What’s wrong with local chefs

You know what’s wrong with local chefs ? They’ve got no vision, no grasp of the big picture. They still cling to old fashioned notions of dishing up a quality product, of personally looking after their guests, of spending night after night behind the pass checking out each dish before it gets as far as the restaurant. Why, it seems to me that they still believe that if it’s their name above the shop that they’ve got to be open all hours, that they’ve got to take personal responsibility for ensuring that the customer has a great dining experience at a reasonable price – fools !
Well certainly fools if they were to take their cue from Gordon Ramsay’s business model. Gordon’s more or less reached a saturation point in the UK and so the next logical step wass  ” across the pond ” and dreams of conquering America. After opening at the Marriott Righa Royal in New York, he has his sights set on Miami and Chicago. What a busy little bee he is. Not content with that workload plus 6 or 7 operations in the UK ( it’s always difficult to tell which one’s have already gone bust or which are just about to ) he’s decided to ” out-Jamie ” Jamie and launch a school cooking iniative to teach kids about healthy eating through cooking lessons.
Responding to doubts that he could ensure quality across his burgeoning empire he snapped ” Do you think Giorgio hand stitches every Armani suit !” And there’s the rub, it’s all about the brand and not the food, about the money and not the guest experience, about the image and not the man, about squeezing as much as possible out of the Ramsay name before the bubble bursts. Now I don’t have a problem with that when the brand is a faceless corporation, Sony, Coca Cola or even McDonalds – I can admire their slick marketing department, their MBA bean counters, their savvy management systems but then I never expected Mr Sony to personally make my walkman and he never made any claims in that direction anyway. Somehow it’s a little different when I go to an upmarket restaurant, pay top dollar for a mediocre meal experience and invite the celebrity chef, via the TV, into my home occasionally, at times like that I often think maybe our local chefs have got it right after all.