subject they’re being taught but also in everything else. We over teach them, we teach them more than they need to know and that knowledge is basically what stands them in really good stead for the industry.

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