ROME, Nov 25 (Reuters) – Like many young people growing up in Sardinia, Davide Sanna loved Italian food and hoped for a successful career as a chef. But for that I had to move to New York.
For four years, starting at age 19, Sanna worked in kitchens on Mediterranean islands and in northern Italy. But she worked 60 hours a week to earn at most 1,800 euros (about $1,963.26) a month to take home. During the busy summer season, she stood in front of the stove every day for two months without rest.
Sanna said a fellow chef then contacted a restaurateur in New York who was looking for a chef. He accepted without thinking.
For the past year, the 25-year-old has been cooking at Piccola Cucina, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s glitzy SoHo neighborhood, home to designer boutiques and high-end art galleries. In New York, he can earn $7,000 a month even if he works 50 hours a week.
“Here we have regular contracts and there is nothing ‘black’,” Sanna said, using Italian slang for undeclared labor. “And if you work an extra minute, you get paid for that extra minute. That doesn’t happen in Italy.”
Italian cuisine is world-renowned, but many talented young chefs aspire to a career in their home country, but are frustrated by low pay, lack of labor protection, and dim prospects. Since the creation of Europe’s single currency 25 years ago, Italy has been the weakest economy in the euro zone.
Star chefs like Massimo Bottura, who runs Modena’s Osteria Francescana, are reinventing Italian cuisine. But Italy has such a rich culinary tradition that its top-class restaurants are definitely underrated. Thirteen of his establishments have been awarded three Michelin stars, the prestigious guidebook’s highest ranking, the same number as in Spain. On the other hand, Japan boasts 21 and France 29.
The current exodus of Italian chefs due to the difficult situation in the country is not a new phenomenon.
Italians began bringing pizza and pasta to the world during mass immigration in the late 19th century. After World War II, Italian cuisine grew in popularity in Europe and the United States as more immigrants arrived.
However, while the number of young Italians leaving the country in search of jobs in the fast-growing economy has been steadily increasing for decades, this trend has been temporarily interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ta. Italy’s population of 59 million is shrinking, as immigration and falling birth rates contribute to a deepening demographic crisis.
Many of the immigrants come from the Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Sardinia, as well as from the less economically developed southern part of Italy, known as the Mezzogiorno.
How long is “5 years”? Not in Italy!
Roberto Gentile, a 25-year-old chef from Sicily, has spent the past two years cooking French cuisine at Le Suquet, a two-star Michelin restaurant near Toulouse, after stints in the UK and Spain. .
Despite his passion for Italian cuisine and his sentimental desire to return to the place Italians call Bel Paese (Beautiful Country), Gentile believes the economic disincentives are too strong to consider returning. He said he couldn’t do it.
“Once you have gained experience abroad and reached a high level, you would want to return to Italy and find a suitable role and salary, but that will not happen,” he said. “Where do you see yourself in five years? Not in Italy!”
After working as a chef and restaurant manager in the UK for eight years, Giorgia Di Marzo decided to take a chance and return to Italy in 2018. The 36-year-old wants to put down roots and be closer to her family, she said.
But the offer of 1,200 euros (about $1,284.84) a month to work 50 hours a week at a restaurant in Milan didn’t make sense to her. Wages in Italy have fallen over the past 30 years, even after adjusting for inflation, making it the only country in Europe to do so.
Instead, Di Marzo opened his own restaurant in his hometown of Gaeta. Gaeta is a seaside town between Rome and Naples that has been a resort town since the days of the Roman Empire. But soon she ran into a problem.
Last year, rising costs forced it to close for three months during the slow winter season, and it was unable to access loans from banks for a sector deemed at risk after the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m a survivor, but I can only offer season contracts,” she said. “You can’t guarantee a year-round job for your employees.”
Eating out is part of everyday life in Italy. The country has 156,000 restaurants and takeaway food outlets, the second-highest number in Europe after France, according to data from international industry research organization IBISWorld.
However, in Italy, the ratio of new restaurant openings to existing restaurant closures has been negative for the past six years amid high taxes, endless bureaucracy and difficult economic conditions, according to FIPE, the industry’s business lobby group. It becomes.
“Always in the Black”
For many restaurateurs, the answer is not to declare their employees at all, creating a massive “shadow economy” in the restaurant industry. Undeclared labor accounts for about a fifth of Italy’s private sector output, much higher than the European Union average of 15%, according to European Labor Agency statistics.
Italian economic data shows that such undeclared jobs are particularly prevalent in the hospitality industry.
Italians take food very seriously, not only as nutrition and pleasure, but also as an important part of their regional and national identity.
Typical dishes include tortellini soup from the northern region of Emilia, spaghetti alla carbonara from the central region around Rome, and pasta alla norma from Sicily. Naples is the home of pizza.
A peek into the kitchens of most traditional Italian restaurants reveals that local dishes are often prepared by poorly paid immigrants.
One of them is Julio, a 31-year-old Peruvian who declined to give his last name because he does not have a work permit.
He cooks pizza and pasta in a restaurant in Rome, works 48 hours a week and is “always in the black” on a monthly salary of 1,400 to 1,600 euros.
Similar situations can be found in other developed countries, but in Italy this is a relatively new phenomenon, with mass immigration only starting about 30 years ago.
“Cooking with our blood”
Francesco Mazzei, 50, trained as a chef in his hometown of Calabria in southern Italy, then in Rome before moving to London 27 years ago, where he arrived with “no money to buy cigarettes”.
He honed his art for 20 years in the UK and around the world, opening his own famous restaurant called L’Anima in London’s financial district in 2008.
This launched his career, opening other eateries in London and Malta, and establishing himself as a restaurant entrepreneur and consultant.
“We could never do something like this in Italy,” he told Reuters.
Referring to Italy’s high social and labor costs, he said, “There are opportunities to do business in the UK.A chef’s salary is less than twice his salary.” One reason for this, Mazzei said, is that young Italian chefs work long hours and take home half of the salaries of their British peers.
He said that as Britons became more knowledgeable about Italian cuisine and learned about regional differences, they preferred to hire Italian chefs to meet their increasingly demanding customers.
“We Italians have cooking in our blood. We are the only people in the world who sit down to lunch and ask, ‘What shall we have tonight?'” Mazzei said.
Meloni’s food pride
Italy’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has created the Ministry of Food Sovereignty as part of an effort to boost national pride. In March, Minister Francesco Lollobrigida announced the creation of a task force of tasters to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world to prevent chefs from making recipe mistakes or using non-Italian ingredients. proposed.
But the government also promotes temporary and informal labor systems that deplete Italy’s restaurant industry, and opposes minimum wage demands.
Antonio Bas, a 28-year-old Sardinian chef who works in a high-end restaurant in Barcelona, said that while salaries in Spain are lower than in Northern Europe, working conditions are still much better than in his home country.
He said chefs in Spain can expect regular, open-ended contracts with a 40-hour week and two days off, unlike in Italy, where they are more likely to be hired on a temporary contract. .
“Here, you don’t have to beg for what you get,” Bass said.
(1 dollar = 0.9168 euro)
(This story has been updated to correct a typo in paragraph 1)
Additional reporting by Gavin Jones; Editing by Gavin Jones and Daniel Flynn
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