6.21 am from a kitchen table somewhere in the suburbs of Sheffield……..
Good Morning one and all, welcome to the all new shiny FDH Blog! I just wanted to take a few lines in this first post to introduce myself and explain how I find myself sat one finger typing this blog on a cold September Morning. FDH are my employers and we do Catering management Software designed to make a caterers life easier and giving them visibility of their business performance. For those of you still awake fear not, this is a blog not an advert and we want it to be about the people who contribute, our daily trials and tribulations and the thoughts we have on things happening in the world of catering. We work in every sector so hopefully this should be quite varied, please comment on our posts and tell us what you think. As Mrs Merton once said – Lets have a heated Debate!
My career in catering started 30 years ago this year (no your right I don’t look old enough) on New Year’s Eve when I started collecting glasses at The Robin Hood Public House, literally at the bottom of our road. I was paid seven pounds for that one nights work (Bit extra than normal I was informed as it was NYE). Compared to my previous employment – 6 mornings a week delivering papers up a steep hill at £1.85 for the whole week I couldn’t believe this payday! Catering was where it was at, I’d never deliver another paper again and at this rate I’d be a millionaire in no time at all.
I worked every Saturday night from that point onwards collecting glasses and very occasionally serving, technically I wasn’t old enough but 30 years ago ID cards were but a glint in Maggie Thatcher’s eye and I had long since been the one pushed forward into the offy on account of my physical appearance. Starting work at about 7.30pm there really weren’t enough glasses to collect and barely an ashtray to clean till about 9.00 so I found myself wandering into the big kitchen, an amazing world of hustle and bustle. I’m not sure where the phrase blood, sweat and tears comes from but if you’ve ever worked in a commercial Kitchen you’ll know what I mean. Fascinated as I was by the gladiatorial efforts of a small team of hero’s to serve 100 or so punters with a perfectly cooked steak I was in the back, preparing the vegetables for the Sunday Carvery. Believe it or not kids of the digital age, we peeled them with our metal knives! When I first saw the volume of potatoes I looked at the Chef affectionately known as tiny ( a truly enormous punk who seemed to have different coloured hair ever week) and protested ‘You’re having a giraffe Tiny”, with that out came a 20 kilo sack of carrots on top and I learnt the first of a million or so lessons I’ve learnt in kitchens around the world since.
After a brief spell in my late teens of trying my hand at proper jobs it soon became apparent I was not for them and they were not for me, It was the mid eighties and backpacking was moving out of the niche to become an every man activity so I boarded a flight to Australia and for the next couple of years I merrily waltzed my Matilda all over. After a brief spell in the kitchens at The Adelaide Oval (great for watching Cricket for free) I settled at a Restaurant in Sydney called City Extra on circular Quay, It’s still there today if you’re passing . I don’t know if they still do pumpkin soup but it remains a favourite of mine both to make and eat.
On returning home I spent a couple of years at a really good brassiere in Hertfordshire, during this time I actually learnt about food, ingredients, flavours, what works what doesn’t and literally how to make anything from scratch including Veal Jus, pasta, mayonnaise and gravlax to name a few. My teachers were two quite brilliant Irish Chefs Connor and Kieran to whom I am eternally grateful. They didn’t just pass on knowledge they passed on a passion for what we do. I have no formal qualifications in catering whatsoever but after this informal apprenticeship I call myself a Chef or professional cook without any qualms at all. It was 1990 and Big Jack the former manager my beloved Sheffield Wednesday was leading the unfancied Irish team the heady heights of the world Cup quarter finals so Connor, Kieran and I were now truly brothers in arms. The blood sweat and tears (and beers) does form life long bonds, well that’s certainly been my experience.
London life and not having a social life (I had Mondays off and nobody wanted to play) was now wearing a bit thin, it was time to move on and try and think of a way of being a Chef that has the weekends off???? Contract catering you say. Monday to Friday you say. 7.00am – 3.00pm you say. WHERE DO I SIGN?
Before finding my first permanent position in contract catering I returned as Head Chef to the aforementioned Robin Hood for short spell while I looked around. During this time I met Wendy who worked in the bar. She’s been trying to shake me off ever since but we celebrated 17 years of marriage last week so she hasn’t managed it yet
Also around this time while I was trying to find a permanent Monday to Friday gig I did a six week temporary contract for a contractor called the Catering Guild at The Staff Restaurant of Norwich Union, who had just relocated some of their call centre activities to Sheffield. It was there I first met a fresh faced Chef Manger from Brizzle called Andrew Pond who I’ve been trying to shake off ever since Our paths have crossed several times over the years and for just over a year we have been the dynamic duo of business development at FDH. I’ll let Andrew expand on which one of us is Batman as he will be the other main contributor to this blog.
My first permanent position in contract catering was with Quadrant, now part of Compass Group and formerly Post Office Catering, taking up a chefs position at the Sheffield sorting office restaurant in Pond Street. It was here I met the then Chef Manager who went on to be Managing Director of TUCO Richard McGloin, who’s position I took when he moved to Sheffield Hallam University where he’s now Assistant Director of Commercial Services and FDH’s longest standing customer having used our software for 30 years. As Walt Disney once said – It’s a small World after all!
Wendy’s Job then moved to Newcastle and I moved to Eurest now as a catering manager with a whole new set of skills to learn. Up until now I’d got away with working hard but also larking about and making people laugh at my ridiculous antics, it turns out that when you’re in charge this modus operandi simply doesn’t cut the mustard. After a while and not so much blood and sweat but just as many tears I think I just about got the hang of it.
My next move was to independent Contract Caterer P&A Catering owned by serial contract caterer Ray Pipe. Ray was a great mentor and probably taught me as much about the business side of Catering as Kieran and Connor taught me about food. The good thing about working for a smaller company is you get to wear a lot more hats, gone were the marketing, food safety and HR departments behind a Compass Group. You were it! Although that can make life a little stressful at times you certainly learn the business end to end. I started as Group Catering Manger for contracts we had with ASDA, feeding over 2,000 staff working shifts in 3 Distribution Centres providing a restaurant service 24/7, another set of challenges as I’m sure you can imagine. An operations manager colleague of mine used to say – When your phone goes at 6.00am on a Monday morning its unlikely to be someone seeing if you’ve had a nice weekend!
I got on well with the clients at ASDA and hopefully provided a pretty good service. When two more sites for ASDA came up for tender someone passed me the sales hat to put on. I wasn’t sure it would fit but we won both contracts and I guess a salesman was born. It also occurred to me at this time that salesmen rarely received phone calls morning, noon and night detailing life threatening incidents involving heavy machinery, hot oil and drug crazed pot washers! Another moved looked likely.
I remember clearly remember the day an engineer turned up at the catering office door to install my first work computer. I had my Horizon (Compass Groups computer bookwork system of the day) training and despite being fairly confident I could handle it, it did take me a couple of days to get up the courage to switch it on. If you’d have told me then what I would be doing for a living today I would have thought you were madder than Dr Mad, from Madchester, who lives on Mad street!
I saw an Advert for a sales executive at FDH and thought that place is just down the road from me, it all felt right from the first meeting and to my knowledge 5 years on there has been no attempt to shake me off as yet. I found out soon after joining that FDH had written the next version of the Horizon System I’d used at Compass which essentially was the forerunner of Saffron. It really is Walt eh?!!
From time to time everyone gets asked the question what are you doing these days? I’m a chef is an easy answer, easier than explaining that a catering management system is a tool that makes it easier to run a catering business, and find out quickly what bits are going right and what bits are going wrong. I know when I ask someone what they’re doing now I don’t want a long answer, so I’ll turn to my life Long friend Paul Skinner or Skin as I know him. He will introduce me to people in the pub by saying have you met Scott, he does food from computers……..Oh how we laughed!
Doing my thing
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