A missing ingredient

08/28/01

BY JOSE ALFREDO FLORES
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

Gustav Mauler's wealthy clientele comes from all over the world, and his food reflects their tastes -- with dishes ranging from American steak to Italian pasta to Southeast Asian seafood.

But when he wanted to hire an experienced Asian chef for one of his restaurants, Bowl Shrimp in Las Vegas, it took more than a year to obtain the necessary visa.

"When I have to serve million- dollar customers from Hong Kong, I need to bring something special to the table," said Mauler, who is a master chef, one of only 50 in the United States to hold the culinary field's highest honor. "They have a very discriminating taste. Waiting one year for the chef I need is simply bad for business."

Increases in both the United States' ethnic minority population and the numbers of foreign people traveling here have fueled demand for international cuisine in recent years. As a result, experts in the restaurant industry say there is an extreme shortage of chefs qualified to produce exotic fare.

In July, Nevada Sens. Harry Reid, a Democrat, and John Ensign, a Republican, co-sponsored the Culinary Worker Relief Act to make it easier for talented foreign chefs to enter the country.

Their impetus was the situation in Las Vegas, where cuisine was once limited to gamblers' casino buffets but which has become a center for haute cuisine. Shortages of culinary talent, however, are occurring nationwide.

"There is a shortage of cooks, the people who work under the chef and do most of the cooking," said Chris Onieal, former president of the New Jersey Restaurant Association, and owner of Onieal's restaurant in Hoboken. "This is a level of the kitchen brigade that culinary school graduates used to accept as a first step. But with the rising cost of their education, they are often unwilling to accept anything except one of the top jobs in the kitchen."

Onieal said culinary school can cost $20,000 a year, and programs range from one to four years. He said chef salaries range from $40,000 to $100,000 in New Jersey -- depending on the size and reputation of the restaurant and the skill and experience of the chef.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, meanwhile, does not track the number of visas sought by or granted to foreign chefs. However, the New York law firm of Barst & Mukamal -- one of the largest immigration practices in the country -- receives an estimated 500 visa applications on behalf of foreign chefs each year, said Deborah Notkin, an attorney there and an officer of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

At the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, Calif., Executive Chef Bill Carter has to satisfy a wide variety of gastronomic tastes.

He has spent days researching Indian cuisine for a visit by dignitaries from India. He has served a reunion of 16 Playboy bunnies, each of whom requested a different ethnic dish. And when mansion owner Hugh Hefner hosted business partners from Johnny Walker, the distiller, the luncheon theme was Cuban -- the clients' favorite type of food.

"For me, every day is a challenge because we're doing different cuisine from around the world," Carter said. "We cater the food to the client."

Carter used to bring in culinary staff from overseas through the H1B visa program, which was created primarily in response to shortages in technical fields. Since passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, however, H1B has required applicants to have a bachelor's degree. And most chefs do not have college degrees -- instead, they are certified in culinary schools.

"Chefs are not treated the same way that other highly skilled, highly trained people are, but they should be," Sen. Ensign said. "Anybody who knows anything about very, very fine food understands that it takes years and years of training."

Overseas chefs desiring to work in the United States generally have two options: They may enter the country under the O visa for celebrity actors, professional athletes and famed researchers. Or they may apply for permanent residency, which can take two to four years.

"For someone in that essential role to have to wait that long is unreasonable," said Notkin, the New York immigration attorney.

Only 10 percent of the chefs seeking the firm's help qualify for the O visa. "They have to be people who are prominent in their fields -- the best of the best," Notkin said.

The Reid and Ensign bill would create a new visa program especially for chefs. The legislation has been assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it awaits a hearing.

The National Restaurant Association, which represents 831,000 businesses with 11 million employees, endorses the measure.

"This bill fulfills a very specific need within the food service industry for dining professionals with significant ethnic cuisine experience," said Brendan Flanagan, legislative representative for the association. "Efforts to fill those positions among domestic talents have fallen short in the last couple of years."

Opposition has come from some culinary schools, which argue that they produce chefs skilled enough to satisfy the demand for quality international cuisine. Some also fear that immigrant chefs could take jobs from Americans.

Chef Bill Sy, for one, would prefer to see the American Culinary Federation encourage more Americans to become chefs.

Sy is president of the federation's Phoenix chapter and a professor at culinary schools in that metropolitan area. His international cuisine course covers French, Italian, South American and Asian dishes, and he said he has observed a dramatic increase in the quality of American chefs since arriving in the United States from Taiwan in 1967.

"When I first came in, many of the executive chefs were European, but that's not the case anymore," Sy said. "I think we can't depend on the chefs imported from overseas. We should let our own chefs do the job for the industry."

New Jersey restaurants have been coping with a chronic labor shortage since the mid-1980s, said Guy Gregg, owner of the Publick House restaurant in Chester.

"A kitchen is a hot, tough place to work, but I don't think that as an industry we have done a good enough job telling young people how much fun the job can be."

Staff writer Beth Fitzgerald contributed to this report.