Pictured: Cris Comerford (Global FWN100™ '13).
Image credit: Food Network
Hazel Mae Castor and her loved ones knew life would metamorphose when she recently boarded a jet plane bound for Florida. But the 24-year-old from the Philippines wasn’t clearing out of her native Iloilo City and leaving her family more than 9,400 miles behind to become a housekeeper, laborer or seafarer — some of the common professions for overseas Filipino workers. Rather, the recent culinary school grad left to cut her teeth at Fontainebleau Miami Beach, a high-end resort and spa where she’ll blend, blanch and broil her way toward a professional career in cookery.
The world has long embraced chefs from France and Italy, the U.K. and the U.S., but now it’s Filipino chefs who are actively cultivating the global culinary scene by carving out spaces on ships like Princess Cruises’, major casinos like the Galaxy Macau resort in China and hotels such as the Athens Ledra in Greece and the Lanesborough in London. Consider Cris Comerford, the first woman and first Filipino to hold the coveted title of executive chef of the White House. The number of Filipino new hires employed abroad as culinary workers grew to more than 7,000 in 2013, up more than 60 percent from 2010, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.
Labor migration is hardly a new phenomenon in the Philippines. Since the 1970s, staffpower has been a chief export of the Southeast Asian archipelago, which is home to more than 98 million people, and more than 10 million Filipinos work abroad today. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, Saudi Arabia crests the list of destinations for Filipinos employed overseas, followed by other Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and Asian locales like Singapore and Hong Kong. Given the Philippines’ relatively young population — a third of the country is under 15 — as well as an unemployment level of around 7 percent and more than 26 percent of Filipinos living in poverty, overseas work is often more lucrative than local jobs.
While many have left home to become nannies or maids, more have been enticed in recent years by rock-star chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. That image combined with a ballooning culinary-school industry in the Philippines — with strengthening ties to accreditation bodies and partner institutions overseas — has churned out more Filipino chefs. When Kenneth Cacho, director of culinary arts at the International School for Culinary Arts and Hotel Management’s Pampanga campus, began his career in 1991, educational opportunities in this field were about as common as, well, unicorn fondue. “At that time we didn’t have any culinary schools offering courses like this,” he says. There were just a handful of other institutions by 2006, when Gene Cordova, president of the American Hospitality Academy Philippines, opened his school. More recently, Le Cordon Bleu has partnered with a local university to offer a “premium education” in restaurant studies — and that’s on top of more than 400 schools with accredited culinary programs across the country. Cordova says they’ve “mushroomed all over the place.”
The challenge of widely popularizing Filipino eats also persists. Cordova, for one, has seen dozens of takes on the very famous adobo recipe.
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News story from OZY.com