For Hong Kong’s next generation of chefs, people skills are as important as knife skills

Hospitality school instructors voice concern about students’ lack of basic food knowledge and of application, and difficulty communicating

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Samantha Tam (second from right) teaches a class at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Hotel and Tourism Management. She hopes her students start out with an interest in food, but assumes she is working with a blank slate. Photo: Polytechnic University

Published: 12:45pm, 27 Aug 2024

As another semester begins, Hong Kong’s hospitality and culinary schools are getting ready to welcome a new cohort of students.

It is a complicated time for the sector – restaurants continue to struggle to make money, while the demand for qualified cooks and servers is as high as ever. So how exactly are instructors preparing students for the realities of the hospitality industry?

At Polytechnic University’s School of Hotel and Tourism Management, Samantha Tam instructs first-year students on “back of house” basic kitchen skills, from general hygiene to knife safety techniques. The premise she operates from is that with most of her students she is starting with a blank slate.

“As a culinary instructor, I wish students [would] have more knowledge of, or interest in, food in general. Unfortunately, a lot of them have been eating rice boxes at school for years, so their palate tends not to be that diverse,” Tam says.

Serving is only a task and a part of connecting with people

Wilson Lee, Chinese University of Hong Kong

“We assume they do not have much knowledge about cooking, so we start from scratch. Nowadays, some youngsters cannot even tell apart vegetables, like choi sum from gai lan, or parsley from cilantro [also known as coriander].”