COOKS BETTER PAID THAN CABINET MINISTERS

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12609, 20 November 1926, Page 11

COOKS BETTER PAID THAN CABINET MINISTERS

Flocking back to London from “business” holidays spent on the Lido, at Deauville, or at Biarritz, are the chefs whose salaries would inake even a cinema star pause and consider. There are, all told, two Royal chefs, thirteen super-chefs, twenty-seven chefs, and some two hundred men who command a kitchen staff in the West End to-day. Only seven are British! THE super-chefs are men of culture and education, and they approach their art with the same zest as is displayed by the groat painter approaching a canvas. They are richly rewarded. The highest salary paid is £SOOO, which is considerably less than the £BOOO paid by a New York restaurant to its chief cook. But the other salaries of London’s super-chefs are nearly all equally high. One artist in a kitchen near Berke-ley-street, recivos £3BOO, while across Piccadilly his fellow countryman receives £4200. These, of course, are the places

where an average lunch, with no wine, is los, and there are 500 guests a day. . Nearly all the super-chefs have cars —one has a magnificent limousine — and nil have West End flats. One Frenchman, with a flat off Bond street, has a collection of Corots, Meissonicrs and other painting masterpieces which would make a millionaire envious. The revelations' at the death or Hugo Rizzi, the famous restauranteur, showed that he was in tho habit of paving almost weekly flying visits to Paris. This is a custom very common throughout a profession where £BO a week is a common salary. Paris is the Mecca of the chef. . Even the ordinary chefs receive salaries of £IBOO to £2200, while it is practically impossible to get oven a third-rate chef for a salary of less.than £IOOO. „ One of the greatest of these men to whom their kitchen is a studio. a “holy of holies” of their art, told a

“Sunday Chronicle" representative' something of his career. “To the Englishman cooking is, perhaps, effeminate," he remarked*. “But is it more effeminate than, say, dancing, acting, or painting? “I was the son of an attorney at Rennes, and studied at the University there. After my military training I went to Paris and took a job under the great Esco flier. I earned, at the start, a salary about equal to £3 a week nowadays. “I read avidly, for there is a magnificent library of the culinary art in Paris. Gradually I rose; I spent two years in Monte’Carlo, three years in Berlin, and one memorable winter in Moscow. Ours, you see, is an international calling; we travel everywhere. “And because we remain behind the scenes we escape any of the servitude which a waiter must possess. “I can now cook chicken in over 80 different ways; my list of sauces —of which I know the prescriptions just like a doctor—now stands at over 400.”