Who Will Cook Our Regional Food 20 Years From Now?
Preserving a cuisine means preserving the people and skills behind it.
I have spent more than 25 years working in UK kitchens. Hotels, banqueting, schools, catering, weekends, early mornings and plenty of unsociable hours.
And yet I don’t particularly want my own children to follow me into the kitchen.
I want them to go to university, build professional careers and earn well without spending six days a week on their feet. My wife hated the evenings I was away. Hospitality meant missing family time, social gatherings and plenty of ordinary moments other people took for granted. She does not want our sons to miss the same things.
That may sound strange coming from a chef, but I suspect many immigrant chefs and restaurant workers will understand it immediately.
We want the food to survive, but many of us who lived the lifestyle are quietly hoping our own children choose something else.
The succession problem starts at home
Regional cooking has traditionally survived because knowledge moves through people.
A skilled cook knows when coconut has roasted far enough by colour and smell, when onions have reached the right stage, and how a curry changes after sitting for an hour. They know what happens when ten portions become one hundred.
Some of that knowledge begins at home. A child grows up around the smell of curry leaves hitting hot oil, watches appam batter being judged by eye, and absorbs things nobody formally teaches.
But exposure does not automatically create succession.
A young person can grow up surrounded by that food and still have no interest in making a career from it. After the hours many of us have worked, I can hardly blame them.
Much of regional cooking knowledge is learned through repetition, judgement and observation.
Recipes only capture part of the skill
Writing recipes down matters, but anyone who has worked in a kitchen knows how much sits between the instructions.
“Roast until dark brown.” What shade?
“Add water as required.” How much?
“Cook until done.” Done how?
Real cooking knowledge lives in smell, sound, texture, heat and judgement. It is the difference between following a recipe and knowing why the dish still isn’t right.
For years, many regional restaurants solved this by recruiting chefs who already knew. The training had happened somewhere else, through family kitchens, previous restaurants and years of repetition.
The chef arrived ready to work.
That model becomes fragile when fewer trained people are coming through behind them.
Restaurants are filling gaps, not necessarily building succession
Recruiting experienced chefs from overseas has become more difficult. Chefs are currently classified as a medium-skilled occupation under the UK immigration system, which makes the route narrower than it once was.
One response I increasingly see in ethnic restaurants is recruiting international students already living in Britain.
They can help fill an immediate staffing gap, but that is not the same as creating the next generation of regional chefs.
Many degree-level international students are limited to 20 hours of work during term time. They may only stay with a restaurant for a relatively short period, and many are working to support themselves while studying rather than planning a career in hospitality.
So the restaurant recruits, trains, loses someone, and starts again.
Making a regional curry properly is not like learning where the plates are kept. It takes repetition and judgement. By the time someone begins to understand the rhythm of the section, they may already be moving on.
If the person you train today is gone in six months, the kitchen is not building knowledge. It is constantly replacing it.
We also have to look at the job we are asking people to inherit
Some regional restaurants still depend on long days, six-day weeks and difficult rotas.
There are commercial reasons. Restaurants have lunch and dinner peaks, margins are tight, labour is expensive and specialist chefs are difficult to replace. Owners are often trying to keep the doors open, not design the perfect working week.
But the next generation has choices.
If one kitchen offers structured hours, training, two days off and progression, while another offers six long days because “that is restaurant life”, we should not be surprised when younger workers choose the first one.
A cuisine may be traditional. That does not mean every working practice around it needs to be.
Burnout is not a succession plan.
The next Kerala chef may not be from Kerala
If our own children choose different careers, regional food cannot depend only on birthplace or community.
The next chef who becomes passionate about Kerala food may not be Malayali. The next person who masters Tamil food may not be Tamil. Someone learning Andhra cooking might have grown up in Birmingham, Glasgow or Manchester and discovered it at work rather than at home.
That should not worry us.
A cuisine becomes more secure when somebody who did not inherit the knowledge can still learn it properly.
That means making the knowledge transferable.
Regional food becomes more sustainable when knowledge can move confidently from one cook to another.
Systems do not have to remove the chef
Better recipes, video training, cross-training, modern equipment and prepared components do not automatically mean deskilling.
They can remove repetitive work while leaving judgement with the chef.
The question is not how to make chefs unnecessary. It is how to stop using highly skilled chefs for work that does not need highly skilled hands every single time.
That thinking has shaped much of what we are developing through CoChilli Pro.
The idea came from catering kitchens, where we repeatedly faced the same question: how do you reproduce regional flavour consistently when volume rises, different people are cooking and time is limited?
The answer cannot be to keep everything trapped inside one person’s head.
If we cannot rely on inheriting or importing the next generation of skilled cooks, we have to become much better at creating them here.
Good systems do not remove the chef. They make it easier for knowledge, responsibility and consistency to move across the kitchen.
What disappears first is not the dish name
If we fail at succession, the famous dishes probably won’t disappear overnight.
The names will survive.
What goes first are the small things: the colour the coconut should reach, the point at which the sourness is right, and the difference between cooked and properly cooked.
The difference between good and right.
Those details are what make a dish taste like somewhere.
So perhaps the real question is not simply who will work in our kitchens twenty years from now. It is whether we are building kitchens where knowledge can actually move from one person to the next.
And once we start thinking about that, another question appears.
How much of the work currently done by a highly skilled chef actually needs a highly skilled chef?
Perhaps the answer is not to remove the chef.
Perhaps it is to remove the work the chef should never have needed to do in the first place.
About the author
Chef Sinoj Sadanandan is a Kerala-born chef with 25+ years of experience across UK hotel, school and event kitchens. He founded CoChilli Events & Caterers and is now developing CoChilli Pro to help chefs deliver consistent South Indian dishes at scale, using solutions shaped by real kitchen experience.
Learn more about CoChilli and CoChilli Pro